My family spent our new year’s day—March 21, also known as Naw Ruz—at the home of some friends in the city who use a wood stove for heating and cooking throughout the colder months. The house was a little chilly, as the family was down to using just kindling during (what we hope will be) the last big storm of the season. A big-burst fire was built up primarily for cooking purposes.
The dad of the house, D., set up a child-tortilla-making station in the living room while the kids made a snowman in the large, frozen garden out back. Everyone came in with wet socks, kindly temporarily replaced with some handmade woollen ones, and folks got to work balling up dough and rolling it out with miniature-sized rolling pins.
Then the tortillas were placed on pans atop the wood stove for a few minutes, flipped over to cook on the other side, and then they were stacked inside a tea towel to keep warm until we were all ready to eat.
The table was set right up next to the wood stove with four places for the grown-ups and a mini-seat for the little babe, N., who recently turned one.
The coffee table, where the tortilla station had been set up, was transformed into a deluxe dining experience for the four children, who gobbled up their burritos faster than the adults could possibly serve them, and then all proceeded simultaneously to try to play the piano, with a great amount of arguing and fussing over how this could be done (it couldn’t). When I got up to suggest a one-person-at-a-time scenario, the children scattered and found something else peaceful to do for a while, and we parents sat around eating and trying to figure out how to solve some of the world’s problems.
