Once a year, around June or July, my mother made blackberry jam in the 95-degree Fahrenheit heat of Tehran in our kitchen. She never bought store jams because she believed they were overcooked and didn’t have the proper color or taste. So in the summer when blackberries were ripest, she walked to the nearest store a few blocks down Salimi Street, bought 10-15 pounds of fresh blackberries and carried them home. We lived on the third story of a family-owned apartment building. Mom walked up three flights of stairs with her blackberries in a black plastic bag. In the kitchen, she meticulously took the seeds out, poured the berries into a big copper pot, added sugar, a little bit of vanilla extract or cardamom, then left the blackberries to soak between two to four hours. When the juice began to form, she placed the pot on the stove until it boiled, then stirred for five minutes, turned off the stove and let it cool. She poured the jam into small jars and refrigerated them. Even days later, the sweet and sour smell enveloped the kitchen. My older siblings and I, eager to have a taste, couldn’t wait until breakfast the next day.
Mom always said that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. On school days, between the ages of seven and 10, the thing I enjoyed most was the 20 minutes that I drank sweet tea with fresh bread (Sangak, Barbary, Taftoon or French Baguette), Iranian cheese (white cheese that soaked in salty water), butter or cream with blackberry jam. Every morning, Mom prepared breakfast on the table. She woke up before seven, boiled the water, placed dry tea powder in the teapot and let it sit on the stove for about five to 10 minutes.
My family loved breakfast so much that we sometimes had it again for dinner. But throughout the day, the thing that remained constant was black tea. I drank mine sweet, but the adults (my parents and siblings) drank it bitter. Sometimes Mom added cardamom in the teapot for more flavor. She poured tea into crystal glasses with handles. Morning, afternoon, late afternoon, sundown, evening, even before bed, she made tea for everyone.
Sweet tea especially tasted good on winter days. I could see the snow on the Alborz Mountains; that was before they built all the taller apartments. No breakfast was served without tea—there was no such thing as running out. If Mom overslept, then Dad made it right before I left for school. Mom wore a loose scarf around her head, out of habit, and long-sleeved cotton shirts with khakis. I used to think making breakfast and homemade jam was a motherly thing, natural and innate. Only later, years later, I learned that it wasn’t about being selfless, but about having passion and interest. Mom had a real passion for that kind of thing; she didn’t do it just to make us happy. She would send one of my older brothers to get fresh bread almost every morning—that was the only thing we often ran out of. On winter days, Mom left the stove on so we could get warm. I wanted those minutes of warmth to last longer. I wanted to sit there, eat and stir my tea over and over again so I wouldn’t have to go to school, so I could savor the taste of blackberry jam and sweet tea.
On my walk to school, the only thing I would think about and keep picturing in my head was how peaceful our kitchen was. How Mom walked from the window to the fridge and back to the table so delicately, like she was floating. How she sat with me, through every bite and asked if I wanted more tea.
When we immigrated to Falls Church, Virginia, I eventually stopped taking sugar with tea. My parents and I made tea the hurried way: teabags. Occasionally when we had guests in our small one bedroom apartment on Manchester Street, Mom took the time to boil and prepare tea the Iranian way: dark, rich with a hint of cardamom. It seemed that with each year, we lost our motive to sit together for tea. There was just less time. Mom worked at a high school cafeteria and left early morning so I prepared breakfast for myself. When I was 17, my older sister received her Green Card in Tehran and came to stay with us permanently. She made us buy a coffee maker so she could have coffee in addition to her multiple cups of tea. After a few years of adapting myself to her Mr. Coffee machine, I got over the bitterness and coffee became my drink of choice.
It’s been years now that I drink coffee in the morning. I no longer eat jam and I hardly make tea. When I do think about a cup of tea, I dump an Earl Grey or English Breakfast teabag into the water I boiled in an electrical water boiler. In the mornings, instead of sitting around a table that smells of fresh baguette or blackberry jam, I smell the intoxicating aroma of brewed coffee from the percolator I bought specifically for New York City. While my family, including my sister, continues to boil tea and prepare it fresh at least twice a day in our house in Fairfax, Virginia, I only drink it when I have a stomachache or when I just want to wind down at the end of the night. I add a teaspoon of honey, but I never get that childhood taste back, the one that was purely sweet, freshly brewed by Mom’s hands.
While immigration can break your habits, it never eradicates sweet tastes. Sometimes, when I am alone and staring at towers and mountains of apartment buildings on East 97th street and Third Avenue, I long for sweet tea in a crystal glass. In my new studio that I share with Jill, we don’t have a kitchen. From our windows, I peak into the apartments across ours and search for their kitchens. But the only view I get is of living rooms, bedrooms, offices with bookshelves and tables. I look down at the street below, at the pedestrians, the cabs and cars that drive by and listen to the incessant and alarming sirens. And sometimes, when I am really thinking back and feeling nostalgic, I think about my very first home: our apartment in Tehran. And I long for that view from the kitchen, where I could see the snow on mountaintops. I long for my mother, who had yet to break her habits, who was still making breakfast for her children because being a mother was her only job. I walk into the Trader Joes on 14th street and look at all the different kinds of jams, the organic, the preserves, and sometimes I make the mistake of buying a jar. I go home, open it and smell nothing. I place the lid back on, push the jar at the bottom of the fridge, behind the Philadelphia cream cheese and the half and half coffee cream, and call Mom.
“Next time I come home, can you make me blackberry jam?” I ask.
“It’s not summer yet,” she says.
I hold the phone away from my mouth and cry. She continues to speak and I picture her in our kitchen in Tehran, standing in front of the window, holding a jar of blackberry jam, and the sun is casting a slight shadow over her head. And then I imagine that we never left.