Iran was a different place then. It was a different time, long before the Islamic revolution had shattered the bond between East and West, before the revolution that set women back decades in their freedoms and in their perceived value in a society that was suddenly so foreign to Mina.
Mina came from a large family where having an opinion was as vital as having bread and water; it was the sustenance of their very existence. Voicing that opinion was as natural as the water that ran over the stones in a river at the base of the garden. When she was growing up, every Friday, without fail, her parents’ house was filled with people. Young and old, cousins, aunts, uncles, and friends who happened to be passing by descended on their house, since her father was the eldest in his generation. No matter how many came, there always seemed to be enough food. The conversations were lively, the arguments loud.
She remembered sleeping on pallets on a second story porch with her cousins on warm summer nights. The smell of the flowers from the gardens still came back to her sometimes on warm evenings. She recalled the arguments she and her cousins had until her grandmother would come out and tell them to go to sleep. They were good days.
Mina came to the United States in 1961 at the age of eighteen to attend George Washington University. That same year, she met and fell in love with a hazel-eyed, sweet-talking senior who proposed marriage to her at the end of their first date.
Mina and Harry McCann married a year later, and Mina’s life took a different path than she’d ever imagined just a few years before, lying on her pallet on that summer porch, the scent of her family’s flowers in the air.
Now, nearly fifty years later, she was happy to think that path had been a good one.
There had been many sacrifices. From the very beginning, she’d missed her parents, her brother and sister. Early in their marriage, she and Harry made a point of visiting Iran every summer. But as their four children came along, each two or three years apart, the trips had become more difficult to make, less practical, and therefore less frequent.
And then the revolution changed everything. Travel between Iran and the U.S. stopped completely. When her mother died, Mina couldn’t return for her funeral. She couldn’t visit her father after his stroke. She’d missed his funeral, as well.
She still had a brother and sister who lived in Iran. She talked to them on the phone. But that was the extent of her connection with people who were everything to her in the early years of her life. She sometimes felt it was as if she’d lived two separate lives.
Harry filled many gaps in Mina’s life, and she loved him for it. He wore many shoes. As the years passed, they had created their own kind of Iranian-American family. Mina had no immediate kin nearby to stop by and fill her house on weekends, so they had created a new extended family that included their three sons and their daughter and an endless array of friends who had each carved their own permanent place in her heart and at their table. And now her family included five grandchildren that she and Harry were extremely proud of.
Mina hadn’t been too keen on moving to Key West after Harry’s retirement. But with the way their children’s lives and jobs had developed, there hadn’t been that one place where they could live and be close to all of them. She finally gave in to Harry and, two years later, she had to admit that he’d been right. Her family loved to come to the Keys for visits. The grandchildren were more attached than ever to Mina and Harry. And the times when there were no impending visits, the two of them were flying to California, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, or Connecticut to see them.
In fact, this morning Mina was already planning to start packing for their Thanksgiving trip to Massachusetts to visit their daughter and her family, even though they weren’t leaving for another two weeks.
Following her everyday routine, Mina slipped out of bed around 7:30, started a pot of coffee for her husband, and made herself a cup of tea. She stepped out the kitchen door onto the brick path already warm with the sun. The hibiscus in the back was blooming beautifully, and she marveled at their colors before walking around the side of their little house.
On both borders of the walk, she and Harry had planted a rose garden, and the scents of the roses filled the morning air. Some of the prettiest had no scent, and Mina could never really understand why a botanist could breed a hybrid for beauty at the expense of smell. Still, she mixed the different varieties and was happy with the end result.
It was Mina’s habit to take her time on this walk. It was her ‘moment of Zen’, as Harry joked. As she ambled along, she liked to search out every new bud and tend to every fading bloom. Along the brick walk, two or three feet apart, she’d placed clay pots of fragrant flowering jasmine. As she passed them, she collected pocketfuls of star shaped flowers, knowing how much Harry enjoyed the fragrance at the breakfast table. Reaching the gate by the driveway, she opened it, picked up the morning paper, and paused before starting back along the brick path.
Most mornings, she also stopped to talk to their neighbor Nora Smith. A retired school teacher, the ninety-two-year-old was an early riser, but Mina knew that the older woman timed her own walk to get the newspaper to have a chance to visit with Mina. They exchanged news of everything from their children and grandchildren to politics to flowers to tourists to gas prices to whatever Nora had seen on CNN that morning. Unlike Harry and Mina, who never turned on the TV unless they were watching a movie or a ball game, Nora’s never went off.
This morning, Mina saw that Nora’s paper was still lying on her driveway. Looking up at her neighbor’s house, she saw the shades still closed. There was no sign of her elderly friend on the wraparound porch, either.
Concerned, she started across the small border garden to knock on her door, just to make sure everything was okay. Nora never slept in.
“Mina…”
She turned around, surprised to see her husband. Hastily dressed in jeans and a tee shirt, Harry was coming out their front door. They both were creatures of habit. But it wasn’t the fact that he hadn’t showered and shaved before stepping out that worried her — it was the look in his eyes. She always believed Harry’s eyes were a window to his soul. He didn’t have to say a word for her to know something horrible had happened.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Who called? Who’s sick? Was there an accident?” She stumbled as she came back through the strip of garden, and the handful of jasmine flowers she was carrying spilled onto the driveway. She recovered her footing and ran toward him.
He didn’t say anything but only gathered her in his arms.
“Please tell me. How bad is it? Who called you?” She couldn’t stop the questions any more than she could prevent the tears welling in her eyes.
“Nora called. She said we should turn on the TV.”
Perplexed, Mina looked up into his face and saw pain there. Something made her think of the September 11th attack. It had happened first thing in the morning. She thought of the afternoon of the Challenger explosion. She still remembered where she was and what she’d been doing.
“What’s on TV, Harry? Who’s destroying our world, this time?”
“I don’t know the details yet.” He took a deep breath. “There’s something going on with Darius’s submarine.”
The world tilted. Her vision blurred. Darius was the only one in their family who’d wanted to join the military. She’d been furious with him when he told them. She’d used so many arguments against it. Her parentage. The possible questioning of his loyalty. The rejection of the belief she and Harry had tried to instill in all of their children about the peaceful resolution of problems. They’d tried to raise peace-loving, responsible adults. Not soldiers.