Nada Almosa, Documenting Sanctuary #1

Documenting Sanctuary #1

Nada Almosa

In my teta’s backyard, there was a spot where a muddy puddle always formed. My stuffed toy found its way into it once upon a time, and now it’s all dried up. Looking up, you would see a garden divided into squares by leftover pavement blocks, creating homes for the different vegetation my teta has stubbornly grown in spite of Sharjah’s unrelenting heat. Eggplants, tomatoes, cabbage, and okra numbered her green army. Surrounding trees bore toot (berries), lemons, and provided shade for traveling street cats. A rest station. Teta hated the cats, especially a ginger tabby cat who liked to flatten her herbs into a bed, no matter how often she chased him away. Mint, headstrong, grew like a weed and claimed every drop of water from a drain nearby. Later, its leaves would find their way into black tea saturated with sugar. Baba would say “this is sugar with tea, not tea with sugar,” as he watched me place another heaping spoonful into my cup. This garden whispered of the times my cousins and I played Shurta wa Harami (cops and robbers), when my sido had his heatstroke, and when heavy cat mothers felt safe to birth their litters. My teta still tends to her garden, with her two artificial kneecaps and a walker.