She would often visit us during our short stays in the arid village of our ancestors. With no gadgets of communication, the birds must have let her know we were coming. She looked like the old poor lady in the Disney cartoon Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, yet her kindness could have enchanted even Snow White. As for Snow White’s naivety, that had no place here; this woman carried humble wisdom in every step she took.

Bent and well past the octogenarian age range, she still managed to walk across the village. The houses were all single-storey, so the village sprawled widely, with huge windcatchers piercing the flat skyline, a reminder of the village’s ingenuity and the harsh climate she navigated effortlessly. She walked daily, not for leisure or to count her steps, but to deliver fresh milk drawn at dawn to villagers who no longer had cows or time. Maybe, just maybe, the gusts of wind that filled those windcatchers conspired to give her a playful nudge forward. With every step, she moved faster, not to show stamina, but because the milk would spoil and go to waste. She had worked too hard for her labour to be lost.

She was not as white as Snow; perhaps she had been in her youth, but now the sun had surely smacked some rays on her forehead and face, a crisp tan meandering between the deep wrinkles of her skin, the only place exposed to the sun. I said she was wise, as she had managed to keep her body working like a clockwork orange. Despite the near thirty-degree angle of her back, she protected herself from little Miss Sunshine’s not-so-idle rays. The sun here had wild, penetrating rays, as if they were the devil’s whiplashes, spitting fireballs waiting to pounce. She shielded herself with a strict dress code; only the face and eyes, needed for speaking, breathing, smelling, and seeing, were exposed. Her white cotton shawl wrapped around her long daisy locks, braided each morning, kept her head safe. Inside that head? A brain that retained memories with astonishing sharpness such that while we processed her stories and memoirs, she was already onto the next.

Her knowledge was vast, forged through years of trial and error in her school: trees, grapevines, orchards, qanats, cows, sheep, saffron, wheat, and poppy fields. She was not educated in the sense we think of today – no writing, no textbooks. Her school was nature. She praised it, revered it, and rejected much that was man-made.

“Let’s go inside and have something to eat,” my mom would shout from the house, as she would be way back in the orchards tending beans, legumes, watermelons, pumpkins, and sunflowers, things she had helped plant or instructed my father to plant. She was of my great-grandfather’s generation; her memories mixed with his era, so his grandson was her grandson. As mothers do until death do them part, she still bossed my father around, despite him being a city-educated, globe-trotting PhD; he, bless him, listened.

She would sit on the brick-laden patches of ground, deliberately avoiding the stylised latest landscape designs with mosaics of different marble stones, insisting on hardened soil in the shade. She grounded herself, knowing best. We would join her there, carrying dinner utensils down to the earth, leaving the thrones of power behind to sit with her. Food had to be what she laboured over, even if it meant pumpkin for all of summer. Processed, store-bought food was frowned upon. Every time my mom tried to sneak an additive past her, she would notice as the food barely met the tip of her tongue and quietly point it out. Moral lesson: my mom never cheated. If she did, a new meal would be made with no artificials just for her.

Many days we joined her in the field, because agriculture does not understand individuality; it takes group work, and the more hands, the merrier. One day, considering her age and the fact that her orange clock was not ticking quite as smoothly as usual, or perhaps her clock simply was not as orange as usual, I decided to keep a close eye on her. I did not want anything to happen.

I stayed near, just doing what she did. From under the shade of my cap, three steps behind, I watched her carefully so she would not notice I was observing. Then, despite not feeling her best, she bent down, slowly but deliberately. She brushed the soil off a tiny sprout struggling beneath the dirt, and with those cracked, weathered hands of hers, she opened its pores to let in the light of day. She lent the plant a hand.

I will never forget that moment: the gentle stroke she gave to that late-blooming little shrub, allowing it to feel the warmth of the sun on its young, sweet leaves. Her hands bore the marks of years, cracks from sun and soil, lines carved deep like the plough furrows in the fields, salted from irrigation water. Despite the rough texture, her touch was swift and soft, just like a mother caressing her child.

It reminded me instantly of a story I had once read in Chicken Soup for the Soul: a man walking along the shore at sunset, tossing starfish back into the ocean one by one, though there were millions stranded. When asked why, he simply said, “It makes a difference to the one I save.” That day, in her eyes, every sprout in the field was its own starfish. Each life, no matter how small, was worth the effort, worth the tenderness. A change for one was still a change. To her, that was reason enough.

After living in the city, I now understand that the old woman, bent beneath the heavy burden of earthly trials, was paying the earthly price for peace of mind in this world, ensuring her path to serene heaven in the hereafter would be well earned. Her body surrendered to the earth in prostrations, and her labour was a living prayer.

She had an ancestral patch of land which she diligently tended, and from that land she managed to make a living. She was not of the bloodlines that had left worldly pleasures for their kin but of the hard-working poor families who often worked for and alongside the masters and owners of fields and water. She had been handed down a small patch of land and little water, yet she managed to make a heaven out of it. From that came her dowry for her girls, houses for her sons, and delicious fruit rolls, nuts, and sweet and sour syrups for her grandchildren. Not only that, but her animals, including her cow, milked at early dawn, benefited from the leftovers and remains.

Others who had been handed down ten times more had turned their orchards, once laden with grapes so heavy the vines meandered downward, into deserts, bare lands stripped of their lush greens and flowery dinner dresses. They took what they could and fled to the cities to fulfil the modern man’s dream, away from nature and into the cradle of technology. Meanwhile, in her orchard of fruit trees, grapevines, and pomegranate blossoms, her smile grew with each season. How I wonder what her ancestors think of her, and what those who left heavens for children to turn into hells thought of them.

She was as easy-going as it gets. She did not just embody flow or letting go; she was flow. Her language, just as Mother Nature had kindly taught her, was dual and cyclical: births and deaths, planting and withering. Every loss held the seed of a new start. She embraced nature’s dualities and waited patiently, trusting that reasons often hide beyond sight and sound, revealing themselves over time to those willing to seek. Life’s ups and downs were to be used, not feared. She worked with the problem, not against it, moving forward by flowing with it. She did not learn that in math class or problem-solving sessions; she learned it in nature’s classes.

To me, it seemed this old lady laboured to shed the world and the body so that her soul could rise lightly to rejoin the eternal. My friends and I, on the other hand, consumed the material, surrendering to the Material Girl era of Mother Madonna, whose ethos was a lifestyle both tasteless and fleeting, mundane and without return. Today, I write of her labours for those willing to take her wisdom into consideration. May it live on, circulate, and inspire, as she tried to teach us, simply by being, doing, and knowing.

Marzieh Mostafavi Mendi is an unpublished writer based in Gonabad, Iran. Her research explores how societies evolve and how values shift across generations. Eager to learn through trial and error, she writes to share her observations of people and culture.

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