Amu Nowruz and Nane Sarma

Nane Sarma is Grandmother Frost, and she lives alone at the top of the world where the snow is.

And once a year, at the very end of winter, Amu Nowruz comes.

He is an old man with a white beard and a felt hat and a long embroidered coat, and he walks in from the other direction entirely, bringing the spring with him. Where he puts his feet, the ground thaws. Blossom comes out on the trees behind him as he passes.

They have known about each other for a very long time.

So every year, Nane Sarma gets ready. She cleans the whole house from top to bottom. She sweeps the step. She washes her hair and puts on her good blue clothes and does them up properly. She sets out the table with the seven things on it, each one chosen and placed just so. She bakes.

And then she sits down by the window in the afternoon sun to wait for him.

And the sun is warm on the glass. And she has been up since before it was light. And the house is finally, completely finished.

And she falls asleep.

Every year. Every single year.

And Amu Nowruz arrives in the evening, and the door is open, and the house is spotless, and the table is laid, and the food is out, and there she is in the chair by the window with her hands in her lap, fast asleep.

And he does not wake her.

He never wakes her. He comes in quietly and he sits with her a while. He eats a little of what she made, so she will know he came. He leaves something on the table for her to find. And he strokes her hair once, very gently, and then he goes, because he has the whole spring to get through and he cannot stay.

And she wakes up in the evening with the light going, and the food is touched, and there is something on the table that was not there before, and she knows.

And she starts getting ready for next year.

Iranian children know this story, and small ones find it a bit sad, and it is. But ask somebody older what it is about and they will usually say the same thing.

It is about your mother cleaning the house before people come. It is about the grandmother who has been cooking since six in the morning and is asleep in a chair by nine at night. It is about the enormous amount of love in this world that happens before anybody arrives, that nobody watches, and that the person who did it usually sleeps straight through the thanks for.

Which is why, at Nowruz, you look at that table with the seven things on it — and you think about who put them there, and how long before you got up they were awake.