it was before the rains we went there. Through the shaded forest, well, truth be told it didn’t need shade as it was overcast. Yet that it is what a late October afternoon Sunday walk should have- and I did miss the butterflies and birds and insects that had gone away. Oh well. Time cycles seasons reasons. The flora and fauna have their nature and God-given logic. And the trees were golden and red, the leaves wildly strange and many shrivelled and decomposing.
Other people were not there. That in itself was marvellously fine. Perhaps i will have been found wrong, incorrect to have imagined the sea so far away when the northern fields were there for me all along. Perhaps I was selfish in that, and unappreciative. And I realized the meadow itself was love, if love is something that lasts when other things fade, if love is something that sustains when nobody is watching and if love says, ‘I am here, I am here, I am still here through it all just look and see me…’
My second mother wore a wide black, hat that exposed only her chin, but since I was right beside her, I clearly saw the contortion on her face, an ugly expression like the combination of a gleeful smile and a hateful sneer. Her black gown billowed in the wind, softly at first, then harshly, as the sky darkened and hesitant raindrops plummeted down as if the clouds themselves were grieving with us.
The priest’s solemn voice monotonously articulated the last farewell for Priye. Her embalmed body lay in the brown casket seven feet in front of us, quiet for the first time in seven months. Her picture was hugged to my chest, where her face blossomed with a pleasant smile that would forever haunt my dreams. The green, chiffon dress she wore in the picture was resting at the back of my wardrobe. I would wait for six months before wearing it along with all her clothes and jewelry that had become mine, even though it had only been seventy-two hours since she died.
Priye was my elder sister by three years. She was frail, sickly and short. But she was more intelligent than me, and she had a beautiful voice that mesmerized everyone in our school. Last year, her performance of Whitney Houston’s “I will Always Love You” was so breathtaking that our principal’s mottled face cracked a smile for the first time that term and he approached her in his black, pinstriped tuxedo to shake her hand. “That was marvellous. It reminded me of my late wife. She loved that song in our twenties,” he had croaked, looking wistful.
Priye had beamed with an ethereal radiance, looking more like an angel than a human being. If not for the leukaemia that ravaged her body…“Oh God, her mother died barely five years ago. Why?” my grandmother wailed in her wheelchair, her saggy cheeks throbbing with every sound she retched. “Why did she die so young?”
I looked at her, at the wispy patches of white hair on her head, and her wrinkled face. In eighty years. Priye could have resembled her. She would have enjoyed her old age, tending to her hibiscuses alongside a host of stubborn grandchildren. I pictured it for a moment, and gulped back a sob.
“Why?” Grandma cried again. She turned to look at me. “Priye, is this a dream? Wake me up!” She gestured at the coffin. “Wake Ifunnaya up, please!”
My second mother hushed her. “Priye is dead, Mama. The person you are talking to is Ifunnaya. The priest is still speaking.”
Did she ever wonder why Grandma kept making that mistake? Maybe not. Grandma’s eyesight was very poor anyway. Most times, she couldn’t see people until they were stooping very close to her nose. But I knew, and the truth was stuck in my throat like a goitre, something I couldn’t swallow, yet couldn’t spit out. Because my mother killed her before her time, I thought, answering grandma’s question silently, hugging Priye’s frame tighter. My mother was a more insidious disease than Leukaemia.
On those dreadful nights, three months ago, when Priye howled in her bed, my mother sang in her room, eulogizing God for bringing misfortune to all her enemies. She rocked expensive aso-oke to galas and to the birthdays of her clients while I held Priye’s hand and assured her, she was not alone.
In those moments, it hurt so much to remember that two years ago, she had been well enough to attend school, chirping tirelessly about everything like the Maths teacher’s knack for singing Fuji in class, her dreams about sailing the Atlantic in her own yacht and her subtle affection for a tall, nerdy boy in her class whose glasses were three times the size of his eyes and who always came first in Mathematics, even though my mother never gave her food for days. It was later that I knew that she poached food from her friends during lunch break, and she did it so prudently that they never suspected that she was being maltreated.
I remembered waking up late in the night, disentangling my second mother’s limbs from around me, and tiptoeing outside. I would go to the backyard with a nylon of biscuits for Priye. She always kept her window open so that I could throw the biscuits in. The window was two stories high so I was often successful two times out of thirty.
Many nights, I was totally unsuccessful, the biscuits thumping against the sliding glass or the wall. Most of the biscuits that made it in had been smashed into crumbs that Priye had to pour into her mouth.
That was when I noticed her fascination with stars. Those nights I woke up after midnight and raced to the backyard, I found her stargazing, with her window open, the chestnut curtain bunched behind her, her white nightgown draped over her skinny frame, looking as bright and quiet like the celestial bodies she stared at.
The only time I ever saw her differently was one night, months afterward, when my mother said she would not waste another dime of her late husband’s money on her disease and Priye latched onto her like a monkey and bit her neck. But after that, she apologized. Though, that night, she looked into my eyes with the intensity of a camera taking a picture. Her diary entry for that night read this: I think we human beings are more like stars than we think. We shine brighter when we start to fade.
It was as if she knew that she would die, so from that day onward, she said her goodbyes quietly. She confessed her love to the boy who told her sorry, he was in love with Zendaya, and she ran home without taking the bus, crying and laughing at the same time. She told me she was crying because he was so stupid, and laughing because she finally mustered up the courage to ask him out. All I did was stare at her, dumb, because I had no idea what it meant to have a crush on someone.
After she calmed down a little, she asked me to draw her, so I took my drawing book and drew her at her window, staring at the sunset. I should have painted the sky black to show it was night but I wanted the memory to be warm, not bleak, besides her skin tone was the colour of a brown sunset and I wanted that effect to show when I painted the drawing.
That night, she sat by the window in her satin nightgown with a crime novel in her lap, staring at the man selling suya on the busy street behind our house and the people walking, and she suddenly asked me a question.“Did you know that stars shine the brightest when they want to fade?” her laptop was playing a YouTube video of how a star becomes a supernova.
She didn’t seem to expect my answer. She probably knew I didn’t know what she was talking about back then. Now that I remembered it, I could assume that she thought of herself as a supernova.“Ify, will you remember me after I’m gone?”
I just stood there in her room, petrified. I was bigger, healthier and more loved than her, but in that moment, I wanted to become her. I wanted to be the strong one, even if it meant our second mother would hate me.
“I wish my mother didn’t die,” she sighed, and looked at me with a sad smile. There were no tears in her eyes, only the shimmering darkness of her irises that portrayed her beautiful soul.
Believe me, I wanted desperately to, but I couldn’t tell her that her mother didn’t die five days after her car accident, mine did. And the woman who called me her child now was actually her own mother. This was the last thing my late mother told me. It was the secret only I knew.
I couldn’t remember my real mother’s face clearly anymore, but I remembered her dimples and dreads. She might have looked like Asa. She was our first mother and she loved Priye and me the same way. All I did was cuddle closer to Priye that night. I noted how she smelled like a flower garden. It was the soap that a chubby, jovial boy in her class gave her. She told me how expensive the soap was.
While I listened, I wondered why she didn’t realize that this other boy had a crush on her. We talked for hours uninterrupted because my second mother had travelled to Abuja and left us in a neighbour’s care. We pretended we were sleeping so he let us be. That night was the Champions league final so we weren’t his main priority. We heard him screaming and cursing from his room as his club conceded four goals during the match. We couldn’t help laughing at his plight.
Priye and I talked about many things until she began drifting off to sleep. I was often amazed at how quickly she slept. In a few seconds she was breathing softly, relaxed, her hand which moments ago had clutched mine now limp.
“This woman is your mother, you know?” I whispered so quietly that Priye might not have heard me. It was the best I could do.
And for a brief moment, I was sure she did not hear me.
“I know,” she said faintly. “You are Priye and I am Ifunnaya.”
Northern lights in the sky over Alaska her father deep in mines, engineer moving from mining town to town to tar paper shacks to a boarding house to a log cabin in the woods long johns and a baby sister then Father off to war.
Waiting for him, waiting under a treeless sky air heavy with heat, dust in El Paso with Granpa the town dentist, mean drunk and her mother shut down, closed off in a dark bedroom with a bottle.
Father’s new job: Arizona a real house in the hills the bright evening star in the dark night sky Mother in pretty dresses baking cakes, playing bridge picnics and potlucks until the next move.
A prestigious position in Santiago, Chile a two-story Tudor green lawns, fruit trees purple iris, a gardener Mother in bed all day with a bottle.
Teenage Lucia the hostess for her father’s social events private school, rich friends skiing, swimming, movies dressmakers, hairdressers nightclubs, balls, boys then a dorm in Albuquerque her girlfriends still in Chile married with mansions busy with children but after the revolution all her old friends murdered or suicides.
Lucia, Wife
She’s tall, lean, svelte dark hair, sapphire eyes at 17 still passive when her parents reject her 30-year-old lover a Mexican-American veteran throws her out of his car never sees him again.
A few months later she marries a sculptor who rearranges her hair, clothes, stance and avoids the draft with their first son with a second on the way he’s off to Italy on a grant, with a girl doesn’t see him again for sixteen years.
A musician called Race kind, quiet, a good man talented Harvard grad from a big warm clan playing gigs on piano gone while she’s home with the babies in a cheap rural rental outside Albuquerque.
Dusty, silent except for horses, cows, chickens, dogs red chili on strings drying in the sun in an old adobe rounded, wind-softened the same dirt-brown as the hard-packed earth no phone no stove no running water loads of diapers she’s too alone this pretty young girl.
Lucia, Lover
Race moves them to an unheated loft in New York City he’s out all night at his jazz gigs she’s up all night typing stories while wearing gloves while the kids sleep in earmuffs and mittens
until a way out arrives with a bottle of brandy four tickets to Acapulco another Harvard man Race’s buddy Buddy dark, handsome, rich bad boy with a drug problem
offering the sexy allure of escape to hot sun sky blue pools white sand beaches and crazy love with a heroin addict.
She bites, writes bears two more sons an electric life flying in Buddy’s plane landing like crop dusters for detox and retox always fearful of his dealer friends.
To keep him clean they move away to another land live in a palapa with a thatched palm roof and a beach sand floor on the edge of a coconut grove surrounded by mountains.
The boys love it there amidst parrots, flamingoes spearing eels and fat fish dark nights in hammocks swaying under rustling palms in the soft ocean breeze heady with gardenias their paradise life
until Buddy gets bored and the drug dealers come.
***
Lucia Berlin shared the stories of social outsiders with her own special brand of detachment, humor, and economy, presenting the brutality of blue collar life tempered by her compassion for human frailty. She was relatively unknown until eleven years after her death when a collection of her selected stories hit the New York Times bestseller list.
Born Lucia Brown in Alaska, she spent her childhood in mining towns all over the west. After her mining engineer father got promoted to an executive position, the family lived in Chile in relative luxury. She moved to Albuquerque for college, returning later for graduate school.
Married multiple times, she lived in Manhattan, rural Mexico, and New Mexico. After leaving her third husband, a heroin addict, she took her four young boys and settled in California.
As a single parent, Berlin worked odd jobs including cleaning woman, physician’s assistant, hospital ward clerk, and switchboard operator. Her stories were based on incidents she experienced herself in her difficult life. She would type late at night while the boys were asleep, a bottle of bourbon at her side.
She eventually gave up the booze and remained sober, teaching writing at the San Francisco County Jail, Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and University of Colorado Boulder. Lucia Berlin died in California at age 68.
Her books:
A Manual for Cleaning Women: Stories
Evening in Paradise: Stories
Welcome Home: A Memoir
Originally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan hides out in the lush ruins of South Florida. She writes pulp fiction, literary crime, and psychological thrillers. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and chapbooks. A collection of biographical poems on 20th century poets is in press with Clare Songbirds Publishing.
Your heart is white, your words If I am sick, you pat my head. white, your intentions are white,
Mom, I love your smile
When you laugh, there is always joy and no sadness.
You are the joy of the family, my mother.
Without you there is no happiness and no smile
Rakhmiddinova Mushtariy Ravshanovna was born on March 1, 2011 in Gulistan district, Syrdarya region. She is currently a 9th grade student. Mushtariy is interested in writing poetry, reading books, drawing, and playing sports.
So far, she has read more than 100 books. She appeared on television in kindergarten at the age of 3 and still appears on television. In the “Bilagon Bolajon” competition, she took 2nd place in English in the 2nd grade, and 3rd place in Reading in the 4th grade. She also took 1st 2nd 3rd place in handball and was awarded with medal certificates. She is a participant in the regional stage of the “Young Book Reader Kids” competition. She takes part in many competitions and projects. In the future, she will become a sign language teacher. She is preparing to enter college.
Her dream is to make everyone proud of Mushtariy and travel abroad. She has also participated in many anthologies and webinars. Currently, she has won more than 50 books, received more than 500 thousand in cash prizes and international, official certificates. She has participated in Olympiads and won honorable places.
Every nation has a heart. As long as that heart beats, the nation lives, awakens, and endures. For the people of Uzbekistan, that heart is our national values. Values unite the people, bring them back to their roots, and awaken pride and love in their hearts. In today’s rapidly changing world, preserving and remaining faithful to national values means safeguarding spiritual independence. National values embody a people’s history, language, religion, customs, beliefs, and way of life.
Main Part
National values are the spiritual roots of a nation. Just as a tree cannot survive without roots, a person cannot live without values. The values of the Uzbek people have endured through centuries and never disappeared. In every era and generation, they have acquired new meanings and served as a mirror of our nation’s spirit.
From ancient times, our people have lived by the belief: “The homeland is sacred, parents are dear, and the guest is a blessing.” Traditions such as weddings, holidays, hashar (community work), Navruz, and Ramadan all teach kindness, compassion, and respect for one another. These customs reflect our people’s moral world, dignity, and love.
National values are not just historical heritage — they are a living part of our everyday lives. For example, greeting our parents every morning, beginning a meal with bismillah, and treating guests with honor — these simple acts represent the living expression of our culture, formed over centuries.
In the era of globalization, some young people are influenced by foreign cultures and tend to forget their own values. However, modernity must never contradict national identity. True progress is achieved by relying on one’s national values while striving for innovation. As President Shavkat Mirziyoyev stated: “National values are the soul of the people, and preserving them is our sacred duty.”
Indeed, our people’s hospitality, patience, tolerance, respect for women, and trust in youth all express our national pride. National values are also vividly reflected in folk art: love in our fairy tales, bravery in our epics, and life lessons in our proverbs. Sayings such as “He who is one with his people will be honored by them” and “Serve your people as you would honor your father” have long called our nation to unity. Today, national values play a vital role in the education of youth.
Because today’s youth are tomorrow’s leaders, scholars, teachers, and farmers — the future of the country. If they know and cherish their national values, they will never fall under alien influences. They will be proud of their land, language, and flag, and see service to their motherland as their sacred duty. Therefore, every educational institution and family should plant the seeds of values in young hearts. National values unite and strengthen a nation — they are the spiritual chain that binds generations together. By preserving and harmonizing our values with modern life, we can elevate our nation to new heights.
Each value carries within it our people’s historical memory, dreams, and honor. The heart of a nation beats within its values. If that heart stops, the nation loses its identity. Therefore, we — the youth — must love, protect, and pass down our national values in their purest form to future generations. National values are not only the memory of the past — they are the pride of today and the foundation of tomorrow. As long as they live, our nation’s heart will continue to beat — strong, proud, and eternal.
Ruzimbayeva Quvonchoy Jamoladdin qizi was born February 8, 2007, in Urgench District, Khorezm Region, Republic of Uzbekistan. The participant of the regional subject Olympiad in the 2023-2024 academic year.Currently a student at Urgench State University.
