Every Saturday, in all my living memory, my Mum would take me to my great Aunt and Uncle’s house for dinner with all of our family. People often use the term “extended family,” but I have never related to this term, because for me, all my ‘extended’ family is simply my family.

Maybe because my parents are divorced and I’m an only child, the importance of being close to family was even more important to me. All my cousins are like siblings that I just don’t see that often. My Aunties and Uncles were always people I could count on for support.

In our family, if you are in the neighborhood, you have to stop by and if you didn’t, they would be offended. So for every other Saturday (I would spend half my weekends with my Mum and the other half with my Dad) for almost 20 years I’ve been having dinner with all my family.

My Aunt Batool and Uncle Ali immigrated from Iran but I don’t know when. I know my Uncle first lived in New York, along with my Grandfather Mo (short for Mohammed but I didn’t learn that until I was 17 for some reason).

When my Aunt and Uncle first moved to Washington, they first settled in Spokane, on the Eastern side of the state. I’m also not sure when they moved to Bellevue, a 20 minute drive from Seattle, but they have lived at 6014 118 Avenue for as long as I can remember.

I now have “6014” tattooed on my arm. To my rather conservative Iranian family who were born in a country in which tattooing is very taboo, normally they would ask why I’ve done this, as they asked me about the first 5 tattoos I got but for the first time they were very happy and touched by what I had done, even surprising their children.

We stand around the kitchen counter and eat Doritos while my Auntie is finishing the rice. When dinner is ready the adults congregate around the dining table, right next to the kitchen, everyone gets a plate and takes their turn to load their plate with kabob and rice. When I was little, my cousins and I would take our plates to the living room to crowd around the table to eat and do our best to not spill rice onto the Persian rug that is a staple of every room in their house.

Now that I’m legally an adult we do get the option to sit at the adults’ table but still often sit on the rug around the living room table. After repeatedly being asked if we want more food, desert comes in the form of a large fruit bowl filled with sliced fruit.

The living room is a small step down from the dining table, even the architecture supports how it is important to not only respect but cherish your elders. The house is all one level except for the guest bedrooms on the second floor.

Walking up to the house it is pretty American-traditional, double car garage, a small path with lots of rose bushes. Ornamental glass above the door, with a small living room, also a step down, to the left is their bedroom along with the stairs to the guest bedroom. On the right is the hallway that opens up to the living room and kitchen, along with a fancier dining room that we only use during holidays.

Their house reflects what’s important to them, it’s large enough to host most of our entire family, and the decorations and furniture are very simple. Almost nothing has changed, not even the hand towels in the bathroom, in all my living memory.

The main thing I look forward to when I come home is walking through their door. And now under quarantine I'm not sure if I'll be able to while I'm back home in Seattle. The only time I've been able to see them is when I stood 6 feet away to make these photos and get to chat with them.