A Personal Note While We Wait...

Hello dear friend—

I’m very emotional, sitting down to write this difficult email. Many of you have been checking in with us, asking if we’ve heard any news from my family. My (Nikoo’s) mother, brother, sister, and their families are in Iran. And since the attacks began, we haven’t been able to reach them or get any word about how they are.

Those of you who have been reading and following us for years know that Jim and I do not believe in war. Human life is far too precious to be torn apart for profit, politics, or power. Children should never be blown to pieces or left traumatized for generations.

There are no real winners in war. At least, not among ordinary people. Wars do not liberate people, and lasting change cannot be imposed from the outside. It has to come from within. We were once told we were going to Iraq to bring democracy. In the end, a million people lost their lives.

Jim and I wrote Silent Waters and The Janus Effect during and just after the Iraq War. Tehran’s Daughters was written later, during Iran’s Green Movement in 2009. It was a time when many Iranians protested for reform and were met with a violent crackdown.

Some of the events in that novel are drawn from my own family’s experiences. Many of you who have read these books understand the emotions behind them and the difficult questions Jim and I wrestled with while writing them.

As we wait and hope for news from my family, we wanted to share a few books that speak to the human side of conflict. We’re recommending three of the novels I just mentioned, along with The Lion Women of Tehran, another remarkable book that portrays with great honesty Iran and the reality of life during times of upheaval.

If these stories resonate with you, we hope you might share them with friends and family.

Recently, I saw a meme that said: “Apparently there has to be a war before Western media looks at a map and learns something about the Middle East.” It made me pause. Stories, whether in books or in real life, help us see the people behind the headlines.

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TEHRAN'S DAUGHTERS

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THE LION WOMEN OF TEHRAN

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SILENT WATERS

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 THE JANUS EFFECT

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WHIGGING OUT!

I’m wigging out for Little Pink Houses of Hope and for me, this is deeply personal.

I’m living with stage four metastatic breast cancer. In 2024, Jim and I attended our first Little Pink retreat together. We arrived carrying the weight that comes with this disease. The appointments, the scans, the uncertainty that never really leaves. What we experienced that week was something extraordinary.

For the first time in a long time, we were just Nikoo and Jim.

No hospital bracelets. No treatment schedules. No explaining ourselves. Just laughter, ocean air, shared meals, and families who understood without a single word needing to be said. Little Pink gives families like ours something that medicine alone cannot: rest, dignity, connection, and joy in the middle of the storm.

After that retreat, I knew I didn’t just want to benefit from this organization. I  wanted to serve it. Jim and I became a volunteers because We’d seen firsthand what these retreats do. They change how a family carries cancer. They create memories that outshine fear.

So yes. I’m putting on a pink wig. But what I’m really doing is asking you to help send another family like mine on a retreat where they can breathe again.

If you donate (or join my team), you’re not giving to an abstract cause. You’re giving a mother, a father, a partner, children a week of hope.

And I promise you, that hope matters more than you know. 💗

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Thank you, my friend!

The Giving Tree...and the Tree that Fell from the Sky

Jim and I have always been tree lovers (at risk of being called ‘tree huggers’). And we mean that in the literal sense of word. Every house we’ve lived in, we’ve always planted a tree, or at least had a tree adventure.One of the favorite books we used to read to our sons when they were younger was The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. Regardless of how many times we read that book, I always sobbed through the very last page.

Did I mention tree adventures?

There was a giant mulberry tree at our first house in Westerly, Rhode Island. Before we moved in, it was scheduled to be cut down. Hundreds of birds sat on that tree, ate the colorful berries, and then proceeded to poop on the neighbors’ cars. It took some friendly interaction from us – followed by cooking and delivering mulberry jam every year – to save that old tree’s life.

When we bought our home in the Point section of Newport, RI, the courtyard shaded by our white lilac became the fragrance-filled gathering place for countless neighborhood get-togethers.

The apricot tree we planted in our house in Perkasie, Pennsylvania, was a source of great amusement for the neighborhood kids. When it started bearing fruit, they looked like bees working around the hive. (The Shakers had a saying about the importance of growing enough for the neighbors too!) The kiwi wasn’t as successful, but we did have some luscious-looking branches.

And then there was the gigantic weeping willow tree in our backyard in Connecticut where our sons and their friends played volleyball and basketball for days on end. There was even a mini-tornado that brought down spruce and white pines along the property border, but the weeping willow survived.

Of course, soon after moving to California, we had to plant our pomegranate and avocado trees. Our granddaughter harvested two pomegranates this past month. And there are more than a dozen still growing on the tree!

In each case, with all of the planting and occasional pruning, we’ve done our share of sweating, hard digging and constant attention. We’ve had days of pondering whether the hole was deep enough or if the soil was fertilized enough. Once we considered if we should remove a boulder three feet down. But when it's all said and done, our trees have given us so many days of fun and conversation and adventure...and an occasional piece of fruit. (-:

But this week, we got an entirely new view of how someone else approaches the job.

A house recently purchased in our neighborhood had a half dozen VERY large, mature trees and at least a dozen shrubs planted yesterday. It took the workers less than a couple of hours. And how did they get it done? Take a guess after looking closely at the photo we took from our kitchen window. We're talking about seriously large equipment! Yes, that's the mother of all cranes in the left corner.

The couple moving in undoubtedly paid a great deal of money for this lightning quick landscaping...and that's great for them. But we still prefer the memories of our own giving trees much better than the tree that fell from the sky.