My pores drink in the sun’s gold. Bees drift from bloom to bloom, nectar-drunk and weightless. Cicadas hum; birds murmur secrets through the branches. My grandmother lifts her skirt so the sunlight and its vitamins can find her completely wrinkle-free, oil-warm skin, salted soft by a century of racked up years. Me and my 10-step skincare routine, her and a single bar of soap standing guard against the world. For a moment, everything is stripped back to the essentials. My Sita (our village dialect in place of ‘Teta’) sits in her dark dress, still in widow mourning colours that have cloaked her for thirty years, a crucifix warm against her chest.
My mind wanders, flitting to where I think I should be: a picnic, the beach, anywhere else to chase this sun. I’m restless here, adrift in the hush she wears so easily. My Sita is steady, still. There’s nowhere else she would rather be.
My Sita doesn’t speak English aside from a few words, and my Arabic falters, stumbles, but somehow we find a tongue that carries what sits in our hearts. She doesn’t know she’s half-famous - a face glimpsed in photos and videos I forgot to tend, Instagram posts and old TikToks I never updated. Family and friends tell her they love her cooking videos; she smiles, unsure what a video really is or how they watch it. People love Sita. They want more of her; her own channel, regular clips, but she is shy, hidden, humble, content, uninterested in being known that way - stitched into the small tasks that move her from moment to moment, always and only here.
Lately, I’ve found comfort in Anastasia Miari’s substack newsletter Matriarch Eats. Inspired by her own Greek Yiayia, Anastasia spent seven years travelling the Mediterranean, gathering recipes and quiet lessons from the region’s grandmothers. Now she’s gathered their stories into a book – Mediterranea – Life-perfected Recipes from Grandmothers Of the Mediterranean – a testament to long, full lives shaped by simple food and well-worn wisdom.
Buoyed by these bowls of bulgur and sage advice, I wanted to share what I’ve learned living alongside my 99-year-old Sita Zahia. Far from her homeland, her ways hold true anywhere. These stories share a familiar hue - wherever they live, grandmothers of the Mediterranean know how to make a life well-fed and well-lived. Here’s how mine does it.
Simple routines
Her days are quiet, steady. She sleeps at least ten hours each night, and if tiredness lingers, she lets herself drift back under in the warm, gentle afternoon light. Breakfast comes late, around ten or eleven: black tea with whole milk, biscuits or plain bread with a smear of jam or butter. Sometimes she humours me and tries a pancake or crêpe I’ve made, but always plain, maybe a little jam if she’s feeling generous with herself. Lunch is skipped. Dinner comes early, around five or six. There is no fuss, no excess. Fussing unsettles her. She doesn’t want anyone bending over backwards for her sake alone. But if it’s done for others, especially the family, she glows with quiet pride.
She eats breakfast alone more often than not, since we’re still sleeping, or drifting in and out of the day on our own clocks. But at night, we try to gather at the same table. It’s helped me let go of an old living-alone habit: no screens needed to keep me company while I eat.
The highlight of her day is the live-streamed Mass. She has her favourites on rotation: Saint Charbel’s in Punchbowl, Our Lady of Lebanon in Harris Park and St George Parish in Thornleigh. The other joy is visitors: family dropping in, gurgling babies cradled in arms, wriggling limbs and waving tiny fists. Babies soothe her like nothing else when the day has nudged her into worry. Sending a cousin with a baby over to her if she needs cheering up, is one of the best things you can do - a never-ending dial-a-baby service.
Nourishing whole foods
Her diet is built on simple, whole ingredients you’d find in any Mediterranean kitchen. Much of what she eats comes fresh from gardens - her own and her siblings’. Even now, at her age, she stands over the sink washing handfuls of endive, dressing it with olive oil, salt and garlic, tearing fresh oregano, squeezing juice from ripe tomatoes, sometimes squeezing lemons from her tree or lashes of vinegar. Some days it’s just a plain garden salad of iceberg lettuce and tomatoes.
These bowls and plates sit alongside her steady rotation of vegetarian dishes, which she cooks at least twice a week when she avoids meat for religious reasons. There’s maklouta - onions, beans, chickpeas, potatoes and bulgur folded together with olive oil. Or mujadara - caramelised onions and bulgur simmered with rice until soft. Rice is made with broken strands of angel hair pasta cooked in butter.
She never measures, just tastes and looks until it’s right. Another staple is stuffed vine leaves or cabbage layers, packed with rice, diced tomatoes, mint, parsley, oil, salt, cumin, pepper, chilli and a pinch of the secret ingredient - Lebanese seven spice. She rolls each one by hand, each fold shaped by decades of muscle memory. I’m one of the few she trusts to help. It’s our special time to talk and linger together.
Once a year, she makes the most iconic and special soup - kibbet raahib or monk’s soup, a Good Friday ritual: five hours of borlotti beans, chickpeas, lentils, lemon, garlic and tiny balls of wheat made with mint and parsley, simmered into something golden and beloved. You cannot imagine how many lemons and how much garlic goes into this liquid gold of a soup. My favourite dish is loubiya, green beans slow-cooked in tomatoes and even more borlotti beans until they collapse.
She tries to eat less meat, though one secret to long life might be the stuffed intestines she still savours from time to time. She drinks kefir every day - fermented, alive with good bacteria. She makes her own yoghurt, laban, from scratch, using milk and a bit saved from the last batch, sometimes straining it twice for days to make thick, tangy labneh, the cloth bag it sits in, swaying gently from the hills hoist in the yard. Her pantry is never without olive oil, salt, garlic, onions, beans, chickpeas, rice, potatoes, tomatoes, seven spice, cumin and chilli. She still cures her own olives too, cracking each one open with a hammer before rinsing and salting them down to mellow and darken with time.
Meditative practises
Sometimes you try to speak to Sita and find her lips moving in silent words that are not for you. She might nod, half-listening, but the prayer keeps flowing, the incantation continues. She spends most of her day like this, weaving prayers through her chores and pauses. Once you see that prayer is her meditation, her way of being present, it makes sense how it steadies her. It keeps her rooted. It gives her a reason to wake up each day and keep moving through it. The way it weaves in and out of her life.
When she steps outside, she kisses the statue of the Virgin Mary, the hanging sculpture above the door, every crucifix she passes, whispering a blessing as she goes. Each night before sleep, she says goodnight to us, then turns to the pictures above my bed - Mary, Jesus, Saint Charbel - touching her forehead, chest and shoulders with the sign of the cross and raining down their blessing on us one last time, marking the end of the day.
Worry beads or a multi-coloured crystal rosary are never far from her hands. Once, my uncle took the rosary away from the kitchen because she was so deep in prayer the pot of stew nearly bubbled over. When he turned his back, she had already hobbled to where it was taken, slipped it into her hands, snuck back and carried on. Prayer and cooking live side by side for her. It is a quiet faith in something larger to hold onto. It is the willingness to sit still. To stay with her own thoughts. To let the mind settle and the heart rest.
Hospitality
Filoxenia means hospitality in Greek, a word for the warmth and generosity offered to guests and strangers alike. It carries a quiet promise of care, a love that asks nothing in return. In Lebanese homes, hospitality is its own kind of devotion, almost an art form, an extreme sport. It can overwhelm you in the best way. People will physically fight you over paying a bill. I’m so serious, you need to be quick and wily or you won’t make it!
Here, community, care and mutual aid are woven into daily life, it’s done without thinking, almost as if on auto-pilot. People appear with food when someone falls ill or passes, sitting with people in their grief, keeping an eye out for each other, making sure no one has to ask for what they need. You can ask the common refrain, budeek shee? Do you need anything? and they’ll say, No, thank you. And bless you in response. But they know if they did, help would arrive before the words were spoken. We stay two steps ahead, not just for family, but friends, the wider community, even strangers.
For Sita, true hospitality means you never let someone refuse it. If we haven’t yet set out snacks and tea for guests who insist they’re fine, she scolds us until we do. If someone is sick, she makes their favourite dish. If I have a migraine, she brings me tea, checks on me, lights bakhoor blessed incense, filling the house with drifting trails of church smoke. She asks if I’ve taken my medicine. I say yes. She responds, This Jesus medicine is better than that one, lighting the incense among bits of broken up newspaper as I laugh at her dismissal of western medicine. But somehow, she’s always right. By the time the last curl of incense fades, my head is finally quiet again.
Love of family and community above all else, Sita carries the world within her bones. The faces of those she loves, the echoes of her mountain village in Bane, the distant lives and beating hearts of Lebanon and Palestine, all fold into her quietly, deeply. Yet beneath that weight, she moves like water through the rocks, soft and relentless. She loves with a fierce tenderness, carries worry like a shadow, then lets it dissolve in the rhythm of prayer. In those moments, she slips away from the noise, from the ache, and finds a hollow space where breath slows and time pauses. There, she sheds what she cannot carry, gathering only what she needs to keep moving forward. Resilience runs like ice cold water from the snowfields of her childhood, trickling streams of fresh water flowing steady and sure to sustain the village. The world’s troubles trickle past her, unable to catch, unable to stay.
Deep, multi-layered love, love that both pains and enriches, is the thread that holds her together. Faith is the quiet pulse beneath her skin. Most things slide away like rain on stone. Nothing settles long enough to wound. If she offers one secret, one mercy, it is this - to release the weight, to loosen the grip, to say softly in her Lebglish: no worrah.
