From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(39)

In just a few months, Zoela was expanding the scope of my vision in the world, my vision of myself, my capacities. She brought forth a well of determination and power within me. But I also felt incredibly vulnerable.

“I’ll do anything to make sure you are okay in the world. I’ll do my best to spare you unnecessary hurt,” I told her as she slept. Yet I knew firsthand that mothers can disappoint, they can wound, they can make their love conditional. What mother hasn’t done that in the smallest of ways or even more egregious ones? I thought specifically about the years Saro’s mother had gone without seeing her child because he had chosen a love she didn’t understand.

That night I made a promise to myself that if I did nothing else, I would be a mother who worked hard to set my own conditions and ideas aside and see this child I was blessed to parent for the person she might be. I’d be at her wedding, I’d be there for births and deaths.

As I rocked her to sleep, the expanse of L.A. city lights twinkling through the window above my chair, I thought about the various sadnesses she would undoubtedly feel someday. Pain is part of life. That much I knew. If I could just teach her how to be resilient, how to love big, how to fear less. How to weather hurt, either at the hands of others or even the hurts she might unknowingly inflict on herself. I wanted her to know that love can come in many forms. That sometimes it can look like letting go, but it can also look like never letting go. That one day she might have to love someone in ways the world wasn’t ready for. That reaching for that kind of love would bring with it struggle, but in the end, it could be grander than her wildest imaginings.





BREAD AND BRINE




Seven years later, Zoela was playing upstairs at her grandmother’s house, watching Pippi Longstocking in Italian on a portable DVD player just a few hours after Nonna and I had left her father’s ashes entombed in the local cemetery. Downstairs, I watched as Nonna moved about her kitchen like a sturdy, silent ship navigating turbulent waters. Her kitchen was the space where I imagined she unthreaded the tapestry of her life, inspecting each interrelated thread. I could hear the cacophony of midday street sounds as they rose and fell: a barking dog, the idling of a tractor engine, Emanuela calling Assunta from down the street to tell her that she had picked up her bread from the baker on the way back from the market. The sounds were familiar, comforting and discordant with the reality of my life in L.A., where my own kitchen had fallen silent since Saro’s death. Just planting my feet in front of the stove conjured sorrow from deep within my bones. But here in Nonna’s kitchen I could sit. I could observe. I could watch an expert hand dice fresh garlic, layer salt into the sauce with generous sprinkles as I once had done with Saro. I could be in company. Silent company. There was more to be said than either of us knew how to say.

I studied Nonna’s kitchen. It was small, gallery style: utility sink, dish sink, stove lined up in marching order along a wall with laminate cabinets above. A backsplash of eight-by-eight-inch brown ceramic tiles and plain brown cabinets lined the space. There was a repeating motif of antique rural vignettes painted on three tiles: a man making wine, a woman serving a family dinner by oil lamp, and a mother and daughter washing clothes in the town square. At the end of the service line was an antique wood-burning wall oven, typical of the turn of the last century. It had been used throughout Nonna’s childhood. Her mother had baked bread in there daily. It was where they had boiled water for pasta. These days Nonna threw her compost trash into its belly through a black forged-iron door with a latch.

At the other end of the kitchen was the house’s single bathroom and next to it a closet that held the refrigerator. Form followed function here. Each of those spaces had become what they were as modernity had arrived in town during the twentieth century: electricity, running water, refrigeration. Appliances were placed where there was space and where there was access to water. Design was informed by access and necessity and often according to the timeline in which a family could afford appliances and upgrades. Refrigeration was the last technological change to arrive in the home, so when a family could afford a refrigerator, it was put into the only space that was left. People worked with what they had. It was an approach to the structural changes of life that I suddenly understood with new urgency.

A big loss has a way of magnetizing all the other losses in one’s life. I was just beginning to realize that in the months after Saro’s death. His passing had resurrected all kinds of feelings of loss, including the dissolution of my parents’ marriage, which had happened when I was, as my therapist had pointed out, seven years old. The same age as my own daughter. It seemed that parts of me, both past and present, needed deep soothing, and grief commingled past and present. That Zoela and I had experienced a loss at the same age seemed to make the younger parts of me crave stability with searing intensity.

The comfort I got from Nonna was a strangely familiar feeling. It reminded me of being at my own grandmother’s house in the summers after my parents’ divorce. My maternal grandmother was the one who had cared for me and Attica each summer in the wake of my parents’ divorce. Then I had been a child grieving the separation of family. My parents had divorced, having given up on the notion of forever, and had started down separate paths. Leaving us with my mother’s mother for the first few summers postdivorce made the most sense as they went about the business of rebuilding their lives. Grandmother was retired, and as a former educator, she wanted to influence the lives of her only grandchildren. She wanted to give us something we couldn’t get at home: stability.