From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(52)

The question of whether we would return to Nonna’s next summer remained unspoken, mainly because I didn’t have a definitive answer yet. A year seemed so far away. There would be finances to consider, a mortgage to refinance, auditions, and the ultimate reckoning of whether I could face another season filled with so many bittersweet memories for me, for Zoela. Who knew where I’d be in a year? Nonna had to be wondering if we would come back again now that Saro’s ashes were interred. Sure, it had been our little family’s summer tradition, but she of all people knew the ways widowhood changed one’s ideas and plans for life. She also knew, I suspected, that although we had a strong tie that bound us to each other, we weren’t exactly close. It would be up to me to decide whether I wanted to come back.

Nonna and I didn’t have a shared language with which to explore all that. So we simply didn’t talk about it. Instead what we had was our time together, especially in her kitchen, the place where her house came alive three times a day.

She stood up from her chair and adjusted the nylon stockings that stopped at her knees. Then she turned off the flame and put a mismatched lid onto a pot of stewing tomatoes. They had been picked earlier in the day by a neighbor. By afternoon, they were sweating themselves out of their skins, reducing themselves into an intense juice and fleshy fiber that would somehow play a part in the evening’s dinner.

“It must have time to come together,” she said, referring to the tomato sauce. I had begun to appreciate that in her world, nothing was rushed—love, grief, joy, or a pot on the stove.

Zoela played upstairs with Rosa Maria, or “Rosalia,” as she liked to be called. She was the granddaughter of Giacoma, who lived at the edge of Via Gramsci. A year older than Zoela, Rosalia was easygoing and affable. The girls had met when Zoela was perhaps four or five, and they had been playing together each summer ever since. She was fascinated by a girl so unlike herself—American, black, bilingual, and with a mother readily willing to open her purse and dispense euros for gelato at the bar in the square. They were inseparable. They waited for each other at the front doors of their grandmothers’ homes. Zoela had told Rosalia where to find candy in the houses of the women of Via Gramsci. Their friendship was as firm as the cement between the stone blocks of the church’s facade.

Upstairs they made forts with sheets, acted out various roles with large puzzle pieces of zoo animals and a one-legged Barbie. They communicated like twins with a shared language only they knew—part Italian, part Sicilian, part English. They found a way to bridge the vocabulary each of them didn’t know. When I had checked on them earlier, Zoela had told me to leave. She liked making Nonna’s upstairs her play domain each afternoon as the sun began to recede and the town came to life after the siesta. And while Nonna was at Mass, Zoela had gotten accustomed to leading Rosalia downstairs to swipe the Italian version of Twinkies that Nonna kept in a cupboard.



* * *



Two days later, I met a farmer while walking through town to mail a postcard at the post office. He was unloading almonds in front of his house, hoisting them from his truck to the narrow sidewalk with a swiftness that made me look twice. He was Nonna’s age. His face was both ancient and youthful, a network of lines etched around bright blue eyes that could have belonged to a movie star had he been born in a different place. I couldn’t believe how deftly he lifted his harvest given his arthritic, bowed legs.

“Signora, prendane un sacchetto—Mrs., take a sackful.” He motioned for me to come closer. “Portine alla Croce—Take them to Croce.” Then he told me to tell her they were from her cousin. Before I could answer, he disappeared into his house and returned with a sackful for me to take home.

Until that trip, I had never had a soft, green almond, tender and fleshy with a sweet aftertaste. They grow on trees everywhere around the periphery of town. In summer, they jut from the branches, green with a soft shell. They are an edible gift for those willing to do the work of il raccolto—the harvest. Sicilians are known to eat them alone as a snack or after dinner with fruit. But he was giving me a large sack of the dried variety because, as he explained, he needed to make space for the green ones he would be bringing home in the coming days.

I took them and thanked him.

It was a rookie move to try to carry three kilos of almonds through town. Halfway up the last hill to Nonna’s house my back told me to fuck off. When I drew back the curtains to enter her house, she shook her head as she watched the bag hit her kitchen table with a thud.

“Che cos’è?—What is that?” She was already opening it for inspection.

“Sono mandorle—They’re almonds.” I knew I had just brought more kitchen work to her home on an otherwise uneventful morning.

“Dove le hai trovate? Ma sei pazza?—Where did you find them? Are you crazy?” Her tone belied the fact that she actually liked that people gave me gifts to bring to her. It was a sign of consideration and respect. Even if it meant that there’d be work to do.

“I need my own mule when I walk through town,” I quipped as I watched her take the bag and walk it toward her “cellar,” the cool space under the stairs where she stored olive oil, a year’s worth of homemade tomato sauce, jars of caponata and artichokes, and bulbs of garlic hung on a rope. It was also the place where she napped on the hottest days of summer.

The next morning I awoke to the sound of Nonna hammering steadily outside the front door. Looking from the door of the upstairs balcony, I saw wind snapping freshly washed sheets on the line. I tied my hair back, slipped on a linen dress, and went downstairs. I found her, mallet in hand on an upturned wooden crate, bearing down on the almond shells, a blanket of massacred shells at her feet.