From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(53)

“Can I help?” I asked.

“You’ll only slam your finger.” Her voice was neither low nor loud. It came from the distraction of some thought. I knew immediately that she wanted to be alone. “I left the coffee ready on the stove for you,” she told me without looking up.

I watched her work a few seconds more. Steady, repetitive. Peeling, slicing, chopping, working was how she contemplated life’s problems; prayer was how she turned those problems over to God.

Just before I turned to go light the flame under the caffettiera, she called over to me, “If you want to take them back, I have to begin now, no?” She was talking about the almonds.

Instantly I knew it was our forthcoming departure that was occupying her mind. It was on mine, too, as I drank my coffee, listening to the sound of cracking shells.

A vendor came by, Nonna continued to work. Her cousin Emanuela shuffled down the street to retrieve bread. Nonna kept hammering. Emanuela returned, and I took the bread from her. Nonna went on cracking nuts. I placed the loaves near the stove, next to stewed artichokes and a pot of zucchini pieces jostling lightly in a broth of mint and basil over a low flame.

Then I walked out into the morning wind. I got a brick from under the bench and placed it on the stone walkway. I took a second mallet, the one I could see had been next to her all along and began to pummel almond shells.

“They are delicious. Here.” She gave me an almond from the shell she just forced into opening its heart.

It was divine, its flavor gentle with a delicate hint of sweetness. The flesh of the nut was somehow structurally firm but also tender with delightful elasticity. When left unattended to dry out, almonds became ever better, more robust. Those Sicilian almonds were nothing like the nuts in six-ounce plastic bags sold at gas station checkouts in the United States. They were a singular act of natural goodness. They reminded me that a thing can be tender or hard, depending on conditions and care, intended or otherwise.

I reached for another.

“Non quella. è amara.—Not that one. It’s bitter,” she told me. “There is nothing worse than a bitter almond.”

Amaro—bitter—is the one flavor profile that is at the epicenter of Sicilian culture and cuisine. It is a flavor foraged for in wild greens. It is distilled into liqueur. With amaro, Sicilians get intimate with nature’s lack of sweetness; they get up close to its marked intensity. In the kitchen, when Sicilians juxtapose something amaro with something dolce—sweet—they bring the contrasting flavors to life, make a stage for both, side by side. Bitterness, Sicilians understand, is an essential flavor both in food and in life. It has shaped the island’s culinary identity. There is no sweet without bitter. The poetry of the island tells us that the same is true of the Sicilian heart.

Nonna showed me the moisture inside the shell I had just cracked.

“When there’s too much rain, this can happen.” Inside the shell I saw a small amount of mold and rotting. “Too much of anything can ruin. Even water.”

I knew she was talking about almonds, just as earlier she had been talking about a tooth. But I couldn’t help but feel that she was also talking about so much more. We had both been drowning on dry land in a sadness that seemed to stretch to infinity. One look at Nonna, and I knew she knew that life could be bitter—as could joy and love. She had lost her husband and her only son. She had had the taste of bitter almonds linger on her palate. She wanted to spare me the same.

I worked with the wind at my back. Gentle and silent, the wind was a persistent character in a town of characters. It caused curtains to billow, windows to shutter. Damp socks batted against stone walls on the laundry line because the wind compelled them to. It carried the rooster’s crow above and across the bell tower, depositing a faint echo among the budding olive trees in the orchards at the edge of town.

I was aware that in four days that same wind would carry me off the island.



* * *



Getting into the olive grove wasn’t hard. I found an opening past a large laurel bush where the earth was low and I could bend the rusted barbed wire without much effort. I squatted near a sprout of fennel, did a tuck and roll, and hauled my body inside the family land with only minor scratches on my legs, prickly spurs stuck to my pants. Small clumps of earth had made their way into my shoes, and my ankles were dusty, which I’d likely have to explain later. But I was in.

Standing, I could see that many of the trees had tiny fruits, baby green olives not bigger than a small grape. Saro had taught me that when they are that hue of green, with a yellow undertone, they are months from harvest. A line of black ants scurried on a diagonal along the gnarled trunk of the nearest tree. Their procession seemed urgent. Below the tree and throughout the sloping grove, it looked as though the ground had recently been cleared. That would make getting to the chosen spot easier; I could walk without worry of snakes or large holes that would otherwise have been hidden by knee-high tumminia—an ancient variety of wheat that sprouts everywhere after the wind sows its seeds back into the earth each season.

I moved deeper into the grove, carefully navigating the de-scending earth so as not to fall. Once I arrived in the center, I stood before the tree where I would scatter Saro’s ashes. The late-afternoon breeze moving in from the Mediterranean refreshed and emboldened me.

The tree I chose was neither the largest nor the oldest. It was just one with the clearest view to the dazzling, ever-present blue sea, the one with enough level ground at its base for me to sit on because I felt the emotion coming on.