From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(67)

When we got outside, we stood on the marble steps in the midst of the sunset hour. Benedetta, who lived two doors down from Nonna, came up behind us and offered to walk with her and the kids back to Via Gramsci. I, on the other hand, wanted to take a walk to enjoy the first moments of the day without unrelenting direct sun. I wanted to walk the hills outside town, pick blackberries off the brambles. Be alone for a moment in the silence that could be found only once I left the stone buildings and cobblestoned streets.

I started into the low hills above town that were lined with small plots of cultivated land because it was the walk I had always taken with Saro. The cicadas were nestled in their posts among the almond trees. Nature was magnificent here. It created a kind of inner stillness I couldn’t find in L.A., where I was in constant motion. Now I could slow down, I could just be. As I listened to an orchestra of cicadas, I could smell jasmine. I turned toward the wind so I could see the land outstretched to the blue sea.

I didn’t see things like that in L.A. A haze always hung over the city, separating the lives we led from the open sky. I moved through urban stretches without ever looking up or even out. Still, occasionally such vistas came to me. Driving from Pasadena to Silver Lake, I would see the sky stretching toward the ocean—a narrow, fleeting view because I was moving along freeways and thoroughfares.

With each curve my ascent was more pronounced, the town of Aliminusa receding into the background. A view of the sea emerged peekaboo style when I reached the first flat plain. Then the Mediterranean was in full view. I stopped in my tracks. I turned my body in every direction, not wanting to miss any of the landscape. From that spot, it was all cultivated plots of land that, depending on the season, yielded tomatoes, artichokes, fava beans, peppers, eggplant, zucchini, garlic, potatoes, lettuce, chard, fennel, cardoons, chamomile, oregano, basil. Olive, fig, almond, pear, and apricot trees were my companions. Each inhalation cleansed my soul. Looking out over the land, I felt no inner division too wide or too difficult for me to cross.

There on the outskirts of town, my lutto—my mourning, the thing I carried with me, invisible to others—was freer. I didn’t have to hold on to it so tight. I knew I wouldn’t lose it there. And I was comforted to know that I wouldn’t lose Saro there, either. There were a town, a history, a culture that would ensure that wouldn’t happen. Saro couldn’t be forgotten there, and for my still-grieving heart that allowed me to breathe deeper. In some way, I felt his heartbeat there, pulsing through the magic of the moment, as if it had been waiting for me to take myself there, our quiet place in a hurried world. There is a saying in Sicilian: “It can’t get any darker than midnight.” Life some days, more than a year later, still felt like an ever-present midnight. But as I walked, I was willing to lean forward into what little light I was given—the light of the Sicilian summer sun. I wanted to stand naked in it.

An hour later, I made the descent back into town and found Nonna ironing upstairs, something she never did at that hour of the day.

“I’m ironing Emanuela’s nightgowns. Since her recent hip surgery, she needs the help. Come. Here.” She led me from that room into the next, leaving her cousin’s sleepwear and intimates on the ironing board. “I want you to see this.” She was pointing to the dresser in her bedroom.

At first I didn’t understand what was going on as she began to show me the contents of her dresser drawers. Then it became clear.

The top drawer of the dresser contained nightgowns—six sleeveless summer shifts in floral prints, never used. She told me that they were for if and/or when she had to go to the hospital. Hospitals in Italy (and in Sicily) do not provide gowns. She had prepared enough for a six-night hospital stay. That way, Franca would not have to wash and iron them every day of her stay.

The second drawer held the same contents but for a spring hospital stay, when the nights are cooler. The third and fourth drawers held clothing for a winter hospital stay. They contained fleece garments, wool nightshirts, even pajama bottoms, something Nonna had never worn, but they had come with the fleece set and she was willing to wear them because the hospital might not have enough heat on a coastal winter night. The fifth drawer contained handmade lace pillowcases. Pillowcases, too, I learned, were not provided in the hospital.

When we came to the final drawer, I had to kneel down on the hand-painted floor tiles to help her open it. It was low to the ground, and it strained her back to reach there. Outside the window, I heard the fruit vendor bringing his car up the narrow street, shouting for us to buy the sweetest melons, the tenderest plums. We ignored him. I peered into the contents of the sixth drawer.

There, alone, was a single clear plastic garment bag. Inside it, there was one pressed and folded white floral-printed nightgown. “Take that out, I will show you,” she said.

As I reached in, I focused on a detail inside the clear plastic. There was a photograph set on top of the pristinely folded nightgown. It was of her and Giuseppe, my father-in-law, taken some fifteen to twenty years earlier. In the photo, she is standing behind him and they are both smiling. I could see presents on a table in the background. The two of them were dressed up. It had probably been taken at someone’s wedding. I handed her the bag, and she set it on top of the dresser. Slowly she removed the photo, set it aside, and held up the clothes: a nightgown, undergarments, stockings.

“These are for when I die.”

Then she patted the clothes, straightened the stockings, and carefully put them and the photo back into the bag. I was directed to put the bag back into the sixth drawer. “I have to have all this. You don’t want anyone saying at the end of your life, ‘She didn’t have enough to have fresh gowns in the hospital and a decent gown to take to the cemetery.’?”