From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(85)



Then we sat just silently. The bubbling sound of espresso perking to the top of the caffettiera broke the silence. She poured us both a thimbleful to start. Then she spoke. “What you have passed, the years you stood at Saro’s side, you deserve to be rewarded for that.”

She was speaking with rare, unbidden intimacy about my life away from her home, away from our moments at her table. I downed my coffee and looked out the door. It took a minute before I realized the various things she might be suggesting. Then, without a second more, I walked through the opening she had made in our conversation.

“In my own way, I am trying to pull myself forward. Raising Zoela to the best of my ability. I’m trying to build a new life,” I said, feeling suddenly exposed, like a melon split open. “I hope for a life that is expansive for both of us. Zoela and I need that. With any luck, I have some forty years ahead of me. I’d like them to be filled with joy as well.”

She shrugged her shoulders, “Ma come no?—Why not?” She went to take another swig of coffee, but her cup was empty, so she looked out past the hand-sewn lace curtain that hung at the front door. She wiped her mouth with a napkin and continued, “Going forward no one forgets.” Then she turned and looked at me. “I don’t know if I’m making myself clear.”

I held her glance. I wondered if she was talking about my opening my life to another love.

“Yes, I think I understand. My heart will never forget while I carry this life forward.”

She nodded in response. The air about us was full of what wasn’t being said. She was, in her own way, telling me I was known and loved. That wherever my life might take me, there was a love that was unshakable.

She pushed back her glasses and used the same napkin to wipe her eyes. Then she pushed a pastry of apricot and brioche in my direction.

I knew we had passed another milestone as friends, widows, mothers.

“Now let’s call my cousin in Petralia. That one will sink her teeth into me with a strong bite of guilt if you don’t say good-bye to her personally. Hand me the phone.”



* * *



Fifteen minutes later, I was dressed and out the door. I left Zoela, still asleep, to walk the hills one last time. I decided to go to a place I had once visited with Saro and his father. I walked down Via Gramsci and hooked a left. Sheep bells clanged behind me as the herder brought his flock down the main street to graze in the valley below town.

I felt a wind off the sea and looked toward the outward-stretched sky. In that moment, I couldn’t think of a better birthday present. I didn’t see sky like that in L.A. There the sky felt as though it was a dome over the city. And most days, I moved hurriedly along urban stretches without ever having cause to look up or out.

At the far end of a narrowing hillside was our family mulberry tree. Surrounding it were four pear trees that produced miniature, densely flavored green pears. It was where I would go to get away.

Silence was guaranteed.

The mulberries didn’t disappoint. It was late in the season. Many had been taken by birds and fallen to the ground. I could never reach the high fruit without a ladder. So I settled for the berries left on the low branches. Everything about my life with Saro came rushing back to me. I remembered artichokes in spring and salt under his fingernails. I basked in that tiny detail. All the while, I let the tart, sweet fruit burst in my mouth once again.

Then I walked back toward town. I detoured and passed the road that led to the oil mill. A day earlier, I had sat with Saro’s distant cousin Epifanio. He ran the olive mill located just outside of town, and he had given me an impromptu lesson in degustazione dell’olio di oliva—olive oil tasting. He had said that the key to tasting oil is to let the palate awaken to it, wrestling with its peppery, grassy flavors while also recognizing its smooth quality.

Around the mill, Epifanio had been cultivating heirloom varieties of mint, sage, and basil, ancient varieties that were common centuries ago but that were little known by modern Sicilians. All of it, he instructed me, was due to nature’s organic cross-pollination; man need not interfere.

The thing that I focused in on was salvia all’ ananas—pineapple sage, distinguished from the classic variety by its variegated color. In more than forty years on the planet, I hadn’t known such a thing existed. The island, still twenty years later, was showing herself to me. When I rubbed the sage between my palms, it emitted a delicate scent reminiscent of pineapple. Epifanio told me I couldn’t buy seeds. That it grew from clippings, letting a piece of one plant give birth to another.

I had stood there enjoying the aroma of pineapple jump from my palm, realizing that life was still revealing itself to me, I just had to stay open to it.

I meandered back home, passing clusters and clusters of wild fennel. I hadn’t seen it before, but there it was, growing enthusiastically along the side of the same road I had passed earlier, accessorizing the landscape, the white stalks knee and waist high, rising with bushy green tops that looked to the casual eye like weeds. Fennel is a delicious thing that can sprout up among weeds along the road of life. As Saro had said, “It’s there to make you know that you are alive.”

When I got home, Zoela was awake and seated at Nonna’s table.

“Ciao, mammina—Hello, little mama,” she said with a grin.

Each summer in Sicily had marked her growth. Walking the streets on her own each morning to get the daily bread from the pasticceria, learning the ancient craft of making fresh ricotta cheese, frolicking in the family’s orchard, Sicily had become a gift to her, the place where she would always know her father. Her independence was breathtaking, her friendships deeper, her Italian charming. She now made jokes in Italian, making me believe that Italian Zoela was American Zoela’s alter ego. I rather loved them both.

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