From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(86)

She was writing a postcard. It was something I made her do every summer, write a postcard to herself telling herself what the summer had meant to her. Then we would send it back to L.A. This postcard had a nightscape of Cefalù. I thought about how we had walked the streets until well after midnight a week earlier. We had let the sea air fill our lungs, we had slurped granita in the cathedral square. She had found il Gran Carro, the Big Dipper, in the sky and had talked about her dad.

“Do you think he can see us here?” she asked.

She knew the close of our trip was drawing near. So we talked about saying good-bye to Nonna, her cousins, and her friends. Her grief sat right at the surface. I could see how she pushed for and pulled from the conversation. She talked about Saro’s hair the day he had died, she asked about Nonna’s age. Then later, as we were falling to sleep that night, she made me promise to do my best “to live to be a hundred years old.”

I told her what I always did when fear and loss left her quiet and pensive: “I’m healthy. If I can help it, I’ll be here long enough to see you become an old lady.” It made her smile.

“But I won’t live at home then, you know,” she was quick to point out.

“I’d be surprised if you did,” I said.

“Maybe I’ll live here.”

“If you do, make sure I have a room to visit.”

After she finished her postcard and cleared away breakfast, she started to help Nonna prepare lunch. This was a first. Zoela called to me in the next room, where I was wrapping bottles of tomato sauce in newspaper and slipping them into old socks Saro had left there years before. “Guarda, Mamma—Watch me, Mom.” She was grating cheese with a vertical tabletop grater that had a crank as large as her hand. It was the oldest kitchen tool in the house, purchased not long after Nonna’s wedding.

A quick survey of the kitchen, and I could see that Nonna was preparing three courses—spaghetti with a classic tomato sauce, eggplant parmigiana, sausage from the butcher, plates of cheeses, and a leafy green salad, dusted with sea salt and tossed with her hands. She would add the vinegar once my parents arrived. Dessert would be fresh melon from her cousin Stefano’s land.

Food was the center of her family life. Cooking was her second nature. There were no formal recipes; the ingredients, quantities, and steps were all in her head. I had asked her once to write down a recipe, and it had been like asking her to write down how she breathed or walked. “Non ti posso dire. Faccio come si deve fare.—I can’t tell you. I just do it as it should be done.”

The food from Nonna’s kitchen told a story, an epic and personal story of an island and a family. It told the story of poverty, grief, love, and joy. It spoke forthrightly of people who had, at times, survived on bread, cheese, and olives while foraging wild vegetables from the rich orchards dotting the foothills near her house. Her kitchen always told me what was in season. It reminded me of my proximity to North Africa, to the East. It told me of the people whose cultures had passed through the island and the ways they had left traces of themselves. But what I loved most was that her kitchen showed me how one ingredient can be made into many different dishes. Her food spoke of malleability and resourcefulness in loss, in love, and in life. She had learned how to turn subsistence living into abundance.

Sicilians say that when you open a bottle of olive oil, you should smell the earth inside. Antioxidant rich, verdant, it should sing of life in a bottle. I grabbed a bottle of olive oil that sat on the table and poured some over fresh bread. I could taste the aromatic legacy of the artichokes, tomatoes, and eucalyptus that grew on the periphery of town. Their essence had infused the life of the olive trees nearby. Being near Nonna had done that for me; every dish she made would be a culinary afterimage.



* * *



Just before noon, my dad rang my cell to say that the driver had just pulled into the entrance to town.

“Stay there, I’m coming,” I said, feeling strangely giddy.

“Well, where else I am gonna go? I don’t speak a word of Italian and don’t even know where I am,” he chided. I could hear the excitement in his voice.

“You’re in Sicily, Dad. You made it to Sicily.”

I called to Zoela to come down from the upstairs bedroom.

She shot down the stairs with Rosalia in tow. “Vieni con me—Come with me,” she commanded her friend. Zoela was full of agency. “Ti faccio conoscere i miei nonni dall’America—I’m going to introduce you to my American grandparents.”

Within minutes we were all headed down Via Gramsci on foot, Zoela running ahead of me, Rosalia keeping pace.

I had waited two decades for this moment.

After we all exchanged hugs there in the street, couplets of onlookers came up to the car to say “Benvenuti.” It seemed that news of their arrival had already begun to circulate.

Then we made the trek back up to Nonna’s house. All the widows and wives of Via Gramsci poured out of their front doors to say “Benvenuti” as we made our way up the street. But the vision that took hold of my heart was Nonna standing proudly in her doorway.

“Ciao, Gene. Ciao, Aubrey. Venite—Come,” she said as she pulled back the lace and invited them inside.

This was what she had not been able to do when her son was alive. But she was doing it now.

“Tell her thank you for having us,” my dad said to me.