Tuesday, August 14, 2012
I have always felt very connected to my grandmother despite the distance of a whole country between us. With our special neighboring November birthdays, mine the day after hers, she always made me feel like I was her special and most treasured birthday gift: “Gioa della Nona, bimba dorata.�
In the past several years I have treasured visiting her on my breaks from school for a week of sitting together in our recliners, enjoying each other’s company watching RAI and somehow managing to communicate across language barriers to recount stories from our family history. Stories that brought us closer as they colored in her black and white pictures and revealed a glimpse of the willfulness of her character, a trait that would sometimes later be mistranslated as “stubbornness� after she translated herself into a new life in America.
Riding her bicycle into a picture of her girlfriends; so vivaciously dauntless. It is with this willfulness that she left Italy and her home, her friends and family, for her family, and began a new life across the Atlantic. Sometimes it is too easy to forget the strength, and speak of stubbornness, but it is because of this strength that she gave up all she knew and we are here.
As always, she acted for her family.
Her family was joy in life, her greatest pleasure was in loving us. Like many grandmothers she expressed this love in her cooking, but of course she surpassed all other grandmothers, as her cooking truly was the best. Labouringly, she made intricate traditional foods customized to our preferences: lovingly making Mark arancini with no peas, little breads for hunter and Madison, cookies for her older brother john, scaccias for all. She was exceptionally particular in her cooking, seemingly irrationally so, decisively adding a pinch of this and bit of that in a specific but ever-changing order, always refusing take any suggestions. And why? Because her cooking was her purest gift and she could not bear to have her offerings of love adulterated: they were her way of sharing herself with those that she loved above all; the people who come together today, although not all present in body, all present in thought and spirit as we remember the tremendous strength and love that she brought to our family and friends and our lives. And we honor her dedication to us, and this tradition of love and family she founded as we express our love and commitments to each other: each time Elio specially buys those tall glass jars of imported tomatoes with no seeds for Candice, every March 25th when I make Erik a pie and a brownie cake for his birthday, and when, on our opposite coasts, we simultaneously cover our kitchens in flour and specks of spinach making Christmas scaccias for our friends and families.
This is how we best remember my grandmother and the love she gave that made and strengthened each of us: nourishing our bodies and hearts. She will always be with us in every bowl of pasta we share and recipe we refuse compromise.
