Growing up Italian was synonymous with being Catholic. The church was rooted in the fabric of the Italian family. In some ways, to be Italian meant spaghetti supper was served at two o’clock on Sunday after church, and also that the priest who said the mass would be seated somewhere in the bustling kitchen, imbibing on homemade wine while smoking a cigar.
While my dad’s patience wavered as each of his six children was sent either individually or in pairs to pry my mom away from the church ladies in the cafeteria, we eventually piled into the powder-blue Oldsmobile station wagon to visit my great-grandmother, who had emigrated from Sicily.
We always entered her tiny house through the back door off the driveway. The garden behind her house showed her day's work with mounds of earth welcoming new seedlings of lettuce, tomatoes, onions, and fennel. The intoxicating aromas of my great-grandmother’s kitchen were straight from the garden and instantaneous.
She spoke very little English, and the veins on her wrinkled hands were like a compass, tracing a path toward her Sicilian homeland.
Her fluency was felt through the hours her hands sifted grains, dug dirt, and planted vegetables, and in the kitchen, where her weathered hands stirred a bubbling pot of sauce and sizzling meats frying in a pan of olive oil.
She was small and round and always wore a floral housecoat and apron, which now seems ironic since she was anything but efflorescent. I don’t remember hugging her or ever being close, but somehow, she moved me.
Witnessing the governance she held within the family was powerful. She ordered you to sit at the platters of meat, bowls of spaghetti sauce, and homemade jugs of wine. Like an altar in a Catholic Church, the table was the center of everything and everyone. The table was small and crowded - we must have eaten in shifts. I have a cousin who was the only person I knew who ate with everyone in the family because he chewed each bite 32 times and, to this day, boasts healthy digestion. His discipline was the antithesis of the whirling dervish that was Sunday supper. It felt like another world; plates seemed to fly overhead, passing in every direction of the globe, never finding the true north.
Gathering with my family, I am drawn to her memory. I find myself among the women in my family, moving in the kitchen with my sisters and cousins to the rhythms of my grandmother. The echoes of her movements as the matriarch return me to myself again and again.