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

Pain is part of life. That much I knew. If I could just teach her how to be resilient, how to love big, how to fear less. How to weather hurt, either at the hands of others or even the hurts she might unknowingly inflict on herself. I wanted her to know that love can come in many forms. That sometimes it can look like letting go, but it can also look like never letting go. That one day she might have to love someone in ways the world wasn’t ready for. That reaching for that kind of love would bring with it struggle, but in the end, it could be grander than her wildest imaginings.

He soothed the places I hadn't known needed soothing, seemed perfectly willing to embrace the parts of me that were wanton, unsettled, unfinished, and contradictory. Together we had engaged life as two forks eating off one plate. Ready to listen, to love, to look into the darkness and see a thin filament of the moon.

Yet nothing about dying was easy. Not for him nor for me. It was labor, as much labor as coming into this world.

We had to begin at an ending and make a new beginning.

want you to know love someday. Another love. Your love is too beautiful not to share.” He said it with ease, not a trace of distress or ambivalence. As if it were the most natural thing for a husband to say to a wife. “I want you to live your life.

What if my own life was like a flower? Something I had to continually tend to and nurture. Sicily was the water and sun that fortified me to stand stronger in my life after loss. And maybe my leaving a rock at the cemetery, as an act of remembrance, had additional meaning. Maybe it was a symbol of the lasting permanence of Saro's love. His love, life, illness, and death had taught me so much but it was the undergirding of his love that was my salvation in loss.

But I had learned that identity is prismatic, that belonging requires claiming.

Fennel is a delicious thing that can sprout up among the weeds along the road of life. As Saro had said, "It's there to make you know that you are alive.

I remember that the afternoon light was another passenger in the car, witnessing two lives in motion.

The connection you are creating here is like a flower. It requires soil and sun, things that, thanks to God, are given freely. But it is you, all of us, who has to water the flower to make it grow. Without water, all relations remain small. They can’t open, and eventually they die.

He was kryptonite sprinkled on pizza, my personal weakness

There are many people, maybe even thousands, that you can love. But there are few people," he continued, his words measured, "maybe only one or two on the plant, that you can love and live with in peace. The peace part is the key.

We are all the children of God, just look at our hands.” He held up his hand, palm facing my dad. “But notice, each finger is different. One is short, one is long, one is crooked. They each do different things. But we are all part of the same family.

I had begun to appreciate that in her world, nothing was rushed - love, grief, joy, or a pot on the stove.

I have an endless thirst of love, the love of your body and soul.

In relationship, real partnerships, the love is only as good as the friendship.

As he drifted off, I made other promises, too, the kind of promises the living make to the dying when we have the sudden realization that we are all, in fact, “the dying.” That life is fleeting, capable of bending the other way at any moment. We reach hard for life.

But what I loved most was that her kitchen showed me how one ingredient can be made into many different dishes.

It requires gentle hands but also strong intentions.

I was witnessing another example of the way community functioned so tightly here, for better or for worse. Each of the women on this street will be called upon and expected to participate in the illness or death of the others. They held one another up, it was a custom as ancient and alive as the ruins of Sicily's Harrah temple.

Saro's love, his life and his loss had forged me, softening me to life and strengthening me in the broken places.

The hot air was pregnant with jasmine and eucalyptus.

In cheese making, the curing comes from the earth element salt. It requires pressure and the addition of time. But grief also involves pressure and time.

The magnitude of a volcano and its constancy in the face of so much human frailty fascinated me. There was something so primordial about it, something about the way its aliveness contrasted my grief.

Now I was seeing that he had resigned himself to play out this Sicilian family melodrama to its painful end. And the more that landed on me, the more I needed to meet these people. Ignorance was changeable. My love for him was not.

Saro, a chef, had always said he married an American, an African American woman, who had the culinary soul of an Italian. In his mind, I was Italian the way all people should be Italian: at the table. Which to him meant appreciating fresh food, forging memories and traditions while passing the bread and imbibing local wine.

I began to see that Saro was speaking directly to me. Each dish an edible love letter. Succulent, bold. By the third and fourth courses I accepted that this chef who wore elf boots was making love to me and we haven’t even so much as kissed.