The tender work of building home by hand

My nonna made the best tomato sauce. I remember bushels of ripe tomatoes sitting in their wooden baskets. She boiled and peeled and crushed them, then cooked them all day to make the most succulent sauce you’d ever taste in your life.

Her pasta — always homemade — tasted like her hands. Her soft warm skin was sweet and fragrant like the dough she kneaded. Like she and her pasta were one and the same. I’d later date an Italian pizza chef and his skin too smelled like the pizza he’d create. An irreplaceable sweetness that permeates both the food and the human. A perfume gifted by the wheat and yeast to the very hands that pour into them. I love that smell.

I spent a lot of time with my grandmother in the city. Her urban backyard grew an unimaginable panoply of fruits and vegetables. Lettuce, cherries, zucchini and grapes offered up in shopping bags of abundance. She sometimes had rabbits and chickens too. In my sleep I often dream of being in that garden. In my slumber it is a bright green Eden, awash with golden-hour sun. There is something magical to see beyond every verdant corner, and just as my curiosity piques, the excitement wakes me. I’m left with an insatiable curiosity, always wanting to see more.

I remember my nonna’s basement. A large wooden table stretched end to end. A big bowl of cherries, including the green inch-worm who made a home in them when they still grew on the tree, would sit right in the middle. It was our sun-soaked dessert after a feast of home-cooked veal, lasagna, salad... Every dinner was a celebration of life.

I remember the back room of that basement. Raw concrete and wood.
It was home to her washing machines. She had a modern one, but for some reason still used the one we had to help her fill with buckets of water. She then cranked it by hand to clean her sheets and clothing. Why this woman refused to keep up with modern technology I’ll never know. Though with how short-lived everything is nowadays, I am starting to understand.

She was always smiling, my nonna. Smiling, working, swearing and nourishing everyone around her. She brought herself to Canada with her brother and cousins close behind. She got into real estate by necessity. She lived in the daggy parts of her house but offered the best floors to her tenants, whom she cherished. My grandmother taught me what I know about hard work and hospitality. The privilege of sharing your home. I wonder if that’s what led me to become such a passionate host and landlord, a role I devoted myself to for 20 years — an honour and a privilege, just as it had been for my nonna.

My nonni each grew gardens in their separate homes. The sustenance of those gardens kept us both fed and entertained. There were eight of us grandchildren running around those gardens. My four cousins lived with our nonno in the suburbs. My nonno’s abundant garden was his prized creation. He made peach preserves and the best sopressata in the world. I ate it every day for lunch at school for 3 years.

We wanted for nothing back then.

Nonno loved to garden with us. He showed us how to pick and hose off cucumbers and carrots. We knew how to pluck apples and pears, which magically grew from the same tree. We could eat from the garden whenever we wanted. We played there, rested there, and grew up with our nonno in that garden.

When my parents bought their house in the suburbs, my nonno came and planted a garden with my mother. They spent hours tilling soil, bringing its chemistry up just right. First they planted the vegetables that would feed us, and then went to work on the decorative plants that would surround the house. They dug every inch of the garden that wrapped our big suburban home, placing round white rocks at its boundary. I played with worms and watched my mother sweat, her olive skin glistening in the sun. She’d go so dark in the summer. My nonno stayed fair, with white hair and piercing blue eyes.

When my nonno wasn’t around, my nonna would come over with offerings of live rabbit or chicken. We’d feed them and love them, but always for too short a time before they were served for dinner. How my parents kept the secrets of slaughter from me I will never know, but I am forever grateful. I cannot count on less than two hands how many times Peter the rabbit or Gertrude the chicken “ran away.”
Dinner was always delicious those nights.

My childhood was sensory. It wasn’t filled with lengthy conversation, but of thick presence and the focus that surrounded me. I understood without speaking a word. The body language of my nonni formed my thoughts and habits. I learned to observe and to wait. I learned to taste and to appreciate. I learned more by being near my nonni than by being told by them.

Our family dog was trained wordlessly as well. My nonno taught her telepathically to walk herself through the forest and find her way back home. We grew in our family with love and togetherness, but everyone retained their wild. Even the pets.

When my nonna died, and my mother left soon after, the house and garden fell quiet. The vegetables withered, and then went the decorative plants that surrounded the home. My father cut the grass and kept the trees healthy, but the garden became a forgotten memory.

Life became about paying bills and labour — the kind that happened outside the home — for companies and for strangers.

I’d still visit my nonno in his garden. I still washed cucumbers and nibbled carrots, using them to lure out the local rabbits before the developing suburbs wiped them from our town. But our house was cold and gaunt compared to what it was when the women who loved me filled it.

I think often of the ancestors who raised me. Of their cousins and neighbours and the community of big smiles and warm hands that helped shape my family. I crave the tribe of my early childhood life, and lament its dissolution — the ramifications of which affect me to this day.

The modernisation of my family traumatised me.

I yearn for the days my grandmother plucked cherries off her trees and cranked the washing by hand. I yearn to sit at that big wooden table in my nonna’s basement and talk with her and my aunts and the neighbours who came over on boats with seeds and trinkets in their pockets, ready to sprout new life abroad. I wonder what they’d say about the world today. I wonder if they’d talk politics or reminisce about the old country. I have a feeling, however, they wouldn’t say much. My heart tells me they would smile and laugh and crack walnuts, drizzle split figs with honey and plant seeds in the soil for next season.

I dream of moving to the Italian countryside and finding myself in my own garden. But would it be the same without the people who sacrificed everything to give so much? Is life the same without the people who bring us into it? The ones who know what it means to nurture?

Today, everything I create with my hands is an homage to the nonni who raised me. An ode to my mother, bent over in the sun planting succulents in the soil.

My mother’s hands and mine are identical: Piano fingers with long nail beds and wide, wrinkled knuckles. When I work with clay, it dries out my skin defining its etched texture. The rivers and pathways that appear on the backs of my hands remind me of the criss-crossing lifetimes of the marvellous ancestors who came before me.

And I wonder how much of their blood runs through mine.
I wonder if the water in me is still the water that was in them.

Unlike my ancestors, my garden is not soil.

My garden is mud.
It is not vegetables that I grow, but vessels. Containers of feeling. Walls that hold invisible spaces, reflections of what I carry within: a yearning for the container that nourished me long ago.

And my garden is beeswax.
My produce is light. The warm glow of a candle so much like that golden-hour sun in my nonna’s garden. So much like the warmth that surrounded and shaped me as a child.

I do not grow cherries and I cannot graft apples to pears. My garden produces ambiance and the stories that my hands make. Stories of memory and feeling.

Stories of home.