Moving to Italy: Speaking of Birthdays

For George’s 29^th birthday that July, his parents didn’t even bother to wish him Happy Birthday. I don’t think my in-laws deliberately forgot their only son’s birthday. They had remembered it on previous years, but to them, birthdays were something that children celebrated, not adults. We were busy with settling in, and his birthday just didn’t loom large on their personal horizon. At that time I saw it as proof that they didn’t value George as a person. His father, in particular, was driving him very hard to get all the work done around the farm that had long been neglected. George worked 14-hour days, seven days a week. It seemed that they were taking a lot and giving back very little.

But when I consider now whether they loved him, I would have to say, yes, very much. However, they didn’t show it in ways that I could recognize as a young woman who resented the long hours my husband spent working at their command. It is only now, after many more years of living that I can understand their love and concern. 

And how does a parent express love? How does anyone?  I am very suspicious of the easy, glib, “I love you.” It seems phony to me. I have a friend who says it all the time, and I ask her, because she is a friend, “What do you mean by ‘love’? Romantic love, family love, friend love, close-friend love, acquaintance love, “Christian” love, “brotherly” love?” How many different kinds of love are there, and when we say that phrase, to which one does it refer? Does frequency of repetition mean it is more easily believed? Or does frequency of repetition dilute the meaning? If I stop my teenage child from doing something, they “hate” me, and they think I am a mean mother, may even doubt my real love, no matter how much I say, “I love you.”  Isn’t it, after all, the steady, reliable presence, and constant care that declare love, rather than short words that spin easily into thin air?

And when we were told “America: Love it or Leave it,”—those words on banners and bumper stickers that helped drive us from America—what exactly did those people mean by love? How do you love a country? Does love mean that you do not criticize the country? Or does love mean that you care enough to pay attention, to see what is wrong, and to try to change it?  And in these troubled times I ask, don’t we express our love for our country by watching, listening, and caring enough to express an opinion?

My parents didn’t express their love openly either, but I didn’t doubt that they loved me—even my father who could be so very cold. My mother was warm, but to say “I love you” to her children was just not part of her repertoire. However, I felt her love in her concern for every aspect of my life as I grew, and her willingness to watch me and sometimes guide me, as I groped around in my teen years testing my skills, testing her patience. She listened to me and allowed me room to express my feelings, and so I never felt a need to rebel in any big way, but I did some stupid things, like get engaged when I was seventeen. That was one time when she questioned me closely to make sure I was not running from our unhappy home, but when I convinced her I was genuinely in love and, already in college, intelligent enough to know what I wanted, even at such a young age, she supported me. It is a mark of how immature I was that I couldn’t recognize the logical flaws in my reasoning, and it is a mark of how much she loved me that she didn’t either. I really believed that I was old enough to handle the responsibility of marriage and a family, because I really didn’t know what all that responsibility meant. She assumed a far greater understanding than I possessed. I wasn’t mature enough for marriage and family, but I was forced to acquire that maturity very quickly. And in the end, it was good that I was settled when she died so soon afterwards, and that I could provide a home for my sister. But, no matter how busy, or how poor, nor how pieced-together the celebration, nor how simple the gift, my mother never, ever forgot my birthday. And even though sometimes we had to improvise on cakes and gifts, in Italy we were always sure to celebrate each birthday.

The story of our move to Italy starts with "Arrival" on the June 26, 2017 blog post.

 

My 25th birthday

James taking off candles, Matthew smiling at the camera.

Gabi: Mary's 25th birthday, September.

Moving to Italy: The Grape Harvest--Part 3

In the early evenings of that grape harvest we watched Zio Silvio's tractor pull the trailer with the grape trough up towards the house. The large tractor treads clawed their way carefully up the hill and around the hairpin curve.  Out of our sight, the tractor turned into our road.  We could hear the back and forth and then feel the thrum of the engine and the vibration of the tracks as it approached Zio Mario's house, located between Zio Silvio's and Zio Remo's. Even though he lived in Torino, Zio Mario maintained his property at Gabi, and he had built at the side of his house the large vat where the majority of the grapes would be fermented. Each day the tractor stopped there to unload.

On the last day I was surprised when the tractor and trailer rumbled past the uncles' houses and on towards ours. Carrying Margaret Ann, I rushed out onto the front balcony, and we looked down into mounds of purple fruit as the trailer passed below us. Zio Silvio drove the tractor, while George and the others waved as they sprawled, dusty and tired, beside the trough on the flatbed trailer. The windows in our home vibrated when they rounded the corners of the house, and I hurried to the kitchen balcony so we could watch them pull into the courtyard. 

Down below, Matthew was running in place outside our door, eager to dash out to the tractor, but restrained by his grandfather's hand. The uncles laughed and waved as they stopped, and Matthew was finally freed to run into George's arms. George climbed down off the trailer and carried him to stand with Paul and James in the safety of the balcony overhang. There they watched the men unload some of the grapes into our cantina. The cantina looked like a dark, sunken storage area, except that it contained three large barrels, and the musty smell that clung to the stone walls betrayed many years of fermenting and storing wine. The men poured some of the grapes into our cantina, where they would be held until the big grape-crush, and then they drove back around the corner to unload the rest at Zio Mario’s house. George’s labor had earned us a few grapes of our own to turn into wine. 

The grape crushing wasn't exactly an "I Love Lucy" episode, but it wasn't far off. The grapes had to be squeezed to release the juice and pulp. Without fancy equipment, the easiest way to do that was with human power. I opened the balcony door to hang my laundry the next morning, and I heard a lot of voices and laughter in the courtyard below. Zio Remo, Zio Silvio, and my in-laws and the children were gathered around the cantina. I hung the wet clothes quickly and ran downstairs to see what was happening.

By the time I arrived, Zio Remo was standing in a tub of grapes, stomping up and down in rubber boots. They looked exactly like the boots that Zio Silvio used to muck out the barn, but I was relieved to hear that these were reserved for grape-crushing only. Before and after he used them they were scrupulously cleaned. He looked a little embarrassed as we all stood around to watch him march up and down in the barrel, sinking and rising in the purple fruit.  After a little while Zio Silvio took a turn with his grape-crushing boots.  As they moved in and out of the barrel they were very careful not to let the boots touch any surface that would contaminate them. Although they made jokes about taking the place of barefoot young women, and invited us all to join them, they were in deadly earnest. If the grapes were not crushed, they would not ferment properly. When they finished our few grapes, they moved on to the much bigger tank at Zio Mario's house. It was large enough to hold both men, and the job was much more difficult. We soon tired of watching the uncles tromping around, and we left them to it. 

A few days later we could smell a strong pungent odor coming from our cantina, strong enough to mask the gamey smells of the barn. The grapes were in the first fermenting stage, a by-product of which was CO₂.  The door of the cantina had been propped open so that the gases could escape, and the sweet, musty smell of rotting grapes wafted around the courtyard and into our rooms.  The twins were too young to venture outdoors alone, but we told Paul and James not to go near the cantina because the gas was dangerous. We needn’t have worried. The strong smell kept them at bay. After about a week of the first chemical reaction, the mixture was then put through a special wooden barrel that strained out the stems, pits and skins, so the real fermenting could begin. Several months later, the wine would be transferred from the barrels into bottles and, shortly after that, we could expect to see it on our table. It was simple wine, so there was no point in aging it for too long. Paul and James raced eagerly to watch each step. It was exciting for all of us to see the process from vineyard to dining room.

George was grateful he wasn’t asked to participate in the grape stomping. He was already aching from exercising rarely-used muscles as he had bent and stretched and lifted while picking the grapes. He was thankful the vendemmia was over and grateful that the family only had one vineyard! George’s take on the grape picking was a reality check for me. I wanted to romanticize our experience on the farm. Even though the house we lived in was crumbling, the bathroom inadequate, and things that we previously had taken for granted were a struggle, I still clung to my romantic vision of our return to the land. I really, really wanted us to succeed. I wanted to reconnect with nature, to get in touch with my humanity. I wanted to be freed forever from the modern quicksand of cynicism and materialism. And I was determined to show my in-laws that their skepticism of my ability to assimilate into the culture around the farm was unfounded.   

The cantina door at right angles to our house

The cantina doorway with barrels for wine

One of the barrels inscribed with 1860

Moving to Italy: The Grape Harvest--Part 2

The story of our move to Italy starts with "Arrival" on the June 26, 2017 blog post.

 

On the first two days of the grape harvest, I joined the children downstairs as they watched their father, grandfather, and great-uncles come together for lunch after their morning's work. The children and I clustered at one end of the long table while the men washed their hands then sat down, talking and laughing in their guttural Piedmontese dialect. I couldn't understand a word of it. To me the dialect was as unlike Italian as Chinese would be, and the choppy up and down rhythm of the language lacked the lyrical quality of the Italian I was trying to learn. The almost two-year-old twins didn't care what the language was. They gabbled away in their own language, and everyone talked back to them. Paul and James were learning a fair amount of Italian in preschool, and they had picked up phrases of dialect from their daily interaction with Zio Remo and Zio Silvio, so they watched and listened and chatted also. They seemed to understand quite a bit of what went on. I smiled but sat silent, watching the men's faces, and trying to understand the emotions and the connections through their interactions. I could try to guess what they were saying by the context of the comments, but most of the meaning was lost in the space between us. When I was a child we had moved often, so I was used to lingering on the edges, waiting to see where I fit, but in Italy it was different. Because I couldn't understand the language, I could find no point of entry into their company. I realized once more that until I became fluent in Italian, or dialect, I would have to stay on the outside. After five months this was a bit frustrating.

The lunch was simple but hearty: a pot of beef with vegetables in a rich broth, tossed with pasta and served with rolls of crusty bread, fresh from the shop at the bottom of the hill. The meal was accompanied by two or three large bottles of red wine placed at intervals along the table with pitchers of water.  The men poured half a tumbler of wine then topped it with water.  As they ate, they gulped the wine-water mixture, just as workers in the States glugged sodas or beer. At our end of the table I sipped from a glass of plain water, but I noticed that the boys grabbed the jam jars that were their glasses and sloshed back their milk in a similar motion as the men.

Wine was an integral part of life on the farm. The uncles and George's father drank it daily, usually the strong red called Barbera. When we first arrived in Italy, I wanted to be one of the crowd, so I drank a half tumbler of red wine with my lunch too, but liquor of any kind has a big effect on me. I found that my head swam so much after lunch that I needed a long nap to sleep off the semi-drunken state I was in. That wasn’t good. The wine wiped me out for the rest of the day. After a few blurry afternoons, I learned to limit my wine to a small glass once in a while, and only with a full stomach! 

The final part of the meal was a mixed green salad with lettuce and tomatoes from my mother-in-law's garden, awash in oil and vinegar.  After lunch, the uncles returned to their own houses, and George came upstairs.  The custom was to nap for an hour before they all headed back down the hill to resume their work.  It seemed like a good idea to wait for the sun's intensity to fade, and I'm sure that they all needed a nap after their wine.

As I peered through the window in the late afternoons during that grape harvest, I saw my father-in-law walk to the vineyard with Paul and James. They got close enough to see dust and sweat as the men worked. They smelled the green of the stems and leaves as they were cut, felt the smooth skin of the plump grapes, and tasted the slightly bitter juice as their grandfather slipped one into their mouths. From between the rows of vines, they heard the laughter of their relatives as they called out to each other and to them. The fact that their father picked grapes alongside his uncles impressed them with the importance of this work. They were learning in a concrete way that food and drink came, not just from supermarkets, but from the labor of men and women like the people they knew. Seeing the men at work, or helping their grandmother weed her garden then plucking a tomato for lunch, taught them as my words never could. What I didn't expect was that their experiences around the vineyard and gardens would subtly shift their sensibilities, and that the effects could be seen as they grew to adulthood.