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.