In wondering what was happening to George and Zio Silvio, I
began to think about food. I checked my stock and found we still had half a jar
of the peanut butter my sister had sent, but only two remaining rolls of
chewable bread. We had three hard-as-nails rolls that we could use in soup, but
just a small hunk of beef to make it, and one onion. We had two packages of
pasta and three jars of pears that I had canned in the fall. The vegetable garden
was in its winter doldrums, having been under snow just a few weeks before, so
we couldn’t go there. Allowing our supplies to get so low was foolish. With my
in-laws there were seven of us left in the house. If George and Zio Silvio
didn’t get through, or if they couldn’t get back, we had only enough food to
last a couple of days.
What to do? In my nervous pacing I pictured myself leaving
the twins with my mother-in-law, hiking with the boys through the rain up the
hill to Bertola and knocking on the door of one of the villagers there. I had only
nodded to them and didn’t know their names, but surely they wouldn’t refuse to
help us. I pulled out my Italian grammar book and practiced saying “My children
are hungry, do you have any food?”
When I look back at this time I can’t help smiling at how
melodramatic this sounds. I was, and am, a relatively private
person so to knock on the door to beg would be opening myself up to relative
strangers, surrendering my dignity and self-respect. But to give credit to my 25 year-old self, I wasn’t
content to sit back and wait to be rescued. I would have done
whatever it took for my children.
Those morbid thoughts just made me more anxious, so I put
away the grammar book, and started a load of laundry. After that I settled the twins with Lego while I tried to teach Paul
and James the alphabet, then wrote a long letter to my sister describing our predicament.
All the while my thoughts were with George and Zio Silvio. Too tense to pray
formally, I just kept thinking, “Please God, let them be safe.”
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| View from the balcony on a foggy day. |
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