Grandpa knew dirt. The son of feudal farmers, he was born into it and was one with it. He knew its language and listened to what it asked for. He didn’t have words like carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, but he could tell if the soil was healthy from its scent or how it felt in his hands. As a little girl I watched Grandpa in his garden gently turning the dirt so that it would loosen and breathe and graciously accept the seeds he left in its care. Grandpa knew when it was thirsty and the best time to let it drink, always before the sun or after the sun. It was a living thing to be fed and nurtured.
The knowledge of the soil, passed from my Grandpa’s father and his father before him and so on down the ancestral line where their lives and wisdom stretched out into the horizon... like the hills beyond hills of Grandpa’s beloved Sicily. A knowledge of dirt was a matter of eating or not eating. From childhood, grandpa toiled under the heavy hand of the Sicilian sun. Land owned, not by his family, but by a baron. All they could keep was a third of their crop, the rest went to the baron. Barely enough to survive. When Grandpa’s father died, there was one less pair of hands to work the land. Reluctantly and sadly, Grandpa, the only son, left all that he ever knew, setting out for America to find a way to provide for his mother and sisters. He was eighteen.
Grandpa carried his knowledge of the land over the hills of Sicily and across the ocean to New York. Even in the concrete city, he grew vegetables and herbs on fire escapes and on tarred roof tops of the tenements he lived in. He married the young woman he knew from his village in Sicily and they eventually settled in a small house in Brooklyn bought with years of their earnings in the factories and on the docks. When he saw the fallow dirt of the backyard he knew the blessings it held. It was there that he patiently created the garden that fills the memories of my childhood.
He rose while the sun still slept, tending his garden before heading out for a long day’s labor. In the evening he would walk along its paths, the dirt fanning out in moist rows of blackness, giving back with tufts of green that were to be our food. “Don’t step on the plants!” A childhood refrain that echoes still, called out by adults as we went to fetch a stray Spaldine that bounced its way into the tomato plants, or to pick fat juicy figs that we could reach with our little hands.
Some days we would hear the old sad horse with the funny straw hat clopping down our street pulling the wooden cart of the junkman who came for our castaways. His cart filled with old claw-foot tubs, corroded metal, furniture. His white straggly hair sticking out from under his woolen cap, he sat, bent over, holding the reins. An apparition amongst the Buicks, Dodges and Chevys of the fifties, that lined the streets of my childhood. We kids would run from the garden, to catch a vanishing glimpse of another time and place. Grandpa would follow with a shovel, hoping the old horse would leave a gift of nature’s fertilizer.
Grandpa scooped the dirt up in his hands, rubbed it between his palms, let it slip through his fingers, the dirt clinging under his nails and in the crevices of his leathery skin. He could feel what it needed. Grandpa took vegetable scraps from our meals and dug them into the garden, little hidden offerings for his dirt, not unlike the offerings we gave to the Madonna at our church.
When the dirt was ready and open to receiving, he planted peach, cherry and fig trees, he planted grape vines and built them a pergola to climb and wrap themselves around as they worked their way to the sun. The pergola, strong enough to hold the grapes as they grew from green to deep purple and became round and fat and juicy, hanging in voluptuous clusters, giving us fruit and wine and blessed shade to sit under on long summer days. The dirt gave back with luscious tomatoes that we ate off the vine, biting into them like apples. Their deep red juice dripping down my chin and arms, staining my shirt and upsetting my mother. Cucumbers, string beans, peppers, basil, parsley, mint, and long fat fingers of deep green zucchini showing off their yellow bonnets under the summer sun.
The zucchini, cooked in olive oil, green and thick and smelling like fresh spring flowers. Onions, garlic, chopped tomatoes, parsley and basil, reunited garden neighbors, sat like a crown atop a large bowl of yellow spaghetti. The zucchini flowers, battered and fried, a gentle sprinkle of salt and lemon juice — the food of peasants, yet fit for the long ago Baron.
We sat beneath the luscious grapes, a table set under their shade. We raised our glasses of red wine, the children’s wine thinned with water, we gave thanks to God and shouted “Abbondanza.” Abundance.
Bread and conversation passed around, filling our plates and our memories, our feet firmly on the cool black dirt, away from the hardness and heat of the city streets.
Grandpa died much too young, made ill by toxins inhaled at his job, sent home to die without compensation or thought. As he slowly withered away, so did his garden, and then they were both gone. I was left with the memories of the grapes and the tomatoes and the fat figs that we ate until our stomachs ached, the family gatherings and Grandpa in his garden.
I write this as I sit in my garden, under the pergola, built from childhood memories, a place for my family to gather under its leafy shade. My garden full of lush green plants tumbling into one another and about to burst forth. Grandpa everywhere.
I know he is there when my hands are in the dirt because he whispers in my ear.