Roots in my mom's garden.

I am strongly influenced by my mom's garden. She and my dad bought land and built a house on a plot that was originally the "back" yard of the oldest house on their street. There was a grape arbor there I remember well- with grapes full of flavor but puckery and with a large seed. I vaguely recall that the rest of the yard was a maze of tracks between bushes, worn by the play of neighborhood kids. The neighbor in back, of one of many Italian families, Mr. DePasquale, had just installed a tall chain link fence, probably to protect his garden from their careless feet. My mom bravely stood her ground in front of the builder's dump truck,
refusing to let them take the top soil.

The energy my parents put in to creating the garden was impressive. They created a curved retaining wall using concrete test cylinders obtained for free from a company in Auburndale. I remember the trunk of the car being filled with these over the course of many trips taken on Saturdays and after supper. Gradually the wall took shape; and over the years mom has enriched the soil and tended the plants with care. Here is what it looks like today, slightly bowing outwards:

The first years of the garden featured tomatoes - for which my parents have a passion. Mr. DePasquale figured large in this story, giving mom advice from his store of wisdom, in part brought from his native Italy. Everything he grew was staggeringly tasty. Mrs. DePasquale was equally adept within her realm, and shared her culinary skills with my mother freely. Her system of measurement was comprised of demonstrations, such as using the index finger of one hand to make a small circle on the palm of the other to show how much salt, and saying,"When i's a like this (gesturing)." when asked how to tell when something is done. They all much regretted the fence over which nevertheless passed a stream of vegetable and gifts, through which hours of talk transpired, and which had to be gone around when visiting - but apparently it was even more trouble to remove it, so it stayed.

The gifts...it was the food that connected people and was put into service as gifts. Wether it was something freshly picked or a finished dish, brought steaming from their kitchens, often without prior notice, to be presented when we answered the doorbell, food mapped the breadth of neighborly relations. This Italian neighborhood where I was raised was crisscrossed with food, patiently grown, or carried on the bus from the North End's markets, generously shared, and laboriously prepared. Cooking formed the compass by which most other topics were reckoned. It was something to do together, something worth doing, and so much a part of community identity and tradition that it did not appear to be as extraordinary as it actually was. Until it is gone, a tradition, like the shade of an ancient tree, seems secure; and yet how fragile it is, how easily broken are the oral and manual traditions of cooking, as easily lost as the songs sung and stories told no one thought to write down.

How many times have I wished I had written down a recipe or at least remember the name of it so I might be lucky enough to track it down! There were some cookies Mrs. Giordano made - like those cut with a zig zag pasta wheel*and fried (yes, fried!) and tossed with confectionary sugar -  that were a taste of heaven. But my memory fails me, I was a mere visitor into that world of tradition and not all the seeds planted have grown. I have since learned to put some of what I experienced into perspective - things do mostly make sense when looked at from the right angle or distance. For instance, about these cookies: a course in nutritional anthropology at Tufts opened my eyes to the fact that Italian communities use cookies extensively as a cultural marker. For example, at a funeral, each woman contributes her own unique cookie, usually passed on from her mothers' mothers' mother, to a tableaux of other cookies, the size of which marks the standing of the deceased in the community. I suppose I might be known for cinnamon rolls, but that is another story.

*be sure to watch the pasta slide show at this NY Times link