” Look at my hand. It’s big as yours!”
I stop stirring batter and wipe the sticky residue on a kitchen towel. My fingers and palm press against my grandson’s. He stretches his hand to its full expanse, flashing new Chiclets that recently replaced baby teeth. That adorable smile melts my heart and will surely break a few in future admirers.
“Almost, Nick.”
This Saturday morning ritual is one of my greatest blessings. My grandkids love making waffles the old-fashioned way. Egg shells litter the slate top table, residue of the sticky whites painting maps on its surface. Flour blankets the kitchen chairs and streaks their hair…blond and curly, short blond bob, long blond and straight. Three tow-heads with Italian features–the best of multi-cultural genetics.
“Grandmas make waffles on that machine and Mamas make them in the box!” Nick, my handsome aspiring actor, dramatically announces. The two sisters dismiss his comment with condescending smirks reserved for the youngest cousin.
“See if my hand is biggest!” Evie shouts through rosy cheeks glowing like a Christmas angel. Her beautiful azure eyes twinkle with excitement, the same brilliant hue of her father’s. My son’s “Mini-Me” grabs my hand and compares it to her own. These five fingers are the fairest of my darlings, the color of milk dripping down her wrist. I smile at that cherubic face adorned with a dot of batter matching the sprinkling of freckles across her nose.
“Almost, but not yet.” Grandma the Mentor continues, “In two more years, when you turn ten, you will pass me just like Willow.”
With this prompt my eldest pushes her way past the junior grands. She is tall and slender, the antithesis of my family body type. But her creamy olive skin announces her lineage as an Italiana. Willow reminds me of my daughter at this pre-pubescent age, budding features that will flower into striking beauty in her teens.
She grabs my hand with the final measurement, proclaiming with omnipotence. ” I win! My hand is even bigger than Mema Lucy’s!”
Another kitchen table many years ago when I was also a child of eight…
I inhale the pungent fragrance of meatballs frying in olive oil and tomato sauce bubbling on the old GE range. Squeezing in between the two ladies, their scents fill my nostrils. Nonna in her flowered house dress perfumed by Johnson’s Baby Powder. Mama in her wrap-around apron with a bouquet of Pond’s Cold Cream, her secret for preventing any hint of wrinkles even into her nineties.
A cloud of flour encircles their heads interfacing with silver hairs earned over a combined fourteen decades. Dough is pounded, kneaded and rolled in syncopation with conversation. Words flow from two mouths like waves on the Mediterranean Sea of their homeland.
My understanding of the Neapolitan dialect is limited, and I cannot speak the mother tongue at all. I interrupt in English, slurred with a Southern drawl. “Yeah pizza! Can I help y’all?”
“No pizza. We maka the gnocci,” Mama corrects never looking up from the red table top criss-crossed with fat white strips of dough.
I shout louder to grab the attention of the pasta makers totally absorbed in their task. “I wanna make yucky too!”
My request briefly halts the cooks as they burst into raucous laughter.”Not yucky…itsa gnocci!” Mama giggles. “Pasta mada from the potato dough. Watcha first, then you do.”
White snakes slither across the table, diminishing into ever thinner and thinner offspring. I watch the mechanized movements of four hands, machine-like in their speed and precision. The faster they go, the more I bounce up and down with impatient anticipation.
“Me now! Let me try,” I insist and halt their concentration.
Two heads pop up at the same time, identical stern looks of exasperation. “Dio mio!” from the grandmother follows “Madonna!” from my mother. With this invocation of higher powers, I freeze in my tracks. Mama’s favorite proverb rings first in my head, then bounces off the kitchen walls. “Children shoulda be seen and no heard!”
Marble-size pieces of dough cover the entire surface of the red kitchen table, centerpiece of our family gatherings. More flour is sprinkled, a light snow showering miniature snow balls. I stare as twenty fingers magically transform white round rocks into beautiful sea shells. After an eternity, I finally get the invitation.
“Bella mia, Rolla lika this.”
Nonna shows me how to form one gnocci at a time on the back of a fork. She smiles her toothless grin at my valiant attempt. I place my floured hand next to hers, measuring it for size.
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Living my personal mission statement, “Each One, Teach One,” my greatest blessing is being the mother of two, grandmother of three and a lifelong educator. A graduate of UF and UNF, I am the former principal of St. Paul’s Catholic School in Jacksonville Beach, Florida and executive director of Tree Hill Nature Center in Jacksonville.
Since retirement my avocation is now my vocation – freelance writing. The technical writing of past professional life evolved into more creative genres of poetry, short fiction and memoir. My goal is to invoke the entire spectrum of human emotions in my reader: longing to laughter, pain to promise, despair to discernment.
2 Responses
Love Lucy’s writings, a forever friend and her laughter binds us. Talented in so many ways. Keep those life stories coming!
Thanks so much Deb, for your kind words!!!
Lucy