I DREAM OF MY GRANDMOTHER AND GREAT-GRANDMOTHER by Maria Mazziotti Gillan
I imagine them walking down rocky paths toward me, strong, Italian women returning at dusk from fields where they worked all day on farms built like steps up the sides of steep mountains, graceful women carrying water in terra cotta jugs on their heads. What I know of these women, whom I never met, I know from my mother, a few pictures of my grandmother, standing at the doorway of the fieldstone house in Santo Mauro, the stories my mother told of them, but I know them most of all from watching my mother, her strong arms lifting sheets out of the cold water in the wringer washer, or from the way she stepped back, wiping her hands on her homemade floursack apron, and admired her jars of canned peaches that glowed like amber in the dim cellar light. I see those women in my mother as she worked, grinning and happy, in her garden that spilled its bounty into her arms. She gave away baskets of peppers, lettuce, eggplant, gave away bowls of pasts, meatballs, zeppoli, loaves of homemade bread. "It was a miracle," she said. "The more I gave away, the more I had to give." Now I see her in my daughter, the same unending energy, that quick mind, that hand, open and extended to the world. When I watch my daughter clean the kitchen counter, watch her turn, laughing, I remember my mother as she lay dying, how she said of my daughter, "that Jennifer, she's all the treasure you'll ever need." I turn now, as my daughter turns, and see my mother walking toward us down crooked mountain paths, behind her, all those women dressed in black