For what feels like multiple lifetimes, I’ve sat at tables like this one in the kitchen of my father’s parents. It’s ring-marked by coffee cups. Crumb trails stretch between cookie plates. Nonno sits like a sentinel at the table’s head while Nonna prepares espresso. Until others arrive, we’ll clink and chatter together. Estranged ones stare at us, pinned crooked on the refrigerator by magnets and oiled by fingerprints. Ceramic figurines passed down from mother to daughter then sister study the wallpaper. At a new institution and city, I don’t visit as often as I should.
Even so, I’m a proud cultural mutt, rooted in my grandparents’ histories. If these roots could speak, I would tease tales from their radicles. So, during each visit, I try to catch the murmurs of the Adriatic seaboard, where my agrarian progenitors spent their lives listening for tremors from Vesuvius with their hands buried in the earth. When I next visit my maternal chants of the Saarslased, kin who settled around an ancient comet’s crater once it filled with rainwater. Or, I’ll heed post-revolution whispers haunting Buda monuments and Pest castles, listening for another deluge on the Danube. A genetic convergence from three corners of a continent, my lineage survives into modernity, modeling a willing adaptability toward contemporary innovations and alienations.
Today, I’m celebrating a grandparent’s birthday, a gathering defined by the family unit, hyperbolized food portions, and fierce feuds indicating a deeply entrenched yet complex dialogic of love. During the meal, surrounded by cousins and wine and Parmesan, I think of earthquakes and comets and revolutions: the unexpected outcomes of unanticipated trends that brought us together. The previous generations faced experiences formerly strange and unfamiliar to them. Their narratives of adaptability I inherit. They overlap like floodwaters.
After dessert, I follow Nonna to the kitchen with dirty plates in each hand. I wonder if she counts her regrets with the soaped espresso spoons in the sink: leaving home, never finishing grade school, drinking vinegar to lose weight.
Steam fogs her glasses. I remind myself that the same water of the St. Lawrence seaway that carried my clan westward condenses as dew and slicks sun-baked olive buds in Abruzzo, just as readily as the seaway, eventually, reaches between the islets of Saaremaa or laps at the Danube’s bends. We’re spreading all the time, city to city, name to name, tale to tale.
I reach across the counter to wipe soap suds from her sun-spotted hand and ask, “What are you thinking?”
Maybe that’s been my role all along: observe and accumulate. I’ve emerged as the family archivist, tracing modern kinship through our narrative affinities, linking generations through retellings. Vacancy blurs her focus, then a glimmer of recollection surfaces in dimming eyes. I watch her reminisce.
She leans over the countertop, grins, and says, “Do you want to hear a story about your father?”
Originally published in White Wall Review 42: Special Issue (2019)