From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home

Part 2, “First Summer,” alternates between timelines to describe key events in Tembi and Saro’s marriage and Tembi’s first summer in Sicily after Saro’s death. The interrelated themes of love, loss, and grief feature prominently in this section. Love drives Tembi and Saro to expand their family and adopt a child after four unsuccessful years trying to conceive. Tembi’s description of meeting Zoela’s birth mother brims with love and gratitude, and she remembers:

I hugged her the way you hug someone you are thanking with your whole body. As though I’d known her my whole life. As though she knew all the secrets of caring for the child we both loved and by hugging she could pour those into me (128).

Similarly, it was both love and a desire to provide her child with a better life that prompted Zoela’s birth mother to put her up for adoption. During the first phone conversation with the birth mother, Tembi could “hear love and hope in her voice […] She was letting go of a child she loved and cared for so that that child could have a life she couldn’t give her” (127). Love also drove Tembi to fulfill Saro’s dying wish to have his ashes scattered in Sicily. The four-week trip was an expensive, bureaucratic nightmare, but Tembi persisted, pushing her misgivings side after landing in Sicily:

As we taxied to the jetway, for a brief moment I seriously contemplated collecting my bags and boarding a plane back to L.A. Because to continue moving ahead with Saro’s wishes […] would really mean that he was dead. Not just dead in L.A. but dead in Sicily, dead at his mother’s house, dead in the room where we had always slept, dead having morning coffee, dead at his mother’s table. It felt impossible to bear. Yet I pushed forward in the name of love (101).

This desire to flee even in the midst of executing her plans demonstrates the intensity of Tembi’s internal conflict and grief at losing Saro. Even before traveling to Sicily, she “woke up each morning in tears,” gutted by Saro’s absence before her “feet touched the ground” (100). In addition to the emotional stress, Saro’s death also took a physical toll on Tembi, for losing him also meant losing his food: “Along with his spirit and the comfort of Saro’s body, gone were his pastas and soups. I had dropped fifteen pounds while Saro was hospitalized” (100). This myriad of descriptions emphasizes the depths to which Tembi missed Saro—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—and emphasizes the narrative arc from fresh grief to nascent healing over the course of the work. Tembi longed “to make love to him […] see him. [She] longed for his voice, his smile. [She] craved his smell” (100); the parallel structure of Tembi’s expresses desires emphasizes her self as subject and Saro as the now unreachable object of her affection. At the cemetery in Sicily, Tembi is so overcome with grief that she feels disconnected from her own body and craves a substitute for the support that her husband could no longer provide: “I leaned against a cypress. I needed to be held up by something with deep roots […] My body was an awful, fearful, unstable place to be. So I floated above it” (117). In a similar act of dissociation from her unbearable new reality, Tembi copes with her grief by keeping busy with memorial arrangements and other logistics related to Saro’s death. Ultimately, however, it is being a mother that gets her through the dark moments: “I pushed through the days by sheer will, the primal pull of motherhood, and a sense that if I collapsed completely, I might never stand up again” (100).

The grief of others brings Tembi’s pain into sharper focus. Upon arriving in Aliminusa, Tembi is greeted by a row of widows she vividly describes as “a stoic brigade of aging women […] lined up on a bench along the stone sidewalk” (103). At Saro’s wake, women of all ages participate in the official lament, crying and wailing so loudly that “the intensity of the lament became almost trancelike, a callout to the losses of all times” (108), and utterly overwhelms Tembi to the point that she claims, “I wanted to fall over. I wanted to lie on the floor. I wanted to howl at the top of my lungs. I wanted to run mad through the street. My husband was dead” (108). Unlike Tembi, Croce deals with her grief primarily through prayer, dressing in widow’s garments, and quietly saying the rosary, urging Tembi not to cry so that she herself won’t break down and join her. Similarly, Zoela also deals with her grief in her own way, and in a sharp contrast to Tembi, who is obsessed with remembering Saro, Zoela wants to stop loving him in the childish hope that if she does not love Saro the pain of losing him will go away. Zoela’s naive wish to escape grief emphasizes her youth and illustrates how the intense pain of loss is expressed and experienced in individual ways.

In addition to the complex evolution of grief, the evolution of Tembi’s relationship with Saro’s family is also thoroughly explored. Initially, bias and patriarchy fueled Saro’s conflict with his parents and hindered their reconciliation. For example, Saro’s parents disapproved of cultural relationships between Sicilians and non-Sicilians. Further, Giuseppe believed that Saro was marrying down when he wed Tembi, and that having a Black American daughter-in-law brought ridicule on the family. In a similar display of stubbornness, Saro refused to mend his relationship with his parents after being disowned. He spent years without seeing them and only communicated with his sister through letters and phone calls, and it was ultimately Tembi who insisted on resolving the conflict. While Croce and Franca were eager to see Saro after years apart, Giuseppe refused to reconcile, a decision that profoundly impacted the entire family. As Tembi explains,

Family mores dictated that if his father refused to come, then his mother, as was custom in the Sicilian patriarchy, would not come. And if her parents didn’t come, Franca couldn’t come. Going outside that ancient code of conduct would have been seen as a sign of disrespect, an act of defiance (152).

In addition to the personal biases impacting Tembi and Saro’s relationship with his family, From Scratch also addresses systemic racism, describing the steps Tembi took to avoid being racially profiled when she flew to and from Italy: “I had learned to keep my American passport out and visible so that there would be no holdups or delays jeopardizing our connecting flights” (112).

Food plays a central role in Part 2, as it did in previous sections, and by juxtaposing kitchen-related memories of both Saro’s family and her own, Tembi deliberately uses food as an indication of human connection, implying that just as sharing food together can reforge broken bonds, even the most intangible of recollections can emphasize common themes across cultures and dissolve any sense of estrangement. For example, Tembi describes watching Croce cook in Sicily, which brings back memories of cooking with her grandmother after her parents’ divorce. Just like Croce, Tembi’s grandmother cooked both for physical and emotional sustenance, and Tembi explains, “She cooked out of necessity, but she also cooked in a way that seemed to me a form of self-soothing […] Her kitchen taught me that flavor can bring forth love and set aside anger, and that something sweet can mend a fence and soothe a heart” (138). These remembrances are strongly linked with Tembi’s observations of Croce moving through her kitchen like “a sturdy, silent ship navigating turbulent waters” (134), and it is this correlation between two disparate matriarchs that causes Tembi to call Croce’s food a “mystical sustenance” (146) that had the power to calm with its “comfort and consistency” (146).