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

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They left my three young brothers at home with Aubrey’s mom, the youngest of whom was barely a year old and whom I had met only twice. She launched her podcast, “Lifted,” which features dynamic women sharing their stories of what and who have lifted their lives. When I told my father during one of our weekly Sunday conversations from Florence that I was seeing a man, the mere mention of it when I was so far away from home, so young, set off his parenting alarm.

His parents, from the little he had told me, had been married his whole life and lived in the town where they were born. In the Sicilian countryside, she discovers the healing gifts of simple fresh food, the embrace of a close knit community, and timeless traditions and wisdom that light a path forward.

All along the way she reflects on her and Saro’s romance—an incredible love story that leaps off the pages. When those moments happened, when the grief was too big and it threatened to buckle the frame of the house, we'd often go to the back yard of our house and lie on the grass, put our bodies prostrate on the earth. Her Italian was choppy and spoken with a nagging stutter, so she had a habit of using her other default foreign language, Spanish, to get by. What it read as was a grieving, never ending, jilted story of a wife losing her husband (which I knew was a core part of the synopsis).

His parents could hardly accept him marrying someone from outside of Sicily, let alone a black woman from Texas, and refused to attend their wedding.

In this sweeping story, we see Tembi and Saro’s initial introduction on the streets of Florence, Italy, their move to Los Angeles as they forge a life together despite disapproval from Saro’s traditional Sicilian parents, and the rare illness that upends everything they thought they knew about family and forgiveness. It is a strange story showing, mother, child and mother-in-laws way of coming to terms with grief, but it is beautiful and maybe a learning lesson for those of us who haven't yet been in such a situation.

Not only is it set largely in Sicily, but it ticks a lot of boxes in terms of my reading interests: food, travel, bereavement, and the challenges of being an American overseas.

Where once Tembi was estranged from Saro’s family and his origins, now she finds solace and nourishment—literally and spiritually—at her mother in law’s table. Her talk, What Forty Steps Taught Me About Love and Grief , traces her journey as a cancer caregiver. Blinking snow from my eyes, wondering what on earth could have happened, I pedaled my way back across the Arno to my apartment.

Behind me the cast relief figures from the Old Testament appeared all the more stoic and timeless as the snow grazed their frozen forms.

And I think one of the things that I learned is life is still happening all around us and for us, we’d always wanted to be parents.