The Preparation

The house in southern Italy, carved into the mountains where she and I lived together that summer after I finished school. The house of heat and spiral staircases and a flow of footsteps through the doorway all day long. The house of plates of stone fruit after a midday meal. The house of tiny spoons clanking on glasses. The sleepless house of glowing tiles on the nights of the full moon. These are the hours I would write until the sun came up. I’d write until my grandmother came down those winding stairs already asking, “What shall I make us for lunch?” 

Our nonna, who held each of us and our mothers in her womb. Here she is making pasta in the storefront she worked at when she first came to New York in the sixties. A shop that was only a few blocks away from my very last Manhattan apartment. I wonder if she looked out the window and saw the little girls in tights walking to ballet class. Did she stare at the friends and lovers embracing on the street corners? Did she see the same young woman walking home each night after work? Did she know that all of these people would one day be me?

And the shoemaker, my grandfather, did he know that the shoes he made as young man—pointe shoes—would be the shoes I lived in? Did he somehow feel that his first born daughter’s first born daughter would dedicate herself to the beauty and pain they inspired? 

And so you see, you are chosen by the ones you love, by the places you live, by the things that you become. Before you take shape as this flesh and blood, the idea of you and all you will do is held so strongly. It is as if everything has prepared itself for you to be who you are.