My grandparents were born and raised in San Niccola da Crissa, a small town in the province of Vibo Valentia, Calabria. It’s a non-descript town burrowed into the side of a mountain. Seeing it in pictures always makes me think of a bird-nest perched upon a branch of a tree. There isn’t much in the way of amenities: there’s a café, a bakery, two or three restaurants, the municipal office. There’s a church, the piazza where people meet for a quick espresso, catch up on local gossip, or espy a baptism, marriage or funeral (sometimes all three on the same day).

Like my own family, most of the adults worked in the trades and farming. My great grandfather, my grandmother’s father, owned an olive orchard. They made olive oil, cheese and baked bread in the town’s communal oven. What they didn’t keep for themselves, they carried off to neighboring towns, traversing through thick bush, blistering soot, dry winds, meandering hills. When I asked my grandmother how they ever found their way before roads were paved, she told me, “We went where the donkeys took us!” They weren’t rich; they weren’t poor. They worked so that they could live, eat, survive. She had seven siblings, and each of them, regardless of age or gender, were expected to work and contribute for the good of the family.

As a child, there was little time for play, and even less time for school. The only toy my Nonna played with was a rolled-up sock; sometimes she tied a rope to a tree and jumped over it; the next day, she’d rolled under it. She told me that her father raised workers not children.

Calabria comes from the Greek, ‘fertile earth’. The italic tribe native to Calabria, the Bruttians, warmed to the Greeks when they first arrived in the 8th century. Greeks had spread throughout the region introducing the figs, olives and grapes that are staples of Calabrian cuisine today. After the Greeks, came the Romans. They plumaged the land and trade routes and set off a series of wars that the region would never recover from. The Greeks came back for a second round, followed by the Arabs French, Spanish and Austrians.

They fought over the land, and the right to impose high taxes. Centuries of petty-minded barony, fiscal control, coupled with an unusual spate of earthquakes, disease and famine, just about broke the Calabrian people. If they were going to survive, Calabrians realized that they could only depend on themselves. They started to create their own secret laws enforced by bandits and brigands — the precursor to the mafia. If the system wasn’t going to help the people of Calabria, they’d create their own system, and when the banditos couldn’t help them, they increasingly turned inward, to the family.

There was brief glimmer of hope for a united Italy with Garibaldi, but the idea of a stronger south was thwarted as the new monarchy, headed by King Vittorio Emanuele, continued to impose high taxes on the southern provinces. Calabrian’s saw their ruler as another form of foreign rule that continued to exploit them. While the north flourished and rose up, Calabria was kept down by fist and ordinance. They had had enough; it was time for them to leave.

You will not find San Niccola da Crissa on any Top-Ten Destination list. Today, there is less than 2, 000 people that inhabit the town. It’s a place people pass through on their way to somewhere else: to the lively markets of Serra San Bruno, or to the bustling shops of Vibo, or the beaches of Tropea. The town comes to life for a few weeks in the summer as the migrants return home to celebrate the summer festivals. They dance and sing, and eat and visit the cemetery, poring over the five or six names that appeared on the headstones: Mazza, Congiusti, Martino, Sgro Carnovale.

My grandparents came to Canada in 1954. My dad told me stories about travelling aboard the Saturnia. He remembered my grandmother being bed-ridden for the entire journey across the Atlantic. When they had arrived in Halifax, an immigration official asked to inspect their luggage; they found capicola and a brick of cheese. He reached for the contraband but was stopped by my grandmother, still weak and weary from the trip. She grabbed the food from the official, stormed out of the immigration shed and threw the capicola and cheese into the Atlantic Ocean. “If my family can’t eat my food, nobody is going to eat my food.” On the train to Toronto, they were given pieces of white bread that stuck to the roofs of their mouths.

Once settled, my grandmother took whatever job she could: she worked in candy and chocolate factories; she worked on farms in Holland Marsh. My grandfather worked with a shovel, laying huge concrete sewage pipes into the ground.

Within a year of being here, tragedy struck. Her second child, Vincenzo, died from Leukemia. She told me once that the one thing she’s never gotten over, was the day my Uncle Vince asked her for a slice of watermelon. She was too embarrassed to tell him that she didn’t have the dime to pay for it.

They eventually bought a house on the corner of Dundas and Coolmine. It was a corner house, with a backyard and alley that ran behind the house. While the men worked, socialized, drank and played cards, my Nonna took care of everything else. She, like most Italian women at the time, was the transition from the old world into the new. She took care of her sons’ schooling, bought my father his first accordion and paid for his lessons. Richard Gambino, in Blood of My Blood, points out that if Italian men are the at the head of the family, the women are at the center of it.

My grandparents opened a grocery store and named it after their youngest son, Mario. My Nonna liked the idea of being her own boss and not having to answer to anybody. She cursed, under her breath, at all the women in their fancy clothes and high-heel shoes. She vexed at my grandfather when he spelled garrbage instead of cabbage on the signboard. She didn’t like negotiating with customers, unless, of course, the terms were dictated by her; she always worried about being cheated out of something. One day, she chased my cousin and I around the house with a broom because we stole a chocolate bar from the store. We cowered under the kitchen table as she jabbed at us with the broom handle.

At night, she watched Spanish novellas on TV. I couldn’t understand a single word coming from the set, but I always laughed when my Nonna cursed at the screen, at the women, mostly, for being conniving, manipulative. She’d look at me with those hard eyes and say my name — she didn’t have to say anything else. She didn’t like her shows being interrupted by anything, or anyone. Eventually, they sold the house on Dundas and moved to North York. The house was big, the garden was even bigger. In the summertime, she’d send me to Yorkdale with $5 to buy Chinese food: Combo #1. She loved her chow mien.

And then, all of a sudden, it was as if my grandparents just got old — everything about them seemed to slow down. They stopped changing the months on the calendar; she asked me to help thread her sewing needles. She spent more time in front of the TV. I coulddn’t tell if my grandfather was sleeping or dead.

She still told her stories: she told me about seeing a wolf knocking at a neighbor’s door; she once saw a person walking on water. She told me that if I ever bend down to pick something up, to make sure that I never say ‘yes’ at the same time. I was confused. I asked her why. “Because every time you bend down to the ground, the devil asks for your soul.”

When she wasn’t in the garden, cleaning the house, baking bread, frying meats, making sauce or yelling at my grandfather, she was on the phone with her sisters, paesani or grandchildren. They called to ask: “Teresa, can you please check me out?” They’d describe their various illness and ailments to my Nonna. When they were finished, my grandmother would pray to herself, and rock gently; she’d often burp, belch like she was exorcising demons. The more she burped the sicker the person was. The diagnosis was always the same: ‘You have a really bad eye’.

There was a time when I almost resented my grandparents. I was young; they were old. They seemed stuck. They didn’t drive, travel or treat themselves to nice things. My Nonna always bought the cheapest cuts of meats; she picked fruits and vegetables from the discount section; her purse was for decoration more than function (it was always empty). It all felt so routine and unnecessary. They had come here for a better life, but didn’t allow themselves to participate, fully, within that life. I’d watch the commercials on TLN, and see an Italy, a culture, that looked nothing like my own. Just once, I would have loved for her to have ordered Combo #2.

I didn’t really understand where my family came from, until I started reading about places they didn’t come from. There is so much in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, that reminded me of the fantastic stories my grandmother used to tell me, stories infused with magic, tradition, poverty and violence. The story of Macondo is the story of San Niccola. There was Jose Saramago’s, Raised from the Ground.; Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath; the shorts stories and folktales of Italo Calvino. These stories taught me that there was nothing simple about my grandparents, nothing simple about the simple meals that they ate, the simple lives that they lived, the simple stories she told.

The moment that it all came together for me, the moment that connected me to my family in a way more than blood ever could, the moment that I understood who I was and where I came from, happened in San Niccola, in August 2009. I was standing in the middle of the piazza. A folk band was on stage performing a tarantella. I listened; I watched. I was captivated, enthralled, entranced. It felt like I was being hypnotized. I could hear nothing but the drumming and the wailing cries of the zampogna. There were people dancing in front of the stage, arms around one another, spinning, laughing, each face melding into another face- young, old, boy, girl- like an overexposed photo. I felt myself falling back into time, tilling the hard soil, collecting olives, baking bread, sharing wine, jumping over a sock, following a donkey.

When I asked my dad if there were any tender moments, if my Nonna was ever gentle with him, his brothers, his father, he said he couldn’t think of any. My eight-year-old son asked if my Nonna ever laughed. I don’t remember her laughing much, but she was tender in her own way. I saw it, and felt it, in the way that she peeled a pear for us; I saw it in the way she picked grapes off of the vine and passed the first bunch to me. I remember how she’d step outside and fill a cup with freshly fallen snow, mix it with espresso and sugar and serve it to us in tiny cups. I felt it when we were in San Niccola, living in her house, with no power, no water and no electricity. When the utilities were turned on after a week of living in the dark and washing up in the river behind the house, we jumped and dance and embraced one another; it was like she was a young woman all over again. When I was five, I remember her taking a sliver out of my finger and putting it in her mouth. She told me: “Your blood is my blood.”

When I told her that I was planning on writing a book about her, she started telling me more and more stories; in Italy, she told me things her own children didn’t know about. She told people that she was proud that her story was finally being told. I could see it in her eyes, hear it in her voice. Stories mattered to her. They rooted her to a place, a time. Stories can be shared; stories proved that you were alive. In some ways, stories were all she had.

One night, in San Niccola, she told me the following story:

“Let me tell you, I was working in the garden, when your grandfather’s sisters came up to the house. I never liked your grandfather’s sisters; they always thought they were better than everybody. When they saw me, they started pointing and laughing at me. Your grandfather just stood there; he didn’t do anything. I tried to get back to work, but one of them called me ‘dirty feet’. Anthony, let me tell you, all I could see was red. I stopped what I was doing, ran over to them and ‘boom’ I beat the shit out of them so bad, let me tell you”.

My grandmother, Maria Teresa Carnovale, died on Friday, April 24, 2020. She was 92 years old. It was the one fight she wasn’t strong enough to win. It wasn’t for a lack of trying, though. In the hospital, she gave the nurses a hard time; she kept pulling the I.V. from her arm (I imagine her ripping it from her arm with the same gusto that she ripped the weeds from the soil in her gardens). When people called her, she didn’t want to talk; she was tired of talking. Because of COVID, we weren’t allowed to visit. My dad told me that she had said that she didn’t want to die alone. She was afraid to die alone. She died, alone.

In the end, she didn’t have much. What she did have, she would have gone to the ends of the earth to protect. She had family, dignity and a gift for telling stories. She was the strongest woman I’ve ever known. She spent her life surrounded by men, and tradition, yet still found a way to be strong, vocal and to not suffer fools lightly. She was a daughter, a mother, grandmother, great grandmother, sister, friend, wife — and more than any of these, she was herself, her own person.

In some ways, I feel like I’ve been saying goodbye for some time. The truth is, our loved ones are gone before they’re gone — greying hair, bad eyes, crocked knees, pockmarked skin, the visits to doctors and specialists. Dinners at her house were few and far between. The house on Dundas is now an Italian restaurant. Because she couldn’t walk, her garden was reduced to a few pots of basil and cherry tomatoes. But she never tired of telling me stories, her stories. While she talked, I listened, took notes, and tried to understand who she was and what she was all about. While she told her story, she was also telling me mine: “Your blood is my blood.”

Because of COVID, she didn’t get the eulogy she deserved; she died without her story being told. I can only hope, in some way, that this story will suffice. I’m afraid of what she’ll do to me if it doesn’t.