It’s always fascinating to see how other people live. We enjoy touring homes – new and old – that tell a story about the owner(s). We often see how other people live through the food they eat. Sometimes we congratulate ourselves on returning to a seasonal diet and knowing where our food comes from. This passage from the excellent book The Lady in the Palazzo by Marlena de Blasi reminded us how our friends in Italy live and that food is life!
One morning I arrive at her table as Tomassina is taking cherries, fat as walnut and chastely pink, from a pasta strainer and placing them on a small, unpolished silver tray. I ask her to choose a melon for me - for my lunch - from the small pyramid of them built up next to a newspaper cone full of dusty blue plums, which she'd laid down like a cornucopia. She dismantles the pyramid, pulling and pinching at the stem end of each melon, shaking her head, gazing at me once in a while, hopelessness rising. When she has inspected all of the navels of all the melons she looks at me, a surgeon with tragic news.
"I have nothing that will be ripe enough for one o'clock." Holding up one in the palm of her hand, she says, "Perhaps this one will be ready by eight this evening. Surely it will be ready by midnight. But nothing will be ready for lunch."
Speechless in the light of her specificity, I simply nod toward the melon still resting in her palm. Tenderly she wraps it in brown paper and then in a sheet of newspaper, pleating the ends in intricate origami folks, making a cushion for the melon. She comes around to the front of the table then, opens my sack, places the melon in it. She looks up at me, then, "Wait until midnight if you can."
I need this woman in my life. I need to learn more about melons and much more about timing and patience and what matters and what doesn't matter at all. I have a midnight melon in my bag, its flesh ripening as I walk in the Umbrian sun, as I make my way past the dark, crackling veneer of a suckling pig laid on a pallet of herbs in the back of a whiny white van, past the man from Attigliano who's roasting chickens over an oak-fired grill on the bed of a pickup. And all the while I'm trying to remember what Gaspare had said. Our earth is rich so we don't have to be. And what Tomassina said to me as she laid the melon in my sack. The less there is, the more important all of it becomes. Yes, that was what she said.
