48 pages • 1 hour read
From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home
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Part 3, Chapters 10-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Second Summer”
Part 3, Chapter 10 Summary: “Heirlooms”
Chapter 10 centers on the first anniversary of Saro’s death. Tembi has returned to auditioning but continues to struggle with her grief, while Zoela, now eight, still asks why her father died. Tembi describes the preceding year as a series of grief-stricken Wednesdays, which she mistakenly believed would get easier over time. She still struggles to get out of bed, and Zoela regularly asks who will take care of her if Tembi dies. After her audition, Tembi finds solace in her garden, where the fava beans that Saro originally planted are now growing. She picks the heirloom beans and makes Saro’s favorite spring dish, purea di fave con crostini, for the friends and relatives coming to mark the anniversary of his death. The aim of the gathering is to celebrate Saro’s life and to revive the tradition of welcoming friends into their home. Tembi calls Croce for advice about the fava bean recipe, using the word ‘commemorate’ rather than ‘celebrate’ to describe the gathering. She promises to visit Sicily over the summer, then continues preparing for the gathering. Two days later, she and Zoela light candles in the room where Saro died, play his favorite music, and invite friends to leave messages for Saro. Tembi feels Saro’s presence as friends and relatives share their memories of him.
Part 3, Chapter 11 Summary: “At the Table”
Chapter 11 focuses on the months following Saro’s cancer diagnosis. During a debilitating round of chemotherapy, Saro urged Tembi to take a lover, and only days later, a friend told Tembi she should consider leaving Saro, but Tembi immediately rejected both ideas. After more chemotherapy, three hospitalizations, and knee-replacement surgery, Saro finally told his parents about his illness, announcing that he was cancer-free. The next day, Franca informed Saro that their parents were coming to LA for a month-long stay. Tembi was apprehensive about hosting her in-laws, but Saro insisted on letting them come. The impending visit caused tension between Tembi and Saro. Saro’s parents arrived two weeks later, deeply concerned for their son but also proud of the home he and Tembi had created. To Tembi’s shock and Saro’s delight, Croce and Giuseppe brought suitcases of food from Sicily. Exhaustion and irritability set in as Tembi ceded her kitchen to Croce and shepherded Giuseppe around LA in search of good bread. Eight days after they arrived, the family flew to Houston to celebrate Christmas with Tembi’s relatives. Over Southern food, Tembi and Saro’s families finally became one.
Part 3, Chapter 12 Summary: “Ricotta”
Chapter 3 describes Tembi and Zoela’s second summer in Sicily after Saro’s death. Croce greets them with open arms as local women surround their car. Within an hour, the three are at the table enjoying their first meal. Tired from the long trip, Zoela leaves the table to watch TV in the living room, where she notices there are no pictures of her parents’ wedding. Tembi delays telling Zoela about the family rift and reminisces about the last time Zoela saw Giuseppe. Sick with cancer, Giuseppe was too weak to go for walks with the then-four-year-old Zoela, so instead, she sat on his lap and tickled his face and neck. Giuseppe died shortly after that visit. Keen to engage Zoela, Tembi arranges for her to spend time with a friend while she visits a local cheesemaker. Two days later, Tembi brings Zoela back to the cheese shop to learn how to make ricotta. Tembi thinks of Saro as she watches Zoela stir and strain the cheese curds, confident that he would have enjoyed teaching his daughter this skill.
Part 3, Chapter 13 Summary: “The Priest”
Chapter 13 opens with a disagreement. Zoela wants to watch Don Matteo, an Italian telenovela featuring a handsome priest, but Tembi insists they turn on Tempesta d’Amore, Croce’s favorite soap opera. During a commercial break, Croce tells Tembi that Aliminusa’s new interim priest is African. Eager to meet another person of color, Tembi brings Zoela to church after Mass. The priest tells Tembi he is from Burundi and blesses Zoela before she skips off to play with her friends. Tembi spends the rest of the day walking the hills outside town, retracing a route she took with Saro. Struck by the beauty of the place, Tembi feels her grief loosen its grip and returns home to find Croce ironing. Croce shows Tembi the clothes in which she wishes to be buried, marking the start of a new openness between them.
Part 3, Chapter 14 Summary: “Hera and the Sapphire Sea”
Chapter 14 focuses on Tembi and Zoela’s road trip to the ancient Temple of Hera in Agrigento with Franca and her husband. Zoela complains about the heat while visiting the ruins, prompting Tembi to recount the story of the winged Icarus falling to the ground after flying too close to the sun. Tembi is both exalted and somber as she tours the sites. She feels cheated of Saro’s love and companionship, and jealous of all the couples around her, including Franca and her husband. Tembi realizes that she had three different marriages: the one when she and Saro were newly in love, the one marked by cancer, and the one she had now as Saro’s widow. A decade of caring for Saro had changed Tembi. Gone were her effervescence, her sense of her sexuality, and her optimism. A few days after the trip to Agrigento, Tembi and Zoela drive by the hotel in Cefalù where she and Saro stayed during her first visit to Sicily. At the beach, Tembi tells Zoela that she is spectacular and that Saro would be proud of her. Zoela smiles in response, then asks why there are no Brown people in Aliminusa. Tembi explains that Black and Brown people did not originate in Europe but were transported to various parts of the world by sea as enslaved people. When Zoela wishes she weren’t the only Brown girl in the town, Tembi reminds her that part of the joy of traveling is meeting different kinds of people. The next morning, Croce reveals that she plans to transfer ownership of her house to Tembi and Zoela.
Part 3, Chapter 15 Summary: “Terra Vostra”
Chapter 15 describes the legal process of transferring ownership of Croce’s house to Tembi and Zoela. Franca navigates the bureaucracy alongside her husband, a move that touches Tembi but also makes her feel guilty. Tembi wonders if the house is a belated wedding gift from Croce, or merely a way to keep the house in the family without burdening Franca with additional property taxes. She also wonders if she will keep the house and continue to visit Aliminusa after Zoela is grown. As a descendant of enslaved people, land ownership is meaningful to Tembi. Her grandmother once owned hundreds of acres of land in rural Texas, much of which was illegally seized by a white landowner. Watching her grandmother struggle to reclaim her land was a bitter pill to swallow, and as Tembi signs the transfer papers for Croce’s house, she realizes that legally, Saro has been reduced to a handful of dry facts: just a name, place, date of birth, marriage status, and death. The sudden realization makes Tembi cry, but she finds comfort in the smell of Croce making caponata.
Part 3, Chapters 10-15 Analysis
Part 3, “Second Summer,” further intensifies the interwoven themes of love, loss, grief, and food. The section opens with Tembi measuring Saro’s absence in the number of Wednesdays since his death and recounting the various emotional flavors of them, depending on her mood. She states:
I had seen Wednesdays when I couldn’t get out of bed and Wednesday when I couldn’t fall asleep, so weary and bereft I had asked other people to drive my daughter to school, pick up groceries at the store, stand at my dining room table and help me fold clothes (187).
Still wrought with grief as the one-year anniversary of Saro’s death approaches, Tembi busies herself by making Saro’s favorite spring dish, purea di fave con crostini, for a gathering to celebrate Saro’s life. Despite her ongoing grief, Tembi cherishes the people at the gathering, grateful for her main source of support as she navigates life as a widowed single parent and championing their “fundamental willingness to walk beside [her] in the most uncertain and painful of times” (192). For Tembi, the gathering recalls the times when she and Saro opened their home to friends for “convivial connection and seriously good food” (192).
Tembi and Saro’s love remained strong throughout his illness, but their relationship was not without conflict, and Tembi does not shy away from describing the lowest point in their marriage, when, weakened by a particularly challenging round of chemotherapy, Saro suggested that Tembi take a lover, telling her after months without sex, “You have needs, and I can’t meet them” (197). Saro’s words shocked Tembi, who immediately refused: “No, absolutely not. No, Saro. I love you and only you […] I will not take a lover” (197). Tembi becomes even more committed to Saro after a friend reminds her that she doesn’t have to stay in the marriage, saying:
I realized for the first time that what we were up against would require me to show up for Saro in a way I had not ever had to […] it was my turn to be the kind of person who could stand in the rain for hours, steadfast and open, ready and available to this man, come what may” (198).
While love fueled Tembi during Saro’s illness, it is the fatal implications of the cancer diagnosis that mends the rift with Saro’s parents. Croce and Giuseppe visit LA for the first time only after learning that their son is sick, and Tembi comically describes their arrival, laden with suitcases full of Sicilian produce such as “eggplant, winter cardoons […] braided garlic, and artichoke bulbs for planting followed by bottles of tomato sauce, a two-gallon tin of olive oil, jars of marinated artichoke hearts, [and] a small wheel of cheese” (203). However, a week of shepherding Giuseppe around LA in search of an acceptable loaf of bread causes Tembi’s patience to run short, and she insists on flying to Houston to spend the holidays with her own family. Despite such frustrations, the occasion not only allows Tembi to introduce Saro’s parents to her culture, but it also gives them a glimpse into the life that she and Saro have built in the US. Even with the dual difficulties of language and culture barriers, it is clear to Croce that Saro is loved and accepted by Tembi’s family, a development that takes her by surprise: “I had no idea my son had all this, this life, so much love here” (208). In addition to drawing Tembi and Saro closer to his parents, Saro’s illness merges the two families for the first time, something “that had not happened for [them] at [the] wedding. It had taken a rare cancer to bring these two very different families together” (208).
The theme of cultural differences also comes to the fore in Part 3. For example, unfamiliar dining conventions bewilder Croce at the holiday barbeque in Houston, causing her to announce, “I don’t understand why Americans pile so much food onto one plate” (207). To this observation, Tembi proudly replies, “I don’t know if all Americans do, but Texans do” (207). Cultural dissonance is equally palpable in LA when Tembi runs errands with Giuseppe, and she describes his silent astonishment by observing that “on trips to Home Depot, he walked the aisles, marveling at all the choices, American surplus on display. He wanted me to translate everything from drills to drains to screen doors” (204). Even after Saro’s death, Tembi remains sensitive to the cultural differences between her and her in-laws. For instance, she calls the gathering marking the one-year anniversary of Saro’s passing a commemoration rather than a celebration for fear of offending Croce, whose grieving practices center on prayer and Mass. Similarly, during their second summer in Sicily, Tembi and Zoela have cause to be keenly aware of their racial and cultural otherness, and amongst a culturally diverse crowd in Agrigento, Zoela asks Tembi why there are no Brown people in Aliminusa. This innocent query leads to an age-appropriate conversation about immigration and transatlantic slavery. Unsatisfied, Zoela exclaims, “I don’t want to be the only brown girl” (243), and Tembi’s direct acknowledgment of multicultural differences and historical injustices highlights her commitment to raising her daughter to be both respectful of other cultures and aware of the inequalities that exist in an imperfect world. The newly appointed interim priest in Aliminusa, a man of sub-Saharan African origin, not only brings some diversity to the town, but also stirs feelings of pride in Tembi, and she muses, “Here was a fellow person of color. Here was a man acting as the spiritual leader of a town of people so culturally foreign to him. He was doing it in Italian, bridging language, geography, nationality, and race” (227).
Despite her “otherness,” Tembi gradually embraces Aliminusa as her home, and Saro’s relatives nurture this feeling, especially Croce. The increasingly close relationship between the two women is most evident when Croce shows Tembi the clothes she wants to be buried in. As Tembi states, “She had shown me her most vulnerable self, invited me to see and contemplate her own mortality. I felt soft inside, as though I needed to sit down. We had never had openness between us like this before” (233). Franca also strives to make Tembi feel like a cherished member of the family by accompanying Tembi and Zoela on day trips and taking the lead at the notary’s office in Aliminusa. Indeed, Croce signing her house over to Tembi is not just an expression of love, but a statement about family and belonging, and Tembi now knows that she “[has] a place in Sicily to call [her] own, a place to return to next summer and beyond” (257).
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