**I wrote this piece several years ago in honor of my grandparents whose loving relationship continues to serve as the template for my own. It's part truth and part fiction but written entirely from the heart.**
By Lisa A. Eramo
As far back as my memory will allow, the cynara cardunculus is there, maturing in the cool mist of September’s morning, its stalky body jutting up alongside Oberle road, not far from the double wide my grandparents called home.
Most people don’t even know about the plant—it just grows and grows along the countryside, dividing the gradations of grassy greens. I never actually questioned how Nonny not only knew it existed, but also that if you cut, blanched, and cooked it properly, a cardoon, as it’s commonly known, becomes an edible treat.
“That which we often glance quickly past is most beautiful,” she’d say, carefully watching an ever-present spider weave a dew-dropped web on their front porch. “Keep your eyes and heart open. Nothing is insignificant, not even that ugly old weed.”
If it hadn’t been for this ugly old weed, Nonny and Poppy would have never met. Nonny had been picking cardoons a mile from her parents’ house on a Sunday afternoon when it started to rain. Poppy happened to be walking down the road and saw her in the distance—a rainbow of color, her hair curling in the humidity, her arms full of earthy plants. Their courting began that day as he held his jacket over her head the entire way home. Since hearing their creation story, I never doubted the existence of destiny.
I think about the cardoon as I drive down the narrow road that leads to their old house, now overgrown with weeds and scattered with stray Styrofoam cups. My sister Judy is getting married tomorrow, and I’ve left the art-infused Bostonian culture to return to the place where my grandparents loved, my parents love, and where my sister and her fiancé would settle and love—a small town in central New York where even the trees bear hearts and rent is cheap for newlyweds.
I park my Mustang in their driveway, and it looks out of place, like a Dahli painting—something surreal. I feel the neighbors staring at me as I get out of the car and walk around the perimeter of the house. One man across the street gets up out of his chair and walks to the edge of his porch to get a better look. Somewhere in the distance, wind chimes sing an unfamiliar tune.
Once Nonny discovered a patch of cardoon, she’d never forget it. She even managed to draw an elaborate map of telephone posts, foot paths, and distinguishing trees that helped guide her back to the same patches in the same fields every year. And on any given fall morning, you’d find them—Nonny and Poppy, map in hand—driving their shiny blue Cadillac in search of the elusive plant.
Within minutes of leaving the house, they’d start the rosary. “Hail Mary, full of grace,” they’d take turns saying. “Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.” It was their tradition to sing this sacred duet during any road trip longer than twenty minutes.
I’ve often wondered what it’s like to know that kind of interconnectedness. What is it like to be able to finish someone’s prayer, someone’s sentence, someone’s breathe?
My sister (Judy) and Derek met in college at a drunken fraternity party. She likes to tell the story of how they both reached for the keg at the same time and then stood there for what seemed like hours staring into one another’s eyes. She said she instantaneously knew that they would be together. And ever since then, they’ve been inseparable—best friends, drinking partners, soul mates. They’re the type of couple that makes you smile and sigh.
As young girls, Judy and I were often in the backseat during the cardoon-searching adventures, listening to the prayer’s counterpoint and playing with our Barbie dolls and Tonka trucks. Sometimes we looked out the window at the squares of hay or dilapidated farmhouses that seemed to fold in on themselves. There was one old house pained with stripes every color of the rainbow, all faded by the sun’s light. We called it the lifesaver house in honor of our favorite candies.
Nonny would spend hours meticulously picking cardoons, insisting that Poppy make sudden stops along the road when she spotted a patch or two. “Bianco ameliore”, “Italian dwarf,” “Large Smooth,” and “White Improved” were just a few of the varieties of these leafy treasures they, or I should say she, sought after.
To me, the names of each type of cardoon were poetic and silky and had a way of rolling off my tongue like a song. “Bianco,” I’d say, stressing the second syllable. “Ameliore,” I’d say, imitating some Italian operatic singers. The names of cardoons made me think of far-away places, countries I’d never visited, endless white sandy beaches, heaven.
“Over there! Over there, Paul. Pull over right there,” she’d say, her arm dangling out the window to wave hello to a small green cluster that seemed to bow to her.
“Ok Sal,” he’d grunt, shaking his head and slightly smiling at her excitement. “I’ve got somebody right behind me and I can’t just stop in the middle of the road!” Sal was Poppy’s nickname for her—short for her maiden name Salamone. Her real name was Rosemarie.
It was inevitable that he’d adjust his mirror to find an angry farmer in a big tractor wanting nothing more than to honk his horn and pass them by. Poppy would put his blinker on and pull off the road into the ditch, and we’d soon be left in a cloud of smoke from the tractor’s barreling off in the distance.
“That guy couldn’t wait two minutes,” he’d say. But before he could even turn his head, Nonny was out the door, running toward the cardoons with scissors and plastic bags in hand. Poppy would always follow after her, insisting that he needed to help her, even if it was just to hold the bag open so she could drop them in.
“Nonny, who lives here?” I’d shout after her, slightly unnerved by the perplexed housewife in the distance hanging clothes on a droopy line.
“Well, I don’t actually know them, but they won’t mind,” she’d say, throwing her hands into the air and laughing, her big horse teeth glistening in the sun. “We’ll only be here for a few minutes.”
The sun always seemed to be hottest on those days. Sweat would drip down my arms and back, reminding me of the heat my body could create. The grass was usually tall and would tickle and tease our legs as we’d run through it. Somewhere in the distance, a barrel would burn, and the smell of smoke would mix with sweet manure and pervade the air.
“Oh! Right here! Over here!” she’d say, startling us all as we wandered through the maze of grass.
Sure enough, there would be a patch of massive green leafy plants huddled together—the Holy Grail of her journey.
“You have to grab it by the stem and cut,” she’d say, as we—a captivated audience—all stood watching.
“Be careful with those scissors, Sal. In fact, why don’t you just let me do that?” Poppy would say, trying to finagle the scissors away from her.
“I’m all right. I’m all right,” she’d say, the cardoon finally breaking free from the ground. Next, she’d to hold it up and get a good look at it. You’d think she was inspecting a turkey for Thanksgiving. “This is a good one,” she’d say. “Yep, this one will be good.”
Perhaps it was those hazy mornings, the sun rising as if on cue to begin the day’s symphony and bring in the sounds of all things living. Perhaps it was the feeling as though we were meant to find those cardoons just like Nonny and Poppy were meant to find one another. All of it was and still is intriguing to me. How and why do certain people come into your life at the right time and place—no searching necessary? Their love story had a magical element more powerful than any Grimes fairytale they’d ever read to me.
A whistle from a nearby train briefly snaps me out of my reverie. I realize that I’ve been standing here for almost ten minutes. Judy must be putting the last minute touches on her wedding plans, making sure the photographer had the right address and the DJ would play right song. The neighbor across the street has gone back to reading his newspaper. I decide to take a seat on the lawn.
I think back to Nonny and how when she started to get out of breath from all the walking and cardoon picking, we knew it was time to go home. Poppy would tenderly wipe the sweat from her brow, kiss her on the lips, and convince her that the rest of the cardoons would wait until next time. On a good day, we would have visited two or three fields and at least two or three cemeteries. Nonny used to say that cemeteries always had cardoons. Usually we’d load up three or four bags in the cemeteries alone.
The drive home was usually pretty quiet. Nonny would fall asleep, leaving Poppy to say an entire string of rosaries by himself.
At home, hunched over the stove, Nonny would wash, blanch, bread, and fry a whole plateful of cardoons at a time. Poppy delighted in the smell of salt wafting through the air and would sit curling his toes in his bright red recliner.
“You’re so good to me, Sal,” he’d say, his head tilted toward her as she turned the cardoons around in the breading and flour.
“And don’t you forget it!” she’d laugh, winking at my sister and me as we sat on high stools watching her, mesmerized as the green leafy weeds were transformed into a crispy brown treat.
If it was during the week, Golden Girls would blare on the TV turned up way too loud, while a small radio on the counter boasted Frank Sinatra. The music seemed to make waves of steam from the stove sway and dance through the air. If it was a Sunday, Notre Dame football would sing through the entire house. The screaming crowds, shrilly whistles and blasting marching bands made it seem like one big party and that Poppy was the guest of honor.
Judy, who was usually buried in old photo albums by this time, would occasionally pull out black and white photographs, holding them up to the light to try and figure out which side of the family each person was on.
“Who’s this guy?” she’d say, her forehead crinkling up like a slinky. “And why does he have such funny clothes on?”
Nonny would pause her cardoon dipping and frying to squint her eyes and look at the picture from across the room. “That’s your great-grandmother’s brother, Freddy,” she’d say. “He was a dentist. That was my uncle, you know.”
“Hey, this is you and Poppy,” my sister would say, grabbing another picture, this one of my grandparents on their wedding day. “Tell us the story! Tell us the story!”
“Well,” Poppy would say, clearing his voice as if to begin a sermon. “When I knew that I wanted to marry your grandmother, I had to get permission from her father.”
“That’s how it was then,” Nonny would interject, pulling a cardoon from the oily pan and setting it down on a paper towel-lined plate next to another one that was already cool. “You needed permission.”
“So anyway,” Poppy would say, anxious to be in the spotlight again. “Once I had permission, I showed up at her house on a Sunday morning. You should have seen the look on her face!” He shook his head and closed his eyes, reveling in the memory of that day. “Her hair was all up in curlers. I think she was getting ready for church.”
“I was getting ready for my cousin’s baby shower!” By now, Nonny had usually spilled some of the breading all over the counter because she was paying more attention to Poppy and making sure he got his story straight. “All I had on was a bathrobe! Don’t you remember that, Paul?”
“Oh yes. That’s right. That pink one with the roses on it. Yes, I remember,” he’d say, rolling his eyes and winking at my sister and me. “Anyway, I showed up at her door holding a silver tray of Italian cookies—crème puffs, biscotti, cuccidati, pizzelles—with a diamond ring on top, and you know what I said?” His eyes were wide and his mouth open, and for a moment, I picture him at the age of twenty-two, a boy, hopelessly in love.
Of course we both knew the answer, but we liked to hear it from him. “Tell us! Tell us!” Judy would say. I was silent, paying close attention to the look on Poppy’s face as he said the words.
“I said, ‘Sal, I give you my life on a silver platter. Will you marry me?’” Poppy always had a habit of tearing up at this point. He usually cried like a baby over the small things—a beautiful sunset, a family picture, a good home-cooked meal. When Poppy cried, it usually meant he was happy, not sad.
“Girls, how could I resist that, right?” Nonny would say, beaming from behind a plateful of almost finished cardoons.
After the tale we both loved so much, Judy and I would usually go back to our pictures. Sometimes if the games weren’t on, Poppy would go up behind Nonny and tickle and nuzzle her like he did to my sister and me. Sometimes he would fall asleep to the crackling of the oil on the stove. Sometimes he would simply stare off into space, an ever so slight grin settling on his face.
You’d think that after years of city life away from home, I wouldn’t cry at the sight of the beauty that is the countryside or of the simple memories of the two people who probably had the single most significant impact on my life. But the memories and the beauty still affect me, even as I sit in the dust of their old driveway, surrounded by white dancing birch trees, a mailbox tilted to one side like an old man, a fence pregnant with concord grapes. Suddenly, I’m drawn to the fact that somewhere a cardoon is living. I bend to pick a piece of grass and blow on it to make a sound. The clouds keep turning and I think I catch a glimpse of their embrace, reminding me of faith.
By Lisa A. Eramo
As far back as my memory will allow, the cynara cardunculus is there, maturing in the cool mist of September’s morning, its stalky body jutting up alongside Oberle road, not far from the double wide my grandparents called home.
Most people don’t even know about the plant—it just grows and grows along the countryside, dividing the gradations of grassy greens. I never actually questioned how Nonny not only knew it existed, but also that if you cut, blanched, and cooked it properly, a cardoon, as it’s commonly known, becomes an edible treat.
“That which we often glance quickly past is most beautiful,” she’d say, carefully watching an ever-present spider weave a dew-dropped web on their front porch. “Keep your eyes and heart open. Nothing is insignificant, not even that ugly old weed.”
If it hadn’t been for this ugly old weed, Nonny and Poppy would have never met. Nonny had been picking cardoons a mile from her parents’ house on a Sunday afternoon when it started to rain. Poppy happened to be walking down the road and saw her in the distance—a rainbow of color, her hair curling in the humidity, her arms full of earthy plants. Their courting began that day as he held his jacket over her head the entire way home. Since hearing their creation story, I never doubted the existence of destiny.
I think about the cardoon as I drive down the narrow road that leads to their old house, now overgrown with weeds and scattered with stray Styrofoam cups. My sister Judy is getting married tomorrow, and I’ve left the art-infused Bostonian culture to return to the place where my grandparents loved, my parents love, and where my sister and her fiancé would settle and love—a small town in central New York where even the trees bear hearts and rent is cheap for newlyweds.
I park my Mustang in their driveway, and it looks out of place, like a Dahli painting—something surreal. I feel the neighbors staring at me as I get out of the car and walk around the perimeter of the house. One man across the street gets up out of his chair and walks to the edge of his porch to get a better look. Somewhere in the distance, wind chimes sing an unfamiliar tune.
Once Nonny discovered a patch of cardoon, she’d never forget it. She even managed to draw an elaborate map of telephone posts, foot paths, and distinguishing trees that helped guide her back to the same patches in the same fields every year. And on any given fall morning, you’d find them—Nonny and Poppy, map in hand—driving their shiny blue Cadillac in search of the elusive plant.
Within minutes of leaving the house, they’d start the rosary. “Hail Mary, full of grace,” they’d take turns saying. “Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.” It was their tradition to sing this sacred duet during any road trip longer than twenty minutes.
I’ve often wondered what it’s like to know that kind of interconnectedness. What is it like to be able to finish someone’s prayer, someone’s sentence, someone’s breathe?
My sister (Judy) and Derek met in college at a drunken fraternity party. She likes to tell the story of how they both reached for the keg at the same time and then stood there for what seemed like hours staring into one another’s eyes. She said she instantaneously knew that they would be together. And ever since then, they’ve been inseparable—best friends, drinking partners, soul mates. They’re the type of couple that makes you smile and sigh.
As young girls, Judy and I were often in the backseat during the cardoon-searching adventures, listening to the prayer’s counterpoint and playing with our Barbie dolls and Tonka trucks. Sometimes we looked out the window at the squares of hay or dilapidated farmhouses that seemed to fold in on themselves. There was one old house pained with stripes every color of the rainbow, all faded by the sun’s light. We called it the lifesaver house in honor of our favorite candies.
Nonny would spend hours meticulously picking cardoons, insisting that Poppy make sudden stops along the road when she spotted a patch or two. “Bianco ameliore”, “Italian dwarf,” “Large Smooth,” and “White Improved” were just a few of the varieties of these leafy treasures they, or I should say she, sought after.
To me, the names of each type of cardoon were poetic and silky and had a way of rolling off my tongue like a song. “Bianco,” I’d say, stressing the second syllable. “Ameliore,” I’d say, imitating some Italian operatic singers. The names of cardoons made me think of far-away places, countries I’d never visited, endless white sandy beaches, heaven.
“Over there! Over there, Paul. Pull over right there,” she’d say, her arm dangling out the window to wave hello to a small green cluster that seemed to bow to her.
“Ok Sal,” he’d grunt, shaking his head and slightly smiling at her excitement. “I’ve got somebody right behind me and I can’t just stop in the middle of the road!” Sal was Poppy’s nickname for her—short for her maiden name Salamone. Her real name was Rosemarie.
It was inevitable that he’d adjust his mirror to find an angry farmer in a big tractor wanting nothing more than to honk his horn and pass them by. Poppy would put his blinker on and pull off the road into the ditch, and we’d soon be left in a cloud of smoke from the tractor’s barreling off in the distance.
“That guy couldn’t wait two minutes,” he’d say. But before he could even turn his head, Nonny was out the door, running toward the cardoons with scissors and plastic bags in hand. Poppy would always follow after her, insisting that he needed to help her, even if it was just to hold the bag open so she could drop them in.
“Nonny, who lives here?” I’d shout after her, slightly unnerved by the perplexed housewife in the distance hanging clothes on a droopy line.
“Well, I don’t actually know them, but they won’t mind,” she’d say, throwing her hands into the air and laughing, her big horse teeth glistening in the sun. “We’ll only be here for a few minutes.”
The sun always seemed to be hottest on those days. Sweat would drip down my arms and back, reminding me of the heat my body could create. The grass was usually tall and would tickle and tease our legs as we’d run through it. Somewhere in the distance, a barrel would burn, and the smell of smoke would mix with sweet manure and pervade the air.
“Oh! Right here! Over here!” she’d say, startling us all as we wandered through the maze of grass.
Sure enough, there would be a patch of massive green leafy plants huddled together—the Holy Grail of her journey.
“You have to grab it by the stem and cut,” she’d say, as we—a captivated audience—all stood watching.
“Be careful with those scissors, Sal. In fact, why don’t you just let me do that?” Poppy would say, trying to finagle the scissors away from her.
“I’m all right. I’m all right,” she’d say, the cardoon finally breaking free from the ground. Next, she’d to hold it up and get a good look at it. You’d think she was inspecting a turkey for Thanksgiving. “This is a good one,” she’d say. “Yep, this one will be good.”
Perhaps it was those hazy mornings, the sun rising as if on cue to begin the day’s symphony and bring in the sounds of all things living. Perhaps it was the feeling as though we were meant to find those cardoons just like Nonny and Poppy were meant to find one another. All of it was and still is intriguing to me. How and why do certain people come into your life at the right time and place—no searching necessary? Their love story had a magical element more powerful than any Grimes fairytale they’d ever read to me.
A whistle from a nearby train briefly snaps me out of my reverie. I realize that I’ve been standing here for almost ten minutes. Judy must be putting the last minute touches on her wedding plans, making sure the photographer had the right address and the DJ would play right song. The neighbor across the street has gone back to reading his newspaper. I decide to take a seat on the lawn.
I think back to Nonny and how when she started to get out of breath from all the walking and cardoon picking, we knew it was time to go home. Poppy would tenderly wipe the sweat from her brow, kiss her on the lips, and convince her that the rest of the cardoons would wait until next time. On a good day, we would have visited two or three fields and at least two or three cemeteries. Nonny used to say that cemeteries always had cardoons. Usually we’d load up three or four bags in the cemeteries alone.
The drive home was usually pretty quiet. Nonny would fall asleep, leaving Poppy to say an entire string of rosaries by himself.
At home, hunched over the stove, Nonny would wash, blanch, bread, and fry a whole plateful of cardoons at a time. Poppy delighted in the smell of salt wafting through the air and would sit curling his toes in his bright red recliner.
“You’re so good to me, Sal,” he’d say, his head tilted toward her as she turned the cardoons around in the breading and flour.
“And don’t you forget it!” she’d laugh, winking at my sister and me as we sat on high stools watching her, mesmerized as the green leafy weeds were transformed into a crispy brown treat.
If it was during the week, Golden Girls would blare on the TV turned up way too loud, while a small radio on the counter boasted Frank Sinatra. The music seemed to make waves of steam from the stove sway and dance through the air. If it was a Sunday, Notre Dame football would sing through the entire house. The screaming crowds, shrilly whistles and blasting marching bands made it seem like one big party and that Poppy was the guest of honor.
Judy, who was usually buried in old photo albums by this time, would occasionally pull out black and white photographs, holding them up to the light to try and figure out which side of the family each person was on.
“Who’s this guy?” she’d say, her forehead crinkling up like a slinky. “And why does he have such funny clothes on?”
Nonny would pause her cardoon dipping and frying to squint her eyes and look at the picture from across the room. “That’s your great-grandmother’s brother, Freddy,” she’d say. “He was a dentist. That was my uncle, you know.”
“Hey, this is you and Poppy,” my sister would say, grabbing another picture, this one of my grandparents on their wedding day. “Tell us the story! Tell us the story!”
“Well,” Poppy would say, clearing his voice as if to begin a sermon. “When I knew that I wanted to marry your grandmother, I had to get permission from her father.”
“That’s how it was then,” Nonny would interject, pulling a cardoon from the oily pan and setting it down on a paper towel-lined plate next to another one that was already cool. “You needed permission.”
“So anyway,” Poppy would say, anxious to be in the spotlight again. “Once I had permission, I showed up at her house on a Sunday morning. You should have seen the look on her face!” He shook his head and closed his eyes, reveling in the memory of that day. “Her hair was all up in curlers. I think she was getting ready for church.”
“I was getting ready for my cousin’s baby shower!” By now, Nonny had usually spilled some of the breading all over the counter because she was paying more attention to Poppy and making sure he got his story straight. “All I had on was a bathrobe! Don’t you remember that, Paul?”
“Oh yes. That’s right. That pink one with the roses on it. Yes, I remember,” he’d say, rolling his eyes and winking at my sister and me. “Anyway, I showed up at her door holding a silver tray of Italian cookies—crème puffs, biscotti, cuccidati, pizzelles—with a diamond ring on top, and you know what I said?” His eyes were wide and his mouth open, and for a moment, I picture him at the age of twenty-two, a boy, hopelessly in love.
Of course we both knew the answer, but we liked to hear it from him. “Tell us! Tell us!” Judy would say. I was silent, paying close attention to the look on Poppy’s face as he said the words.
“I said, ‘Sal, I give you my life on a silver platter. Will you marry me?’” Poppy always had a habit of tearing up at this point. He usually cried like a baby over the small things—a beautiful sunset, a family picture, a good home-cooked meal. When Poppy cried, it usually meant he was happy, not sad.
“Girls, how could I resist that, right?” Nonny would say, beaming from behind a plateful of almost finished cardoons.
After the tale we both loved so much, Judy and I would usually go back to our pictures. Sometimes if the games weren’t on, Poppy would go up behind Nonny and tickle and nuzzle her like he did to my sister and me. Sometimes he would fall asleep to the crackling of the oil on the stove. Sometimes he would simply stare off into space, an ever so slight grin settling on his face.
You’d think that after years of city life away from home, I wouldn’t cry at the sight of the beauty that is the countryside or of the simple memories of the two people who probably had the single most significant impact on my life. But the memories and the beauty still affect me, even as I sit in the dust of their old driveway, surrounded by white dancing birch trees, a mailbox tilted to one side like an old man, a fence pregnant with concord grapes. Suddenly, I’m drawn to the fact that somewhere a cardoon is living. I bend to pick a piece of grass and blow on it to make a sound. The clouds keep turning and I think I catch a glimpse of their embrace, reminding me of faith.
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3 comments:
This is such an amazing story. Thank you for sharing. Is your sister getting married and will she live here, really? This is so well written.
Thanks, Lisa (wow)
Hey Diana, thanks for reading the story. :) The part about my sister getting married is fictional...for now. :)
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