If there was one flaw in her paradise—and she seldom mentioned it, feeling it wrong to complain—it was the vagaries of the upstate New York climate; the weather was erratic, and its crazy quirks would make her restless and edgy. There would be chill, gray days in August or such balminess in February that the trees and bushes would go berserk and produce buds at the wrong time, only to have them die in the frost. April was warm one day, cold the next.

“It is because it is a new world, a new country,” Umbertina would half grumble to Serafino. “It has not yet found its clima,” that steady, predictable flow of the seasons she remembered from her years in Castagna. And she thought that the weather might have something to do with the jerky movements, restlessness, and rigidness she noted in the few americani she ever saw. Or maybe they didn’t eat well—she had seen their bread, a characterless, soft, spongy, dead-white concoction that she wouldn’t have fed her pigs in Castagna and that she considered a desecration of God’s good grain.

She never stinted on food for her family. They had everything fresh or homemade. On special occasions, like Thanksgiving, which she called Chicken Day, she made ravioli filled with ricotta and other cheeses, never mixing it with spinach as the abruzzesi did, for she didn’t believe in mixing her greens—dandelions, good strong chicory, spinach, and broccoli—with anything. Fresh greens were a miracle of the earth and had to be separate to be relished properly and have their best effect on bodies after a long winter without. But into the minestra went everything: beans, greens, vegetables, and pieces of meat, along with the soup bones to enrich it. She made cacciatore dishes with her tomatoes and peppers, or if there was rabbit, with fragrant stems of rosemary and white wine. The rosemary in her garden was not the sprig from Nelda’s garden in Castagna, which had not survived the journeys and moves, but a new American growth. It would never be the glorious blue flower-laden bush of the warm Italian countryside, but it still had the aroma she remembered and was still the totem of her strength. “In the house where the rosemary grows, the women of the house are its strength,” Nelda had told her, and that’s what she now believed.

Her oldest son would be summoned occasionally by her excited shouts as he was getting ready for school when it suddenly occurred to her that some laborer hadn’t stopped by for his panino. She’d scream, “Eh, Giaco, ven’acà! Su!” and have him run down to the railroad before he went off to school.