Serafino was an easygoing old man who rode his little girls on his foot and told them stories. He wasn’t as strict and bossy as Umbertina, but he never criticized her. They had grown comfortable together. And when they sat, at times, talking, they remembered the same things.

Margherita, Sara, and Carla were expected to get the ripe tomatoes ready for the winter store of conserva, the thick dark tomato paste that Umbertina would use when the fresh tomatoes were gone. The tomatoes had to be skinned after dipping in boiling water and then cooked down to the dense paste. This would be spread on trays that went outside to dry under cheesecloth between stakes. The girls would be stationed there to keep the birds and insects away from the trays, fussing because they couldn’t leave to play.

The kitchen was the family’s center, just as their aesthetic was the land. Not the house or the rooms they occupied, or the furniture they surrounded themselves with, or the clothing they wore were for Umbertina and Serafino as important in a deep, essential sense as the grooming and tending of land, which yielded them its fruits as God’s visible sign of life and grace.

And not just Umbertina, but all who had left their land had to return to it to find their order and identity. Sometimes it was only a backyard plot, for not everyone could afford the horse and a wagon and rented farmland at Muskieville; but even so, an Italian yard was always distinguishable from a non-Italian one, where lawn meant leisure and money enough to cultivate the arts rather than the soil.

But cultivation for Umbertina was something else: It was direct contact with the land, an almost angry wrenching of well-being from the earth and whatever ruled it. Behind the plain frame houses of Yale and Denny streets in the old Italian neighborhood grapevines were lovingly splayed on stakes and gently formed; or there would be a pergola upon which the vines were trained so that the beauty of the vine was combined with the practicality of shade. Nothing was left to chance or to waste. Flowers were grown for beauty, yes, but also for the church.

In his backyard, tending his plot, the Italian felt himself again a man, not a foreigner among strangers. America was vast and alien, but the former peasants kept their footing there by little patches of zucchini and broccoli—vegetables the Americans knew nothing of.

Only a few immigrants, like Gino Gualtiero, had gone immediately to the rich lands near Emory and Canastota and become farmers; most of the former peasants were now city laborers. But all kept their culture, which was the tending of the land. Domenico used to say they were all like Don Antonio’s chickens—they needed dirt to scratch in.