Nonni

To my grandmother Joan, on her ninetieth birthday

Here on Åland, people often ask whose child you are. It is a way of placing you among familiar names, of finding the family behind the face. My answer takes us off the local map and across the Atlantic.

But there are people there. Quite a lot of them, in fact. A whole web of relationships in which I need no introduction, where people remember things about me that I have long forgotten myself.

And at nearly forty-six, I am incredibly fortunate to have two grandmothers still living. Today, my mother’s mother turns ninety. But like many Americans of Italian descent, I call her Nonni.

This one’s for her.

Nonni was only forty-four when I was born.

For years, that was simply something I knew about her: she had been a young grandmother, my very active grandmother with a kid still at home during my earliest childhood. She was always the one who took us places. Often she looked after me if my parents went on trips. My parents would meet her halfway on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I was perfectly happy to go. Nonni meant fun.

Obviously, her presence has been a given since I made my debut into life in October 1980. She came to help when I was born. I know this because I have the photos. Our relationship begins somewhere beyond the reach of my memory, in those first days when being loved was something other people would have to remember for me.

Now forty-four is an age I have lived through myself. I can look back towards her from somewhere beyond it, with a different understanding of how much a woman might already have lived before a baby arrives and begins knowing her as someone’s grandmother.

It should also be noted that I was neither Nonni’s first grandchild nor even her first granddaughter. That distinction belongs to my cousin Carrie, born in 1970. Nonni had already been a grandmother for a decade by the time I arrived.

She is a mother to four children and a bonus mother to three, a grandmother to sixteen and a great-grandmother to twenty-two. The grandchildren alone span thirty-one years, from Carrie to my cousin Lauren, who arrived in 2001 and was the flower girl at my 2005 wedding.

This year, baby Eve made Nonni a great-great-grandmother. Carrie is Eve’s grandmother.

I find myself lingering over that: the baby who first made her a grandmother has become a grandmother herself this year. A whole life has unfolded far enough to begin the pattern again, while Nonni is still here to be part of it.

Don’t even ask me to start mapping the great-grandchildren. I can’t. Most have been born in my absence.

Until 2016, when we lost Nonni’s mother at nearly ninety-eight, while I was pregnant with Matilda, we had five straight generations of women. Yes.

Daughters-daughters-daughters-daughters-daughter.

Five generations of straight mother DNA, and somehow we each look like our fathers. Ironic.

The continuity has had to find other ways of showing itself.

And somewhere in that great, growing company is me, almost forty-six, with my childhood artwork still under her protection.

At our family parties, the recycling signs are still the ones I remember drawing in the late eighties or very early nineties. Even when I am here, far away, there might be a call with the phone passed around on any given holiday. Someone always goes to the recycling bins and shows off my art, complete with an Easter bunny recycling a can like a good Easter bunny. (Yes, my interest in recycling long predates Ålands Natur och Miljö.) What is funny is that the Easter bunny presides over the recycling at Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year’s, the Fourth of July, etc.

My Nonni keeps my childhood artwork and will not let anyone throw it away. She once scolded a relative for erasing drawings I had left on the chalkboard where she would write reminders, where I had left very little writing space for said reminders. I was re-commissioned for another masterpiece. Instructions for disposing of things have, in her care, become things that cannot be disposed of.

I am well into middle age and the mother of four, but she keeps sight of the little girl who would scurry around to help set up before family arrived and who made those drawings.

I have been thinking about those signs today, from the other side of an ocean. She is turning ninety. I am about to turn forty-six. Between us is the entirety of my life, half of hers, and rather more geography than I would like.

What I remember the most is going places.

Picnics in Valley Forge, outings to the Liberty Bell and Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, shopping, movies, her dogs. A trip to Blockbuster, now quaint, was always a standard feature. In blazing hot summers, we would see two or three movies in a row to stay in the air-conditioned theatre. She lived three hours away by car from my hometown, but she was an active grandmother whenever she could be, and much of my early pleasure in the world had her company attached to it.

She has always loved travel. For my sixteenth birthday, she took me on my first trip to New England. We visited old artists’ colonies, visited Hammersmith Farm where JFK and Jackie got married, looked at things, went to see what was there. Before that part of the world became somewhere I would make a life for ten years, it was somewhere she had taken me.

We are both bookworms. Nonni was a straight A student in school. I used to “steal” her books and she would see me with one and say, “Oh yes, that is a good one, you should read that one.” The library was always open. We both love history, especially British history. We like historical novels and costume dramas. We both enjoy art museums.

I think now about the generosity of introducing a child to what you enjoy, and the pleasure, years later, of finding that you can enjoy it together. Interests that once determined where she might take me have become part of the ground on which we meet.

There were other expeditions, too. Once, as a teenager, I remember furiously wanting a particular swimsuit with the sort of conviction that leaves very little room for a different swimsuit. I had to have this and only this swimsuit in this particular teenage magazine. I still remember said swimsuit.

A mall was an hour away from where I grew up, but would not have carried it anyway; this required a more upscale department store. But when Nonni heard from my exasperated mother, she hunted it down in the retail hell that is the King of Prussia mall. Among the things I remember being given, it has lasted remarkably well for an object I have probably not possessed for over twenty years. At the time, I was over-the-moon that she found it.

With the years, the real gift I remember is that she went looking for it, because I wanted it so badly.

During my college years, I found my tiny hometown stifling and wanted to stay closer to my then-boyfriend, now-husband. So I lived with her for three straight summers while working at my optician’s job at the nearby Exton Mall. It would be easy to describe that as simply somewhere to stay. But a summer has a different scale from a visit. There is time for the occasion of being together to wear off, for ordinary life to take over, for people to become more fully themselves in one another’s company.

I would dutifully head to work in my uniform and come back with feet hurting and back aching to dinner waiting. Often she would make a favourite of mine. I remember her telling me how impressed she and Nonno were by how hard I worked. Truth be told, I did not think I was anything extraordinary. But I have remembered her telling me that. She would ask me about my day, let me rest my feet, and we would watch movies together in the evenings.

Those summers gave me more of her: the reader, the philosophical and religious woman always in search of life’s meaning, the cook of great, casual Italian-American dinners like all Nonnis are. She is generally such cheerful, pleasant company.

Although cut her off in a parking lot, and holy hell. Good luck.

I understand more now, too, of what was happening in her life while I was busy being a child in it. Uncle Gary, Carrie’s dad, died in 1990 the day before my tenth birthday. He is gone thirty-six years on Friday. Uncle Gary never got to meet his grandchildren, or his great-grandchild Eve. Nonni has now buried three of her seven children. Gary’s loss was the crisis whose size I could not have fully understood then. I remember her suddenly smoking, or being less patient in traffic. I also remember her eventually finding comfort in her Catholic faith again. I still had my grandmother, still had those outings and her interest in me; I did not yet understand how much of her own life lay beyond what I could see.

She went on religious retreats, including ones where she would be silent for days. It should be noted that Nonni is, in fact, a talker. I think about that now, about the woman who sought out that silence, and about faith giving her somewhere to go when she needed to find her way back to herself. There were two lives inside those childhood memories. Growing up has brought hers into fuller view, especially when I became a mother myself.

As a child, I had been fortunate enough to have a grandmother who took me on adventures. As a young woman, I became fortunate enough to know her as a woman whose company I genuinely enjoyed.

She was there through the moves to college and back, the move to Boston, the day I got engaged she was the first to know and see the ring. She came to Sweden to see me graduate in 1999 and took me on my first trip to London as my gift for graduation. She has come to visit me here. Yes, even on Åland, just two years ago. When I tell the story of my life, she appears in so many places that I cannot confine her to an earlier chapter. Our relationship has kept acquiring a present tense, despite great geographical distance.

That is because she has made herself available and present, but never really intrusive.

“How is it going?” she asks. “You are doing great things.”

“I am proud of you,” in essence.

And, generally, she asks about me before she asks about my children. That means a lot to someone after they become a mother. I love her for that. She knows the busy population of my life; she remembers that I am in it.

Now with four children of my own, I understand more of what it takes to keep track of another person as the years change what they need from you. Once there was a swimsuit. Now there are questions with less obtainable answers. She has remained interested in the person doing the wanting and wondering.

She wants me to be happy, and has left room for my own understanding of what that might mean, even if it has taken me very far away.

Perhaps this is what I am beginning to understand about the signs she has held onto. She can treasure something I made as a child without needing me to remain one. The girl is welcome in the family gathering; the woman is welcome to go on becoming. I have felt both of those things in her love.

I know how much time we have been given. I had as many as six grandparents in my life until I was twenty-two, four great-grandparents at the time of my birth, and the last was with me until I was nearly thirty-six. For a time, there were five living generations of women in our family. I became a mother while I was still a great-granddaughter, belonging in several directions at once.

Now my father’s mother will be ninety-eight this November, and Nonni is ninety. I still have both my grandmothers. I have grown old enough to understand something of the lives that preceded mine, while still being able to ask the women who lived them. That is an extraordinary kind of abundance. To ask about times, places, and long-dead relatives you never could have met.

But someday that will be gone. And that is the thing that hurts the most on days like today.

Nonni’s family now reaches to a first great-great-grandchild. Children and bonus children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, another beginning. I think of her at forty-four, coming to help when I was born, and of all the people who have arrived since. So many lives for one woman to have a place in. So many versions of us for her to know.

I wonder sometimes whether my grandmothers can tell, from so far away, how large a place they still have in mine. Distance makes a poor account of affection. It records where we were absent much more readily than how often someone came to mind; it cannot show the company we keep in thought, or the ways an ordinary day continues to be furnished by people who are nowhere near it.

Much of my pleasure in going out into the world began with Nonni, be it in books or steps. Today, I wish there were rather less of the world between us. I would like to be there for her birthday, to have the unremarkable privilege of arriving, sitting down, spending time. And maybe catching a movie after.

Instead, I am here, far away in the middle of the Baltic, thinking about what I could give her. She is already well supplied with Easter bunny drawings.

And so after all these years, I find myself making her something again.

This time, in words.

Happy ninetieth birthday, Nonni. We love you.