The small size of our Courtland Street apartment and our growing family gave my parents a good reason to start looking for a larger house. They had originally bought the two flat in early 1955 when I was four and Sue was two. By December of that year, on my fifth birthday, Judy was born. My mother joked for years about filling nut cups with M & M’s and peanuts for my birthday party in between labor pains.
The room Sue and I shared was quite small, but since we had bunk beds - beautiful maple four-poster beds that could be used stacked or side by side - it gave us a bit more room, especially once Judy entered the picture. The previous owners of the building had wallpapered our room with a circus mural that wrapped around the walls. What wasn’t part of the circus picture was white with red polka dots. To match it, my mother had bedspreads and pricilla-type curtains made for the single window of red dot material.
When our room was tidy, it looked quite nice. The annual flood of Christmas toys and birthday presents created a bit of a storage problem since, during the winter especially, we preferred to play in our room instead of the unheated sleeping porch off my parents’ room. Sometimes we did play out there, wearing jackets while we dressed our dolls, served our pretend meals with our dishes, miniature table and chairs. The room was cluttered with an assortment of stuffed animals, games, coloring books, and dressup clothes we had pilfered from my mother’s drawers and closet.
My parents’ room was painted a rather dark green. Judy’s crib alongside one wall, their bed, two dressers and two nightstands filled the room to capacity, but more often than not, one of us would wake up in the room most mornings. A belly ache for me or a bad dream for Sue would bring us climbing into our parents’ bed in the middle of the night - a tight squeeze that sometimes sent my father back into our bedroom, if only for some uninterrupted sleep.
Still, we made good use of the space we had - the side yard made it feel like the most spacious building on the block. We were always playing there or in the back yard and during at least one summer my maternal grandmother came over to plant tomatoes, zucchini and basil. No matter her age, Nonna Modesta - or Nonna Ma - always seemed a large, older woman, her gray hair constantly tied in a bun. I can see my mother hanging clothes on the lines while Nonni puttered through the vegetables, weeding here, watering there. Whisps of hair came free from her hairpins as she bent down and up, and her rough hands becoming dirty from the soil. She always wore a dress with an apron pinned to the bodice and tied around her waist. She and my mother would talk now and then, always in Italian, each woman intent upon her chore.
I would amble between the swings, playing in the dirt where our feet had worn away any semblance of grass. The dirtier I got, the more my mother wanted me to stay clear of the laundry, even though I loved to run through the sheets, smelling the soap and bleach and trying to catch the edges as they blew above my head.
Nonni called me away, knowing my mother wanted no part of dirty handprints on her laundry.
“You like tomatoes?”
She showed me the vines, heavy with green tomatoes just about ready to begin turning. I looked with some interest as she pointed out the little yellow flowers that would soon give birth to the final crop of the season. I squatted down next to her, watching her hands trim the plants, dig away at the weeds and pat down the soil. I started digging with a stick, working on some planting of my own.
“You like this guy, too?”
I turned to see her outstretched hand with a caterpillar the same shade as the tomatoes, and as thick as one of her fingers. I stood up and stepped back, immediately frightened or repulsed by the creature inching along her hand. She smiled at me.
“He likes the tomatoes and he puts holes in them. He looks like the tomatoes so the birds don’t eat him. But I don’t want him in the garden.”
She flicked her wrist toward the alley and the caterpillar flew off, now exposed for any hungry crow.
At my grandparents greystone house on Harrison Street further south in the city, they always managed to plant tomatoes, flowers and an overflowing grapevine in their tiny yard. Even after she reached 90, Nonni planted her tomatoes and put them up in Ball jars with basil. When age caught up with her, though there were no longer any tomatoes or grapes in the yard and only wild sage that grew year after year, she still thought the plants were there, and she would tell me to take something home “for when you’re cooking.”
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