Memories of grandparents
1
Women are always women
Between lost recipes and girlish jealousies, Mrs Giuseppina reminded me that our grandparents too were once young.
Mrs Giuseppina was someone easy to talk to: you only had to sit down beside her and she would take care of telling you her life.
One day, to find new topics of conversation, I asked about the recipes of the old days. Like most elderly people, she was always glad to recall stories, events and flavours she had known when she was young.
Talking with Mrs Giuseppina, I had tried to get her to tell me the original recipes for “rusumada” and “pan gialt”: the first a sort of Red Bull before its time, the second considered the bread of the poor, made mostly from maize flour.
Based on Mrs Giuseppina’s accounts, I had tried to remake “pan gialt”; sadly the culinary experiment did not turn out well… the bread came out so hard it was practically a stone! It was lovely all the same to take on the challenge, trying to reconstruct traditions now lost.
Women are always women
2
Mrs Giuseppina had never married, though she confided that there had once been a young man who courted her. Even though he was a “brau bagai” (a good lad), she had never fallen in love with him. Instead she had become infatuated with a young man who, by her own admission, was not too respectable…
Our grandparents too were once young, and they were not so very different from us.
I still remember a charming little scene involving Mrs Giuseppina and Mrs Domenica, a companion in her wing. Mrs Domenica, in spite of everything, was particularly keen on putting in her curlers, doing her hair in front of the mirror (which she kept in her handbag…) and parading down the “catwalk” before one of the few men in the home.
Mrs Giuseppina could not stand the sight of it… she would get angry when she saw her flirting and at once shout at her: “you’re old, sit down, what are you doing!”.
I do not know whether she felt a touch of jealousy or simply thought it unseemly behaviour, but these squabbles made me forget that I was in a care home, and that, when all is said and done, our grandparents too were once young and not so very different from us.
Collected by Riccardo Beretta · AVO Concorezzo volunteer