In Florence we stayed at our friend Vanina’s friend Salvo’s house outside the centro. As we stood on the balcony hanging our clothes to dry, we admired the garden on the terrace below. The neighbor below us was watering his garden and after conversing, invited us down to take some of his tomatoes. He insisted. Downstairs we entered his small apartment and met his partner Sonia, and we all walked through a skinny door to the terrace outside. He showed us his tomatoes, and cherry trees, and the hard-to-grow bergamot that he takes inside in the winter. He picked off almost ripe peaches that we washed in the outdoor sink and they were delicious. We explored his kiwi vines and apricots and plums and olive trees and bananas. In a 10 by 12 foot plot he had an incredible oasis. He melded foods from his home – Peru – with the temperate fruits of mid-northern Italy.
This garden reminded us of a book we read in 2010, The Earth Knows My Name by Patricia Kleindienst — grounding stories of the gardens of immigrants in the United States. A friend had recommended it to me and I fell in love with it, buying another copy and mailing it to Sofia’s doorstep in Claremont, while I was in Northampton, in the very earliest days of our new love story.
I had long been dreaming of gardens. Sofia had tried her hand at a garden with a lover before me. She wrote poetics on a blog about the seeds planted, and the waiting, and the patience. At our wedding we gave out California wildflowers; to feed the pollinators and spread the seeds of love. This secret garden in Florence was a gift, a reawakening of our dreams to one day till the soil of wherever we land, to remember that the earth knows our name.
He chopped a cabbage off the stalk for us (cavolo) and handed us a bag of tomatoes (pomodori). We ate them the next day as we lazed by the olive trees in a beautiful house in the Tuscan countryside. What sights did we see in our 24 hours in Florence? We saw the best thing of all — the harvest of seeds of love.
