How Cooking With a 98-Year-Old Italian Grandma Helped Heal My Grief: 'I'm Your Nonna Now' (Exclusive)

In 2019, I got an Italian grandmother for Christmas. Her name is Maria Volontà and she will turn 100 in February. We are not related by blood; and we were strangers the day she cooked me her Christmas chickpeas for the first time, the same day she announced that she would now be my nonna.

When Nonna Maria adopted me as her new pseudo-granddaughter, I was in my late nonna’s native Calabria, on top of an Italian boot, on an exploratory trip through its fascinating Greek-speaking enclave. I was writing a novel set in this region during the Christmas season of 1960. Walking through the December sun-drenched hillsides from village to thousand-year-old tiled village, I would sit with old men in their 80s and 90s, witnesses to the history I was trying to record.

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Nonna Maria and her daughter, the architect Antonella Casile, were referred to me by a friend of an acquaintance. I arrived at their house in Bova Marina at 2 pm with a notebook and a recorder, expecting to stay maybe two hours. (Yes, I had the absurd idea that I would leave without dinner — almost as if I had never met an Italian grandmother before). In the yard, the lemon tree was groaning with fruit. December was early for lemons, but they were already bigger than my hand.

The old woman who greeted me was not as tall as my chest, with black eyes deeply set in a touching spiral of worried wrinkles, and such a blissful loveliness in her expression that it made me think of the statues of the Virgin Mary in many a nearby church. Maria, with her steely memory and musical voice, proved to be the key I was looking for to unlock the past.

Maria and Juliet Grams.

courtesy of Juliet Grames

She shared her memories, proverbs, poems and songs in her native Greco. We had only been talking for a few hours when she suddenly reached across the table and grabbed my hand. “Do you still have your nonna?” she asked me. I actually lost my Italian grandmother a year earlier, when she was 98 years old.

“Well, I’m your nonna now,” Maria said, then added with charming humility, “if that’s all right.”

This precious friendship would bring me much comfort during the panicky pandemic years we didn’t know were coming—when my family would especially appreciate Mary’s hard-won wisdom about surviving scarcity, finding joy in simplicity, and connecting with others through spontaneous generosity.

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When the supermarket shelves were at their emptiest, Maria suggested delicious foods from her poor childhood – polenta with roasted garlic; soupy pasta with one egg cracked into it for protein — a reminder that you don’t need luxury to be nourished and satisfied. As 2020 marched on and quarantine was introduced, I was reminded that the reason we have holidays at all is that before our comfortable modern era, treats were rare; celebration used to require effort and planning. Maria taught me how to reignite the holiday cheer by appreciating the old-fashioned labor of love involved in preserving tradition.

Maria is cooking chickpeas.

courtesy of Juliet Grames

I was only allowed to leave at 11pm that night with the promise to return the next day for “something very special”. It turned out to be a chickpea stew usually served on Christmas Eve, “la Vigilia,” a vegetarian feast for the holidays when meat is not allowed before midnight mass. My family’s holiday tradition now includes Maria’s new—and very old—chickpea casserole recipe, given to me by my new, and very old, nonna. Lopsa proved to be vegetarian and crowd-pleasing, generous and elemental, warm and cozy, proof that what is oldest is sometimes also the most modern.

And after dinner, I was gently kidnapped, forced to stay with a mother-daughter duo during my two-week stay. Every evening, Maria stood at the stove, her 10 decades heavy on her stooped shoulders as she stewed softened pasta for visiting scholars and folk musicians. Seeing Maria’s lively, patient generosity, the relentless charisma of a nonna at the height of her powers, was a balm to my still-grieving heart.

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During the years that followed when we couldn’t visit each other, Antonella kept us in touch via WhatsApp. I wrote my novel, The Lost Boy of Santa Chioniawith my two Calabrian advisors looking over my shoulder, continuing my rigorous Greek cultural education as they sent me videos of how to cook Greek delicacies and demanded I respond with my own videos to prove I was doing it the right way. I was honored to use their names as the main characters in my novel about their beautiful, secret corner of the world.

‘The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia’ by Juliet Grames.

Alfred A. Knopf

Traditions are sacred because we make them sacred. Connecting with our heritage can bring us joy, but connecting with someone else’s can be just as joyful, a gift that complements our own treasured traditions and illuminates our commitment to them. We can choose to make new traditions sacred in the same way we can choose to make friends into family.

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The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia Juliet Grames is available now, wherever books are sold.

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Source: HIS Education