Honoring the "mother line" as we near Mother's Day

Years ago, when I first started writing Something Italian, I devised a number of titles for the book. I like to have words in mind when working, to add inspiration, to give heft to the framework, like building a house, knowing its architectural style.

Everything Good Begins the Basement was one title. Cooking Between the Lines another. And one of my favorites—The Mother Line.

The Mother Line implied the ancestral lineage of me, my mother, Vinzenzella Jean, and two grandmothers, Raffaela and Stella. It also implied the lines on the faded pages of my mother’s recipes binders, the perfect lines of her handwriting, the line drawn from me to her, as shaky and crooked as it often was. And the crossed-out lines in her writing and mine, as if we’d changed our minds, or had something else to say. Which we often did.

And, who could forget her smile lines?

In honor of Mother’s Day, I am sharing to paid subscribers, the original Mother Line essay, unrevised, unedited, before feedback from my writing partner, along with a favorite Mom recipe. Pure in its form. In the many iterations of that essay, tentacles reached out in new directions I hadn’t considered. Eventually, like the remaining essays, sentences were adapted to fit the whole.

However, we all know, mothers stand alone, pure in their form too.

(and remember, paid subscribers receive a signed copy of Something Italian at a discounted rate).