From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home

“Cooking is about surrender.”

With this observation, it becomes clear that the very act of cooking food symbolizes love throughout Tembi’s memoir. As a child of divorced parents, Tembi’s early college days are marked by a deeply ingrained distrust of the very concept of unconditional love, and Saro’s elaborate courtship-by-cooking is truly his “love language,” his desire to show her without words that by surrendering so much of his time and energy into delighting her senses and her soul, he surrenders his heart to her as well. Ultimately, Tembi chooses to surrender her own fears and accept Saro’s love over her misgivings and the objections of his family.

“In creating one family, Saro had lost another.”

Although Tembi and Saro fall in love and have the courage to build a life together despite their cultural differences, this decision causes a deep rift between Saro and his own parents, severing his connection to his roots, history, and ancestral home for many years. This quote highlights the painful irony that creating one thing can often destroy something else unless a reconciliation can be forged.

“I knew now that everything that came next was going to be about both labor and love.”

Traveling to Aliminusa with Zoela just months after losing Saro, Tembi shows in this quote that she is still deeply caught in the throes of her grief, and her trepidation upon arriving in Sicily underscores the enormity of the task before her: to commune with and become a part of her husband’s family and to honor him in the process, balancing his final wishes with his family’s traditions and expectations. Despite her sudden desire to flee, she pushes through her grief out of love and fulfills Saro’s dying wish to have his ashes scattered in Sicily.

“In just a few months, Zoela was expanding the scope of my vision of the world, my vision of myself, my capacities. She brought forth a well of determination and power within me.”

This quote emphasizes the deep philosophical transformation that Tembi undergoes upon becoming a mother: a truly transformative experience. While the main focus here is on the changes that begin immediately after adopting Zoela, it is also clear that the addition of Zoela to the family does not change Tembi into a new person; instead, it allows her to discover aspects of herself that she never realized she possessed. Becoming a mother forces her to expand her understanding of what she can achieve for herself and for her family. The intensity of this connection lays the groundwork for readers to understand that it is Tembi’s love for Zoela that ultimately helps her to push through her grief and allows her to rebuild her life after Saro’s death.

“I wanted her to know that love can come in many forms. That sometimes it can look like letting go, but it can also look like never letting go. That one day she might have to love someone in ways the world wasn’t ready for. That reaching for that kind of love would bring with it struggle, but in the end, it could be grander than her wildest imaginings.”

This passage outlines Tembi’s inner musings on how best to address Zoela’s grief over losing her father and how best to help her daughter move forward with her life. Tembi desires to find the right balance between remembering and forgetting—between honoring the memory of her husband and allowing her daughter to go forth and forge new memories. Along with this preoccupation is the knowledge that in addition to helping her daughter grieve, she is also teaching her how to grieve properly and healthily, and she is acutely aware that the patterns she establishes in this moment will profoundly affect how her daughter chooses to live her life as an adult.

“Ignorance was changeable. My love for him was not.”

This terse quote encapsulates Tembi’s determination to heal the breach that her love for Saro unintentionally created between him and his family, for although Croce and Giuseppe’s disapproval infected the early years of Saro and Tembi’s marriage and Saro stubbornly refused to heal the breach himself, Tembi’s decision to organize a trip to Sicily without his knowledge reflects just how deep her sense of love and sacrifice is for her husband. In order to make things right for him and for his family, she is willing to make every effort to heal the “ignorance” that has kept them apart for so many years. Her determination ultimately forges new connections that never would have come to be without her courage and love.

“Sicily beckoned with her sapphire blue sea, her rocky arid terrain that, without warning, offered up verdant fields of poppies.”

Sicily is a symbol of family, home, heritage, and belonging in Tembi’s memoir. Her vivid descriptions of Sicily not only underscore its importance, but also transport readers to the island as vividly as if they were themselves walking through hidden fields of poppies and discovering the lush secrets that the island hides around every corner.

“We were survivors of a kind. We held, between us, a kind of secret of life and what mattered most. And that secret, that deep understanding of the constancy of nature and its opposition, human impermanence, was what I hoped would eventually help us gain our equilibrium.”

This quote exemplifies the complex relationship that both Tembi and Zoela have with their shared grief over Saro’s death, for just as Saro strengthens Tembi and Zoela’s bond by bringing life’s impermanence to the fore, both mother and daughter are able to comfort each other even as they grieve in vastly different ways. Tembi’s memoirs thus become the courageous recounting of an emotional and psychological odyssey in which she overcomes not just the physical distance between her culture and her husband’s, but also the divide between the life that was and the new one that she must work hard to build. She and Zoela are ultimately survivors of the ravages of grief and loss.

“They had come by chance; they had stayed by choice.”

The succinct yet emotional nature of this quote describes the steadfastness of Tembi’s friends, who stand by her side while she cares for and loses Saro despite her best efforts to help him to live well in the world. Despite their many setbacks with Saro’s family over the years, Tembi and Saro open their home to a wide variety of friends during their marriage, and Tembi continues this tradition by hosting celebrations of Saro on the anniversary of his death, ultimately celebrating both her choice to create a life with Saro and her friends’ ongoing choice to entwine their lives with her own.

“I had begun to appreciate that in her world, nothing was rushed—love, grief, joy, or a pot on the stove.”

Further emphasizing the central role of food in the overall memoir, this quote focuses on Croce’s approach to life and draws powerful parallels between the processes of preparing a meal and working through life’s emotions. Tembi implies that both actions are commonplace and yet sacred, as both are an inevitable part of the universal human experience. The quote also calls attention to the cultural differences between Tembi’s fast-paced life in LA and the leisurely tempo of life in Aliminusa.

“I had accepted that I would never be close to his parents. Just being in one another’s lives was a huge enough hurdle to overcome in one lifetime. I had never imagined them coming to Los Angeles, seeing our life in person.”

This quote underscores Tembi’s amazement and gratitude that a reconciliation between Saro and his parents is possible after all, despite the years of estrangement that had kept them apart. Pleased as she is by these positive developments, her statement also betrays a slight edge of apprehension, as she wonders, perhaps, what Saro’s parents will make of the life that she and their son have built for themselves in Los Angeles.

“One bite and my heart eased, my stress lowered. Los Angeles began to fall away as if it literally existed in another time and place.”

With this quote, Tembi reiterates the deeply vital role that well-prepared food plays in her life as a source of both physical and spiritual nourishment. By describing the restorative effect of her first meal at Croce’s house during her second summer in Aliminusa, Tembi also implies that a deeper level of healing has begun as she more fully embraces the subtler nuances of Sicilian culture and leaves the less healthy aspects of her life in the United States behind, welcoming a renewed life even as she welcomes the meal itself.

“Life was separating my curd from my whey.”

This quote emphasizes the philosophical significance underlying Tembi and Zoela’s first attempts to make ricotta cheese with a local cheesemaker during their second summer in Aliminusa. As Tembi presses, drains, and molds the cheese, she realizes that cheesemaking and the process of separating bitter from sweet elements is akin to separating the bitterness of past grief from the sweetness of the present moment. Both require patience and work, time and pressure.

“Nature was magnificent here. It created a kind of inner stillness I couldn’t find in L.A.”

This quote emphasizes the profoundly healing impact that the very presence of Sicily has upon Tembi, accustomed as she is to the unhealthy hustle and bustle of Los Angeles. Presented with Aliminusa’s natural beauty, Tembi is soothed in a myriad of subtle ways that fast-paced LA simply cannot offer, and thus her husband’s native homeland becomes an unexpected refuge to which she returns again and again in her quest to heal and to belong.

“Saro couldn’t be forgotten there.”

Tembi initially travels to Aliminusa to fulfill her promise to Saro to scatter his ashes in Sicily, but she finds herself returning again and again to revel in an ever-growing sense of community and belonging. Not only is Sicily the place where she feels closest to Saro, but it is also the source of inspiration for building a new, family- and tradition-centered life for herself and Zoela, all of which helps to ease her grief. In this way, the very act of looking back allows her to move forward and forge a new life for herself and her daughter in Saro’s absence.

“Part of me was exalted by getting to experience this place again many years later; another part of me suddenly wanted to plunge myself into the sea.”

With this quote, it becomes clear that grieving is not a simple or linear process for Tembi, but one characterized by multiple relapses in the midst of her triumphs and progressions forward in life. Some moments, like her trip to Agrigento with Zoela years after first visiting the site, stir a range of mixed emotions, for on one hand, she is thrilled to see the ruins once again, but revisiting this cherished place also exposes her to new feelings of grief that have yet to be dealt with and set aside.

“Her gift was allowing me to stand in her shade until I was able to walk out into the sun.”

This quote describes the profound impact that Croce’s wordless strength has on Tembi’s struggle to heal in the aftermath of Saro’s death, for Croce not only takes care of Tembi physically by cooking for her as a mother would, but she also keeps Saro’s memory alive in a thousand little ways, from her attention to detail in preparing nourishing meals to her inclusion of both Tembi and Zoela in the tight-knit Sicilian community that surrounds them in its warm embrace. She provides the shelter that Tembi, in her grief, so desperately needs.

“Before, the grief had been like being caught in the undertow. Now I felt I had fought my way to the top of the water. I could see the sky, but I had neither the energy nor the inclination to swim in a new direction. I was just learning to breathe again.”

This passage describes an awkward middle point in Tembi’s long, arduous grieving process. By her third summer in Aliminusa, she is no longer debilitated with grief, but she has not yet found the strength to choose a deliberate path and purpose or actively start to rebuild her life. Instead, she remains in an odd stasis, combining the minutiae of the “now” with remembrances of her life past, and it will be a while yet before she is able to recalibrate enough to move on.

“Time was what Sicily gave me.”

This quote sums up the collective significance of Tembi’s three long visits to her husband’s childhood home in Sicily after his death, for these trips are the true impetus for her eventual ability to heal from his loss. Freed from work and other obligations, she embraces an alternative life far away from the daily routines she and Saro developed during their marriage and away from the American-style “hustle” of life in Los Angeles that precludes the quiet contemplation needed to truly begin to heal. Surrounded by the kindness of her adopted Sicilian community, Tembi starts to imagine who she might choose to become without Saro by her side.

“I will use the love of this place to fortify me. It is my stone inheritance, the gift of Saro’s life.”

With the quiet strength of this quote, Tembi outlines the deep significance that Sicily has come to have for both her and her daughter. Sicily symbolizes family, home, heritage, and belonging. Spending summers in this peaceful place over the years not only helps Tembi come to terms with Saro’s death, but it also allows her to forge new bonds with his family and place of birth. By the end of her third summer in Aliminusa, Tembi feels as though she truly belongs in Saro’s hometown, a feeling that deepens after Croce so generously gives Tembi her house, a gift which states once and for all that Sicily will forever be Tembi’s home.

“Three generations and two tributaries of the Lupo family would begin the work of lighting the fire with wood collected from the fields, peeling the tomatoes, salting them, cutting onion, preparing the basil, manning the cauldron, then bottling and storing.”

Although this passage ostensibly explains how to make tomato sauce, it also establishes the importance of observing age-old traditions in Sicilian society, and once again, the preparation of food takes on a central role in this ongoing dynamic. Just as food brings family together in many different contexts, Tembi and Zoela declare themselves to be a part of this extended family by actively participating in this time-honored, annual ritual. The act of preparing food together thus cements their belonging within the larger community, just as tomatoes, onions, and spices come together in a pot to create something unique in the very act of joining.

“Whatever had actually happened was, in fact, irrelevant.”

As the final statement on the incident of the English tourist and the Sicilian motorist who is technically in the wrong, this quote highlights Aliminusa’s tightknit community and their commitment to protecting each other, for although the local driver is legally at fault, no witnesses will betray that communal sense of loyalty by testifying on behalf of an outsider over one of their own. Similarly, whatever uncomfortable things may have happened in Tembi and Saro’s own past, those things, too, are irrelevant in the face of her newfound belonging within the local community. She and her daughter are part of Croce’s family and part of Aliminusa as a whole, and as such, they too are entitled to (and obligated to provide) similar loyalty alongside the local inhabitants.

“‘Mamma.’ I ventured to call her that, it felt natural in the moment.”

This quote emphasizes just how much Tembi and Croce’s relationship has evolved over the years. From initially marrying Saro without his family’s blessing to ultimately becoming a solid member of the family, Tembi traces the long, arduous path of her ever-developing relationship with her husband’s family, and there is no symbol more expressive of ultimate acceptance than being able to name someone a surrogate mother, bestowing upon them such an intimately familiar term as “mamma.”