Why We Started Writing Things Down
Every April, around the time the garden wakes and the apricot tree shows its first pale blossom, Nonna Elsa opens the drawer under the kitchen table and takes out a notebook with a soft blue cover. It is not really a diary. It is a list of things she did not want to lose: how much sugar the apricot jam needed in a wet year, the week the cellar was too warm for the ice cream, the morning the fig tree came into leaf. She wrote in pencil, in a small hand that leaned forward, as if the page were trying to pull away from her.
This blog began because of that notebook. In 1999, the year my mother was seventeen and Nonna was already the age where everything had to be written down or it was gone, the first pages were copied out and typed on a borrowed machine at the kitchen table. There were eight of them that first year. Nobody imagined it would keep going, let alone that the same pages would still be here nearly thirty years later, with photographs where her handwriting used to be.
My sister Elena and I do the typing now. Our mother Marta still keeps the notebook and still buys the same blue ones at the stationer's counter, and she still corrects us when we soften a detail. Nonna read the first few of these pages on the screen and said they were fine, which from her was high praise. She died in the winter of 2019, and the notebook stayed in the drawer, where it has been ever since.
We post something most weeks, mostly about what is in season and what we made from it. Sometimes it is a recipe. Sometimes it is only a note about the weather or an argument we had. The point is not advice. The point is that rhubarb lasted two weeks in 2004 and eleven days in 2019, and unless somebody writes it down, nobody will ever know.