This little lady, rosary in hand, daily prowled the sidewalks in our neighborhood, seeking news and gossip and lamenting vanished landmarks: like grandmothers who sat on the front porches of every house, watching who came in and out. Their absence had enabled, she said, crime and
immorality in the neighborhood, but “Our Holy Mother will recall grandmothers to their duties again.”
At the time, that remark seemed as ludicrous as the fig tree ritual. With age, I've learned better. Her actions and advice spoke of a deeper connection: to family and parents, to tradition and responsibility many generations old.
When they left their home in Italy, her parents had been married seven years and had lost four of their five children to death. They brought only her three year-old brother, Giuseppe. She was born five months after they arrived in the United States in 1926. It must have been very hard under these circumstances for her parents to leave their small town near Naples.
Like all immigrants, her parents brought only their most valuable possessions. A carefully wrapped root from the family's fig tree in Italy was one of them. Her father planted the fig scion in the New World garden. There were no other fig trees in the area; winters are much too cold in northern Indiana! So, every year, just before the hard frost set in, around early November, her father dug several “graves” for the fig trees from Italy. Then, about five months later, always on Holy Saturday, her father would dig up the fig trees, shake off the dirt, plant them upright, mulch and water the bed. By June, the fig trees were heavy with ripening fruit. There was a large Italian neighborhood then, and from the time she was a little girl, she saw her mother proudly giving away bowls of figs to the neighbors.
She and her brother both took roots from their parents' fig trees when they married and started their own families. The children and grandchildren — there were 15 of them all together — who lived all over the country, also have cuttings. The parents died in the 1940s and her brother died in the 60s; her own husband had been gone for nearly twenty years. The Italian neighborhood of the past had continued up into the 1950s, but it is gone now, too.
Now, it is almost Easter. It is almost time for her to dig up her two ancient fig trees. It is a lot of trouble, but would she do anything else? In a world of change and loss, she has two things that connect her to the past and to eternity: her faith and her fig trees.
(This article is reprinted with permission from Canticle Magazine.)
