Nipotism

My wife and I don’t grow anything to eat.

There’s be no point to it, anyway, as a deer is like a bunny rabbit around here. They eat at the prickly barberry bushes and nibble the spiny leaves off the hollies now. It would be a 24 hour counterassault to try to safeguard actual food from them. Neither one of us comes by it naturally anyway.

My beloved Uncle Raphael grows things to eat. He has a soft spot for enormous gaudy flowers, too. In the early summer he’ll attend any fete with a huge bucket of blooms for the hosts. But this time of year, it’s all food he brings.

I can’t remember the latin term, exactly. Glebae ascriptii, I think. Google is no help. It might be forty years since I read the term, but it stuck. It meant tied to the land, I believe. It referred to people who were serfs, who literally came with the property.

I can’t imagine our ancestors were very wealthy before they crossed the ocean in big rusting freighters to scratch out a life here in America. When I think of paisan, I think of peasant. That is its literal derivation, though that is obscure now. You are my friend, my countryman, my compatriot, because like me, you scratch your living out of the same earth.

I wonder if we were glebae ascriptii. I’m sure we were paisans. I wonder if it is in our bones, somewhere, the wonderful magic of bringing forth life from the land. If it’s in my bones, it is hiding well. Maybe Uncle Ray got mine. He certainly got more than his share. I can’t think of another man that has conjured more things out of this earth and sea than he. It has to be enough, perhaps that he is my zio Raphael, and thinks to give the fruits of his labor to his nipote.

It was common in the working trades to labor next to those that were older, and learn from them. That was the compact. The grail for the younger man was always the grudging respect you could earn with your effort from the older and wiser man. His nephews all took a run at it. Uncle Ray wore us all out. We brought in reinforcements and they flagged. He’s retired now, long after he should have been. Now he wears us out with his tomatoes. Someday he’ll wear out the other archangels with his smile.