Gnocchi and ... nothing

My favorite dish is gnocchi, but I can never make it like my Nana made it.

'Made it.' She died of cancer two years ago, and it feels like yesterday that I was holding her nothing hand as her body was eaten away by the cancer in the hospice. But every time I do take out the left-over mashed potatoes and the bag of flour, I make them as I watched her making them, and smile, remembering how she guided my tiny hands in her powerful ones as we made gnocchi together.

That was my Nana, my Italian grandmother.

I don't have one memory of my Irish grandmother. My understanding is that she ... drank, and she died when I was only a little girl. So I don't have any experience of being Irish, really, just some stories and my looks and that's it, because my mom's, you know, American.

I don't know where I'm going with this, because I am an American girl, and, as you may have read, I'm proud of that, too, but I'd also like to have a connectedness to my history, also, I guess. I mean, America has history, but not like history as in history, like the Italians or the Irish or the Greeks where they can go back more than a thousand years without breaking a sweat, and they can show you the places and buildings that older than that.

People who know their cultural heritage have a rootedness to them that I ... don't.

And I want that. I want to know that by making this cup of coffee I'm repeating the action that my ancestors have been doing for a thousand years, and I do feel that sense of peace when I make gnocchi and feel Nana's hands guiding mine, even today. But I don't feel that in much else of my life: turmoil is more like it. Restlessness. Rootlessness.

So if you do have a connection to your history, your culture, your past ... please treasure it and pass it on, because here's one little lost girl who so wants that grounding in her life.

kisses, 'phfina