Tuesday,
May 15, 2007
Nonna Nina - The
Impact a Great-Grandmother Who Passed Before you Arrived
The
ANNOTICO Report
It's
amazing and inspiring to read how much of an Impact a Great Grandmother that
had passed on before one ever entered the World would have.
It
is Moving and Heartfelt, and the Devotion is Not Misplaced..
Nonna Nina
Donna
Bertaccini
The
Huffington Post
May
15, 2007
How does one
begin to describe the impact a great-grandmother has had on you when the fact
of the matter is she was long gone by the time you rolled around?
Do you start by
recounting, one by one, the stories you've heard told from childhood on, about
this remarkably resilient, loving, dynamic, peanut of
an Italian woman? "Peanut indeed," I hear her whisper in my ear as I
set pen to paper. "Put those frayed and faded black and white photos away.
Why, during the summer harvest, I was climbing peach trees at the ripe old age of eighty-five, and don't you ever forget that." Hardly, Nonna. Hardly.
Though she may have been short in stature, I'm told that what she lacked in
size, she made up for in strength and spirit. I don't doubt that. There are
many of her loved ones still around to attest to that, including her now ninety
year old grandson, my father. And that's not to mention, perhaps her biggest
fan, my own mother, story-teller extraordinarie,
herself now in her early eighties and keeper of the flame of all things Nonna Nina.
Do I continue on
then to explain that this is my adoptive great-grandmother I write of? I'm not
really flesh of her flesh nor blood of her blood,
though I am of her breast milk. Wild, no? This
particular story goes that Nonna Nina already had a
biological child by the time she gave birth to her second, a full term
stillborn. Though surely crestfallen and disheartened, that didn't send Nonna to bed; sheets pulled up over her head weeping in
sorrow and despair. No way. She awoke the very next morning to the crowing of
the roosters and casting her tragedy aside, headed straight to the local
orphanage.
There, the nuns
handed her my grandmother,
Family lore has
it that
Though she would
likely have had no inkling more than a full century ago, Nonna
Nina in part helped steer my life on its course. So much so, that when the time
came for my husband and I to start our own family, I chose to have home births
with my children, just like Nonna Nina, and then
later went on to adopt a delightful little girl from half way around the world.
To be sure, our adoptive daughter is everything we prayed for and then some.
For those who know our Soleil, our sunshine, she is testimony to the fact that
this world of ours can be more than magical if only we believe.
Getting back to Nonna Nina, interestingly enough, my parents' first face to
face meeting with her at the family farm in Pievaquinta
came shortly after World War II. It was on a trip to
They quickly went
on to have two boys. Sadly, not all that long after, my grandfather died
suddenly at age thirty-nine in the Influenza epidemic of 1918, thus leaving my
grandmother the sole responsibility of raising her young sons. As fate would
have it, despite eventually remarrying happily,
My dad and his
younger brother, proud Americans both, enlisted and found themselves in
In the end,
several of my cousins were part of the group which claimed responsibility for
the lynching of Il Duce himself. Mussolini was no stranger to them. He was a
local boy, born and raised a mile or so up the road. Many had known him their
whole lives, grown up and gone to school with him. Understandably, they were
anything but impressed with the boy from Predappio.
Relief came, of sorts, when the British showed up, kicked the Germans out, and
then took their place on the farm for several months. The difference this go round was that my relatives befriended the British
soldiers and went on to keep in touch with several of them for many years. So
you see, this first meeting between my dad and Nonna
Nina, decades in the making, was momentous to say the least.
My mom, in
particular, fell hard for Nonna Nina, admiring not
only her unwavering strength, faith and dignity, but her boundless and
welcoming love. What neither Nonna Nina nor
Italians and
Americans alike, were determined to keep the family
connections tight for decades to come. No more lengthy separations. Indeed, one
of my earliest childhood memories is of waking up on the family farm in
Donna
Bertaccini co-owns and is Executive Producer for Molesworth Enterprises, Inc. (www.molesworth.com) a television
production company based in
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