Tuscan Roots by Cynthia Rosi A rmed with a machete, an ancient digging stick and a mailbag, we set out one chilly April morning to dig Tus- can roots.
My husband and I had picked up our zia (aunt) from her stone house in a village built along an Apennine spur in Lunigiana—the Valley of the Moon. Wearing Wellington boots with nylon stockings, a black skirt, and a wool-knitted vest, Zia dressed in the same style as village women in photos from World War II. We searched for madder today, Rubia peregrina, used for thousands of years in Lunigiana to dye eggs for Holy Week and wool the bright red of a Medici cloak. Morning dew swamped our tennis shoes as we climbed past
blackberry thorns. Zia marched along and tutted at the overgrowth. “Twenty years ago there were sheep here, and potatoes,” she pointed out.“Youngsters don’t make money from sheep, and there are plenty vegetables in town.”
Suddenly Zia stopped. She crouched next to a tree, and began to whack at the earth with her digger, an ancient-looking tool with a leather wrapped, adze-shaped head. She wormed her fingers into the rich soil and carefully followed a cord back to the mother plant. Sitting on her heels in her black skirt, our white-haired Zia grinned, “How long, do you think, have people been digging these?” After gathering the stringy rhizomes, Zia made a bundle in her hand, and wrapped a long piece several times around the middle to tie it. Eying a broom plant, she handed my husband the machete. “For the rabbits,” she explained.
As I watched him whack at the stalks, I thought of the cart-load of forage stored in Zia’s outbuilding: a free source of feed for the meat. Back at the village, we squatted in front of our Zia’s stone house. We sorted and cut the madder into two-inch lengths. Zia peeled back the bark with her fingernails to show me the orangey core. “We dyed our socks red with these roots during the War,” she said. I’d felt amazement at such fresh wartime memories when I came to the village from Seattle twenty years ago. During that visit my father-in-law recalled the first American he’d ever met, an African-American zooming up the road in a Willis jeep, asking which way the retreating German army went. When the plants layered the bottom of a battered steel pot, we picked it up and turned our backs on a stun- ning view of the gardens: olives, vines, and snow-hooded mountains. At the village fountain, we rinsed the dusty roots under a brass spigot, scrubbed them against the pot, and dumped them all out onto the flags, only to put them back in the pot to rinse them again.
Kathleen Lindemann
Our Zia had no problem crouching on her heels, bent double over her little chore. Her spine is perfectly straight after a lifetime of tending sheep, goats, chickens and rabbits, maintaining her garden, hunting porcini mushrooms on the mountain with her walking stick, and preparing endless plates of home-made ravioli, polenta and loaves of foccacia.
As we worked, she told me that eggs dyed with madder will be edible even if the shells break. We returned to the kitchen and the brown wood stove that is central to her home’s warmth. She stoked the fire and pulled out iron rings until the bottom of the pot fit snugly into the hole, over the flame. The cut Rubia peregrina would simmer in water all day.
52 Winter/Spring 2012
greenwomanmagazine.com
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