Dinner Talk

By Edvige Giunta

The asparagus grew in the Sicilian garden, and my mother made frittata that was sometimes lunch, sometimes dinner, sometimes snack. Food ran like a thread through our days, and it was orderly and good. We ate lunch together, but my father ate dinner alone because he stayed out, talking politics in the square, and needed to eat right before bed because of his digestion. Sometimes I sat with him, and I remember him chewing bread and drinking wine, and the stories he told me, and his voice rising almost to a shout and then lowering to a whisper, and sometimes his silence, full.