When I was a little girl, I spent a lot of time with my Italian grandmother(my mom's mom). I called her Non. She was loud, opinionated, loving, dramatic and a FABULOUS storyteller. Her stories were vivid and clear and always excitingly captivating. She had countless tales of life as a little girl in the 1910s/1920s. I absolutely loved her stories and requested them constantly. The stories I requested the most often were stories about what and how she played as a child since as her family was quite poor and toys were an unnecessary frivolity. In fact, she and her siblings had almost no toys at all, save a few that had been hand made by friends and family. My sister and I having almost every toy that was ever advertised during the commercial breaks between our beloved Saturday morning cartoons, found the concept of life with no toys unfathomable and were wildly curious as to how surviving such a situation would even be possible.
While she and her brothers had come up with many ingenious toys in her youth, my absolute favorite makeshift toy from all of her stories were the clever yet simple twirling ballerinas she made from freshly picked fuchsia blooms. Non explained how the beautiful little hanging flowers clearly looked just like a perfectly lovely young woman in beautifully colorful tutu and by plucking two of the 4 outer leaves off you could create arms for the magical dancer. Then with a twist of the stem you have yourself a fully interactive dancing ballerina. Since fuchsias grow beautifully in the San Francisco area where she grew up and are a very common flower in personal gardens and parks it was never hard to find some. Because of this generous plant, Non was able to have a pocket sized dancing dolls at any given time.
Truly inspired and captivated by this dancing flowers(and my grandmothers clever ingenuity), I spent many a day of my childhood harvesting fuchsia blooms from our family's fuchsia bush while imagining them as troops of delicate and whimsical dancers from far away kingdoms.
To this day I still can not look at a fuchsia without imagining a ballerina. And the flower will always remind me of my grandmother and her fantastic stories.
To add to my great fondness of the flower, Roger and I were even married in a Fuchsia garden.
2 comments:
What a beautiful story! This is one I will be sharing with my girl, she adores flowers and ballerinas, and this will captivate her imagination. What a wonderful, blessed time you received with your grandma!
Gorgeous story! I think you've inherited your grandmother's story telling ability ;)
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