ZIA FRANCESCA, MATRIARCH

She came to this country when she was only 15. With her brother Felix, they traveled across the pond and took with them their heritage. She was an improviser, a businesswoman, a mother, an organizer, and a leader. She was everyone’s aunt; she was a confessor, and a giver of comfort and money. She was no taller the 4’ 9”, and spoke broken English, raised three children in a shack without a husband who died of the Spanish flu serving our country.

She buried her son and soon after died herself, at the age of 97, when her body could not go on any longer, yet her brain could.

During the Great Depression, she owned both a pizzeria and a vegetable store. Her children all treated their friends to the movies because they were the only one’s with money.

Every year she made a pilgrimage to Italy to help poor village children, where they finally named a building after her years later.

For all her kindness, she was revered in the Italian community in Brooklyn. On any given Sunday, while the sauce cooked, and the house was filled with company, her phone would ring off the hook with people calling about the pilgrimage or the bus rides to some shrine in upstate NY. While this was happening, a steady stream of visitors would ring her bell, and by one’s and two’s, parade into her large kitchen to visit and speak their Italian, talking anything from world politics to the cost of a good salami at the deli. People would come to her for financial help, or perhaps they had a problem in the community, and could she take care of it? She even took care of the birds that gathered in her yard, eating the bread that she tossed out her screen door. Her yard was adorned with figs that hung from the trees, and grapes that were so sour, yet she turned them into sweet wine. Her cellar had a press for grapes, and one for tomatoes where she bottled her own sauce and wine.

Zia Francesca raised not only her children but her nieces and nephews as well. They came here from the old country, and she would sponsor them, giving them a home, and helping them find a job. She was their safe haven in a foreign world.

Her children all feared her, yet loved and respected her. No one could smoke in her presence if you were a daughter or niece.

In the end, after she died there was a huge void that settled over her family, one that because my dad was already gone, put a finality to life as I knew it to be, and brought home to me the fact that not only do we pass on, but we live on in the hearts and souls we leave behind, so in essence, we never die. We hear our parents in ourselves, we develop taste that are instilled in us, and it is all part of life’s continuity