After dinner when I was a child we\u2019d walk from 17th Street
\nup the hill to visit my aunt and uncle, Zia Rosa and Zio Gianni.
\nZio built a huge grape arbor at least thirty feet long
\nand 20 feet wide down the center and lined up tables
\ncovered in oilcloth. He built a bench
\nthat ran all the way around the edges, where all
\nthe children would sit. Zia Rosa would give us
\ncream sodas and cookies and the women would sit
\nat one end of the tables gossiping in whispers
\nand laughing. The men would sit on the other end
\nplaying cards, talking politics, and drinking wine
\nin short glasses, peaches sliced into each glass.
\n
\nMy father and the other men all made their own wine,
\nand at the same time each year, they made a trip
\nto the farmers\u2019 market to buy boxes of grapes. I remember
\nmy father lugging those boxes into the basement.
\nHe\u2019d wash the grapes, feed them into the wine press,
\nand then transfer them to the wooden barrel
\nwhere they\u2019d ferment, the aroma rising
\nthrough the floors into our cold water flat.
\n
\nIf I close my eyes, I can still smell them.
\nMy father poured the wine into green gallon jugs
\nto be set out on our dinner table, one bottle at a time.
\nThen, he would pour the wine into a short water glass
\nand he and my mother would have one glass with each meal.
\nWe never got to drink this wine, except sometimes
\nat my uncle\u2019s house. My uncle made the best wine
\nof all the men, and he also made whiskey and liquor so strong
\na tiny glass could send even larger men reeling,
\nand he\u2019d encourage them to drink more than one
\nuntil they\u2019d stagger home. <\/p>\n
After dinner when I was a child we\u2019d walk from 17th Street up the hill to visit my aunt and uncle, Zia Rosa and Zio Gianni. Zio built a huge grape arbor at least thirty feet long and 20 feet wide down the center and lined up tables covered in oilcloth. He built a bench [&hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4350,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[219],"class_list":["post-4346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","tag-photo-by-jill-wellington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4346"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4351,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4346\/revisions\/4351"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n
\nMaria Mazziotti Gillan is a recipient of the 2014 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs), the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers and the 2008 American Book Award for her book, All That Lies Between Us<\/em> (Guernica Editions). She is the Founder \/Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review<\/em>. She is also Director of the Creative Writing Program and Professor of Poetry at Binghamton University-SUNY. Maria has published twenty books. Her most recent are the poetry and art collection, The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets <\/em>(Redux Consortium). Ancestors’ Song<\/em> (Bordighera Press), Writing Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find the Courage to Tell Your Stories<\/em> (MiroLand, Guernica) and the bi-lingual poetry collection, In a Place of Flowers & Light<\/em> (poems in English & Italian with a preface by Elisabetta Marino, edited by Osvaldo Marrocco (San Mauro and Mia Mama).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"