“Well, in that case, give me a piece!” Zia Gab steps forward.
“Molto bene!” Niccolò shouts. He hands perfect triangular slices to me, Topher, and Zia Gab.
“Salute!” Zia Gab exclaims and tosses it back like it’s a shot glass. She scrunches her face in anticipation, but it immediately softens, and her eyes widen. “No, this is phenomenal; you have to try it right now! Hurry up, boys, before I snatch yours!”
Topher and I cheer.
It’s soft and pillowy, and the flesh isn’t bitter at all—it’s sweet, paired with a slight acidity from the rind and a dash of sour from the pulp; it tastes like the best piece of candy I’ve ever eaten.
“It’s perfectly balanced, holy balls!” I say.
“Fielder, mouth!” Ma yells.
“Sorry, but Ma, you gotta try this. Seriously, everyone has to try this! I want to eat this like a freaking hand fruit!”
“You can just bite right into it, like an apple.” Niccolò grabs another lemon and chows down like it’s his last meal.
“I need fifty of these!” I shout.
He hands me another slice and cuts pieces for everyone else.
“Candy.” Monroe snaps her fingers like she’s at a slam poetry event.
Matty spins on his tiptoes. “Insane.”
Ricky smiles sheepishly and offers me more lemon, and everything melts away.
“You don’t like it?”
“I love it,” he says. “But you love it more. Have mine.”
A breathlessness overtakes me, and though we’re not alone, I feel like we are. Like this entire lemon grove is our sanctuary, it belongs only to us.
“Come,” Niccolò commands. “We’ve barely gotten started! Now that we’ve all gotten a little of nature’s zucchero.”
Nonna gets up and starts to do a little two-step, and Niccolò follows suit, taking the lead, and together they waltz the group along the stone terraces and down the narrowing dirt path up the mountain. I grab my phone from its perch and follow.
Breathtaking views of green-and-black-netted crops quilted into the fabric of the surrounding forests enrapture me.
We stumble upon wooden wagons carrying handwoven baskets, and Niccolò tells us about the hard work of the harvest, how most of it is done by hand, and how his father, who is now too old to climb the wooden terraces to harvest, taught him the backbreaking work it takes to run the grove at a young age.
“It is harder and harder to find local work. Every year, we produce less and less because of the instability of the climate. A few years ago, a nearby crop was destroyed entirely by an uncontrollable fire. If it is a harsh, hot year with no rain, everything dries up, and all it takes is one spark.” He explains how everything he uses is natural—there are no plastic ties for the branches of the lemon trees because they hand-split willow branches to tie them to the arms of the wooden arbors, the structures that allow the trees to grow and spread. The only manmade mechanism he uses is a pulley system that looks like a miniature gondola to help move crates of fruit from the peak down the mountain.
As we climb farther up, carefully traversing stone steps, Niccolò explains to us how tourism has kept Amalfi—and the crops it survives on—alive. “When we have a less than fruitful year, it’s harder to pay workers, so they don’t come back.” The Avello family is the last surviving family of lemon farmers. Every other family has left the region, moved to Rome or Milan, started new businesses and livelihoods.
“What keeps you here?” Topher asks, threading his fingers in between Sienna’s.
Niccolò leads us to a break in the terraces, and we can see the expanse of his grove, and the workers who climb tirelessly to harvest and reinforce the structures the Avello family have beenusing for centuries. Rolling hills blanketed in lemon trees. Patches of nets that protect the groves. Donkeys being led by farmers over a ridge through a patchy grove across from us. A glimmer of the Tyrrhenian Sea sparkles in the distance, a soft blue jewel set against tall mountains.
“This.” Niccolò’s voice catches as he shows us his bounty, his reason, his purpose.
“Two hundred years, my family, our history, this land. Mio primo amore. You never get over your first love, and I’ll never stop fighting to save it.” His fingers gently lift a small bulb on a nearby branch. “Funny what can grow from love.”
I’m usually not an emotional wreck (lies), but something about the way Niccolò talks about his legacy and the deep ties his family has to this land makes me think about who I am as a Lemon, our family, and what I want my own legacy to be. Before today, I never would have thought about something like this, and maybe it’s being here in Italy, our origin country, surrounded by the people I love most that has me in my feelings. An overwhelming wave of emotions crashes over me, floods me like a tsunami: What am I doing with my life? Where am I going? Does any of it matter? All the followers and content buzzing around me that consumes my daily thoughts, is it real?
Like Ricky wrote in his journal, I’m a seed from a mother tree that hasn’t blossomed yet, stuck in a juvenile state, waiting to fruit.
“Lemons are the most versatile food source here in Amalfi— we use them for everything,” Niccolò continues. “The lemon is the lifeblood of the local economy and ecosystem, and commercethroughout Italy, from seafood to desserts to limoncello to candles, oils, soaps, and anything you can think of. Here, nothing is wasted.”
