In the beginning, my task was just to observe.  Eventually, she encouraged and guided me to dig in and try my own hand at rolling, pressing and patting down. With her patient, deliberate teaching – Abuela and I – produced canvas after canvas of dough.    There were sheets all over the workroom.  There were sheets on floured surfaces of the table, over chairs, on floured cookie pans, on floured TV tables and even hanging on the clothesline.  It was a sea of layered pasta sheets everywhere.

Abuela retraces back to her very first sheet, somehow, inexplicably, remembering the order – like a lost dog that finds his way home from several miles away.  Each sheet in procession is folded over at the narrower end, from the bottom up about two inches.  She continuously folds until it is about a two by twelve inch paint stick of pleated pasta.  She places her left hand over the top and centers, angles and positions it to slice.  She shears half inch slits evenly across with the finesse and precision of an haute couture seamstress.  With her right hand she threads a thin, wooden dowel my dad gave her, through the crimped slashes.  She lifts the tallarines up into the air, homemade pasta strips dangling, at last, like strands at the end of a fringed scarf.

The sewing room provided a place for gathering, shaping and transferring of food, fabric and facts.   The music forged a background for learning, expressing and laboring with ease and joy.  The food conveyed the patterned mosaic of love, sustenance and heritage.  The women endowed me with a legacy. A gift, I offered my daughters.

My daughter, V, this summer, using a pasta machine!