On My Father's Island: Sao Miguel Part One
“Come, querida. Eat, darling."
That's how I’d finished eulogizing my grandmother at her funeral in Carona, Queens, before her body was flown back to Sao Miguel, the largest island in the cluster of the Portuguese Azores. A first-generation American, my Portuguese is limited. But food I speak, and this oft-repeated phrase from my avó - come querida - had stuck.
Packed into a tiny rental car with my father, one of my uncles and my American photographer as we speed from the airport in Ponta Delgada to our town of Povoação, I wonder if I can get by with the basics. I'll be taking the photographer, Brent, all over the island to places I remember from my many visits over the years, and to a few I've never been: the one remaining vineyard on the island, a slaughterhouse with a restaurant attached, one of the many pineapple farms. I'm unsure of my language skills, but hope they'll return to me as they have many trips over before.It takes us less than two hours to cross the island, a new highway drastically cutting out some of the meandering roads I’d driven many times in the past. It's March, earlier in the year than any other time I’ve come, and cool, wet air hits us from all sides. We climb the land thrust skyward thousands of years ago by volcanoes, and the rotten-egg smell of sulfur sometimes drifts downwind from open springs to make sure we remember where it's all come from. In the front seat, my dad and Tio Octavio absentmindedly speak a muddle of both languages, pointing out the Japanese cryptomerias that grow so tall that native plants dwindle in their shade, or trying to remember which friend had lived in which house and if they were still alive. By the time we’ve made it to Povoação we are damp, jetlagged, and spent.Stretching out in my grandparents’ bed – a mattress on a wire frame with a metal headboard, flanked by statues of Catholic saints and covered with a hand-made throw slightly musky from the nearby sea air – I realized that things seem less romantic than they had been on my prior trip, that one a bit harsher in reality than the one before, and so on, all the way back to that first rose-colored visit alone with my father when I was about eleven. My stints since have been largely celebratory, lazy days spent on the rocky beaches with family, long meals on rickety tables outside. My avo's kale soup, the bread from her oven in the garage, the sardines she'd fry, the shellfish we'd eat by the beach, the stews of pork and potatoes... I crave this food at home when needing comfort. I'd always considered it special, and worth holding onto and sharing.But is it? Food here doesn't strive to be beautiful. It's meant to sustain, to be shared with family, with friends. I'm not yet sure if it could be significant from an outsider's perspective, or if I want it to be.
...To be continued...