Nonna and I danced the tarantella               (Mom on the left, Dad on the near right, and Tim’s dad  on the far right)

I’ve always loved the tarantella, a traditional wedding dance in Southern Italy. Even as a child, I begged Nonna to dance it with me. She’d laugh, shuffle a few quick steps, then collapse into a kitchen chair, insisting she didn’t remember “t’is kind’a dance.”

Before my wedding, I pleaded with her to dance it with me, but she adamantly refused. Still, near the end of the cocktail hour, when Nonna announced she was ready to leave, Mom quietly cued the musicians, and the tarantella began.

What followed felt like a small miracle. Nonna sat very still, then lifted her eyes to mine, nodded, and held out her hand. She stood, stepped toward me, and began to dance: clapping, twirling, holding the edges of her dress just so. Guests formed a circle around us as she pulled from her pocket a crisp white handkerchief she had crocheted for her dowry decades earlier. She held one end, I held the other, and we danced in one direction and then the other – her face solemn, as if she were back in Rotondella dancing with Vincenzo.

Then, as suddenly as she began, she nodded again. She was finished. She kissed me, kissed my husband Tim, and told Uncle Jimmy, “Now, I go home,” walking away with a light step and a smile.

We kept dancing the tarantella as she had shown us. I danced with Tim, imagining myself in Rotondella too.

My reflection: I have many tender memories of Nonna, but this one still moves me deeply. She didn’t want to dance “t’is kind’a dance,” but she did it for me.

Something to think about: Isn’t this what we – mothers and grandmothers, fathers and granddads – do? We work to make our loved ones happy. I’ll never know what memories that song stirred in Nonna’s heart, but she loved me and danced because she knew it would bring me joy. And more than fifty years later, it remains one of my most cherished memories.