Dandelions

Lenarduzzi’s touching debut, winner of the 2020 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, serves up lyrical meditations on food, family, and belonging. She uses the dandelion’s easily spread seeds as a metaphor through which to explore her family’s migration, focusing on the story of her grandmother Dirce, who at age 24 moved to Manchester, England, from Maniago, Italy, in 1950 amid the country’s postwar economic downturn. Weaving together anecdotes from her family’s history, she recounts her family’s “parable” about Dirce picking dandelion leaves in Manchester to the bewilderment of onlookers, who were unaware that in Italy the leaves were commonly eaten “tossed with salt, perhaps a splash of vinegar.” Historical detours enrich the symbolism, as when the author notes that European settlers may have brought dandelions to the Americas in the 1600s because the weed’s hardiness ensured it would take root and provide a “steady supply of leaves for salads and stews.” Lenarduzzi’s admiration for her grandmother’s resourcefulness and resilience provides an affecting emotional backbone, and the elegant prose delights (“Tens of moony dandelions were meeting their maker, casting their ghost-seeds to the breeze,” she writes about a groundskeeper with a weed trimmer). The result is a ruminative take on what it means to put down roots. (May)