Chapter 1 The slender thread

O n an autumn morning in 1975, I was lying down in our room on the hill in Kibbutz Merhavia, a few steps from my parents' room, where I had spent my childhood. For the past week I had lain in bed all the time, getting up only for the bathroom and shower, carefully safeguarding the fruit of my belly, which was scheduled to see the light of day in May. I spent the days reading and thinking. I had just finished a book about a mentally challenged child named Todd. It was a fascinating account by two researchers, Glen Doman and Carl Delcatto on how to improve Todd's quality of life by means of a method they had developed. Influenced by the book, I repeatedly hoped that the child growing in my womb would be born healthy and whole. A determined decision echoed in my head: not to give up my right as his mother, and the mother of his two siblings, to let them know what genetic heritage I was passing on to them.

It was 3:45 in the afternoon – the hour that in normal times I would go out after a short midday rest to pick up the children from the children's house. I would take them either to the playground, to visit their grandparents, or for a tour of the barn and chicken coop. On that day I'd arranged with Dubi, my husband, to take our seven-year-old daughter Shani and four-year-old son Shafi for a walk. I knew that my parents would be arriving any minute. My heart raced with excitement when I heard their footsteps nearing the door. My mother came in first, carrying a bowl of fruit. She asked how I was and went straight to the small kitchen. The "kitchen" was in the corner of a porch that was closed in with two sliding windows, creating a kind of narrow nook with a sink and a tiny bit of marble, with barely enough room for a cutting board and a kettle.

"Would you like me to make you a fruit salad, or just cut the fruit up onto a plate?" she asked, her voice coming from beyond the open window frame.

"I'd love a fruit salad," I answered hastily from the double bed that was wedged into the narrow passage between the living room and the shower. My thinking was to buy some time, because today it was happening – today I was going to break the silence.

My father sat at the foot of the bed and stroked my hand that was sticking out from under the blanket. "How are you feeling, Nanchik? Have you had anything to eat today? Do you want something to drink?"

"I'm fine – just passing the time, reading, and enjoying the peace and quiet."

My father glanced at the book that was lying next to me and picked it up with hands that were lined with prominent, dark blue veins. His rough fingers flipped through the pages as if trying to figure out the gist of the story. "So who's this Todd?" he asked.

"A child born intellectually challenged, and thanks to the determination of his mother and his devoted family, he became a lifelong project for two doctors who believed in a treatment method that included physical exercise. They set up an intensive treatment program, which included therapists and volunteer aides working in shifts. Together they managed to better Todd's quality of life and improve his functioning."

I saw this as an opportunity to get to the question I had always wanted to ask but hadn't dared. "You know, what intrigues me the most about the book is the conflict of his parents, knowing they have passed on a defect to their child, one they can't change. What was most exciting for me is that out of their terrible frustration, they turned the world upside down and found a way to help him."

I was still talking when my mother came in with the fruit salad. I thanked her and asked her to take a chair and join us. With trembling hands, she handed me the plate.

I had been noticing the tremors for some time; apparently they were a side effect of the anti-depressants she was taking. I remembered them from childhood when she would be away from home. They told me she was in HaEmek Hospital in Afula, although I never knew exactly why. I'll never forget how my father and I once hiked from the kibbutz to the hospital, a half hour's walk on a dirt road. From the hospital gate we turned down a path to a lawn with trees and a wooden bench. I saw my mother sitting there in a dressing gown and slippers and was incredibly surprised. If she was sick, why was she in the garden? And if she was in the garden, why was she wearing a robe and pajamas?

I had seen her in pajamas only a few times, usually when I went to my parents' room on wintry Saturday mornings and got into their warm bed. Usually my father would be the one to stay in bed. Mother would get up early, and by the time I arrived she would often be preparing a quick breakfast.

A short time before I got pregnant for the third time, she seemed somewhat apathetic and her speech was slower. Her eyes glistened, and her face was swollen. She gained weight and lumbered heavily on the kibbutz paths. Despite her condition, she made sure to get to her job as a seamstress every day. She would walk from their room in the new housing area in front of the dining room, cross the large courtyard, and go into the sewing room in the building with the arches – the room that everyone called "The Big House" (a house with a square yard that survived from the first cooperative period in 1911, when Jewish settlement in the Jezreel Valley began).

"You know, Mom," I said, "I was just telling Dad about a boy named Todd, the main character in this book I'm reading, and I thought to myself that I actually don't know anything about the genes I inherited. You already have two beautiful grandchildren, and a third one on the way. What I want the most for the baby and for all of us is to know where I came from. Who was my birth mother?" There was silence in the room.

This time, I wasn't giving up, I promised myself. I won't settle for the clichéd answer, "When you grow up, you'll know." I already am grown up, and I don't know. I continued, "You probably both remember – when I was nine years old, during the 1956 Sinai war and in the stark days before the war – that you said that if something happened to you both, there was an important document for me in the dresser drawer. I never found anything there. What was it?"

My mother broke the oppressive silence. I will never forget the way she looked down and not directly at me…and said in a quivering, acerbic voice, "Her name is Franka Lewinska. You were born on January 17, 1947."

My father's face went pale and he jerked his upper torso towards her with a surprised, anxious look. Then he turned to me with sadness in his eyes and a loving smile and stroked the back of my hand. "So now, finally, you know," he said softly.

I stared at them both – frozen, almost paralyzed – and was barely able to comprehend what I had just heard. My mother went to the kitchen and brought out a glass of water. She sat sipping from it, her hands shaking uncontrollably. My father took the glass from her. He put his hand on her knee, the one touching his own, in an intimate, moving gesture. My parents almost never showed affection for each other in my presence. This was a supportive, respectful moment from him. Mother looked into my eyes, took a deep breath and whispered, "The woman who handed you over to me at Haifa Port gave me a note with her name and your date of birth. You were born in Germany."

Not for nothing did she say "her" name." I was her only daughter, about to give birth to her third grandchild. In a few months it will be 28 years since the day she first held me in her arms and wept with joy right there, at the Haifa Port. All those years she had harbored the fear that one day her happiness would end, that one day Franka would come and find me…

My mother and father, March 1932

On the morning of March 18, 1932, a group of girls got off the Emek train, which was heading from the Haifa Port to the town of Afula. They disembarked as "tourists" after a long, wearying voyage on the Dacia, a dilapidated ship. These young women, members of the "Pioneer Movement," had come filled with the burning desire to help build the Land of Israel in the agricultural outposts of the Jewish settlement. After spending their first night at Kibbutz Merhavia, some of them continued on to Petah Tikva, where they would remain while waiting to settle in Kibbutz Neve Eitan in the Beit Shean Valley. Hulda was among them. A few hours earlier, when they spotted the shoreline crowned by the Carmel Mountains, they hurried to change their clothes from the arduous journey and put on the attractive dresses they'd packed specially for the exhilarating meeting with veteran pioneers from the city who were to greet them at the Afula train station and take them to spend the night on the kibbutz. Many of the girls, if not all, hoped to find among the young men who greeted them "the one" with whom they would build a family in their old-new homeland.

In her small cabin on the ship, Hulda took great care in getting ready for the meeting. She applied a few drops of scented oil to her thick black hair and combed it back, gathering the strands into a neat, symmetrical circle that was formed modestly at the nape of her neck. She stood erect, showing off her lovely figure; her smile revealed a row of white teeth that accentuated her dark skin and intense brown eyes. Impressive and attractive, she moved gracefully on the soil of the valley along with her excited friends. Three young men approached. Her eyes were drawn to the shortest of the three. He looked familiar, but his clothing and appearance had undergone a significant change since the day she had met him in Yaroslavl, and that led her to doubt if it was indeed he. As she got closer, she recognized the high forehead and black hair. His face was tanned and his body firm. He wore black work boots and the cuffs of his brown trousers were tucked inside them. A white shirt was casually stuffed into his pants top, the sleeves rolled up to the elbow. He held a small brown notebook in his hand.

Hulda looked away for a moment to ask her friend Roshka if she, too, recognized the short young man. Suddenly she heard him call her name. "Hulka?" And when she turned back around, he was standing in front of her.

"Hulka Steinbach?" he asked.

"Yes. You know me?" she said.

"You remember me? Six years ago, just before I emigrated, there was a big conference of youth movements in Yaroslavl. We met there and exchanged addresses, but we didn't have a chance to see each other again before I left."

Hulda restrained herself from bursting out and telling him that she had always hoped to see him again. Her heart was pounding; she couldn't believe he was standing there in front of her. "Yes, I remember you," she answered, feeling her cheeks turning red.

Eliezer Rosenfeld (the short young man) did his best to make Hulda's stay in Merhavia pleasant that night. His efforts were rewarded by her decision to remain on the kibbutz where he was, and not to join the group of girls who continued their journey. Love blossomed in both their hearts, and within a short time they moved into a tent together. They had to share their tent, however, with young men called "primus" in the local jargon, named for the portable cooking and heating stove. The "Primos" were single men who, due to the limited living facilities, had to live with the pair of lovers and be ‘as if not there' during the couples' love-making in the darkness of the tent.

My mother was considered lucky. Her friends were jealous of the love that was rekindled the moment she set foot on the soil of Eretz Israel.

The lives of the young pioneers on the kibbutz were turbulent and exciting. During the day they worked, and every evening they planned the next day's work. The evening culminated in group singing and exuberant dancing of the hora. Many love stories were born around the campfire and in the threshing fields. Hulda applied to be a " havera " – member of the kibbutz – and within seven months she was accepted with full and equal rights. Her life was full of activity, sharing in the building of the kibbutz with manual labor. Bursting with idealism and a desire to contribute, she volunteered to help build roads and clear stones from the fields. The work was difficult and tiring, even for men who were much stronger. After a short time, she was assigned to the vegetable garden and the makeshift chicken coop set up in the center of the large central yard.

In her first years there, Hulda didn't have a permanent position. At harvest time she was sent to work in the vineyard, and for a short period she took care of small children. Only after several years went by did she find her rightful place when she joined the seamstress unit that made clothing for the kibbutz children. Joining the sewing group was the closing of a circle for her. After several years of excruciatingly hard labor, she had returned to sewing, a vocation she had studied for three years when she was younger.

Her first years on the kibbutz had been difficult for her, especially getting used to the hectic schedule and manual labor, particularly during the summer's scorching heat in the Jezreel Valley, where the temperature could soar to 43° C. Everyone's workday – for both men and women – began at sunrise, and after a midday meal, they rested in their small rooms that had no toilets and no showers. In her first six years in Eretz Israel, she sometimes wondered if it was all worth it. Her days of training in Poland hadn't prepared her for the austere lifestyle, the uncomfortable living conditions, the extreme heat, and the mosquitoes – all of which sapped her strength. She was reluctant to complain in front of her friends and to her new husband, who was considered a seasoned veteran. Twelve years of pioneering had smoothed his memories and obliterated any nostalgia for the home he'd left behind.

After six years, Hulda and Eliezer were told that their new home on the hill – one apartment out of five units in a small building – had reached the final stages of construction. That day, despite the oppressive heat, she felt hope and optimism for the first time. She didn't manage to nap and waited impatiently for the time to pass, visualizing the moment when they would go up the hill to see the apartment. A feeling of well-being and rejuvenation nestled in her heart, even though none of the eight new buildings on the hill had bathrooms or toilets, just a sink for brushing teeth on a small side porch. These were one-room apartments with two air directions, and used for both living and "entertaining." Bathrooms and toilets were in the two public buildings built on both sides of the hill – north and south.

In the weeks remaining before they could move into the new apartment, she often pondered the meaning of the word "home." Her thoughts wandered to her childhood in the town of Rava-Ruska in Poland in the good old days, before the disastrous death of her mother when she was a child. To celebrate the Jewish holidays, her parents, Yosef and Sara Steinbach, would take the family on picnics and sit around a table laden with goodies. The children played under the table or in the nearby grove. On vacations, they would go to the nearby city of Yaroslavl to visit her Aunt Gittel (her father's sister) who, with her husband, Yoel Graf, was raising a large family. The Grafs lived in a big, comfortable house suitable for a family of nine children: David, Hulka, Bella, Rivka, Shunio, Hankah, Asher, Shankah, and Shmuel – her beloved cousins. She often told me about the games of hide and seek in the many rooms and hidden nooks in the attic, about how the girls would dress up in her aunt's fancy clothes, and the delicious meals around the huge table in the dining room.

In those early, happy years, my mother couldn't have imagined that before reaching puberty she would find herself as the tenth child in Aunt Gittel's house. Her father, Yosef, was a successful textile merchant, who was often away from home, and her mother, Sarah, ran the household by herself. When she was about nine years old, her mother died after a long illness. During the mourning period, her father went to live in Yaroslavl and split his children up in their different aunts' homes. When he'd return from his travels, he'd gather his children at his house for the weekends. Soon, however, he remarried and started a new family. At that point, my mother told me, the visits to his house became less and less frequent, until they almost stopped.

Soon after she went to live with the Graf family, my mother suffered one of the worst traumas of her life. As a polite, well-educated girl, she wanted to help around the house and one day tried to light the fire in the kerosene stove. When she bent over, her beautiful black braid unwound and caught on fire. Her aunt, who was busy nearby preparing for Shabbat, threw a towel over her head to smother the flames. The stench of burning hair filled the space. My mother's face was untouched, but the experience was ingrained in her for all time.

During my childhood, I noticed that my mother never had a gas stove in the house, but her fear of fire didn't stop her from making the various foods that I liked, especially the cakes and cookies. My father would carefully ladle the batter for her cakes into a "wonder pot" (a baking pan with a cone-shaped hole in the center), and place it on the kerosene wick in the shower area (there were no gas or electric stoves in the kibbutz members' rooms at the time). My mother would stay out of there while the fire was burning. On the counter in their kitchenette was a round, electric hot plate with spirals, on which she would cook and fry our food.

I also loved the " tzuker liakach " cake, made with sugar and eggs, that she baked for Shabbat. Already at the door you could detect the aroma that heralded Friday night dinner. I also loved her coconut cake with chocolate chips, the traditional strudel made with thin dough, and the " makagigi " almond brittle that she and my father made together. The preparation of the brittle and the kneading of the dough for the apple strudel required the coordination and precise planning of those involved in its making – who does what and when. I remember that there was tension between my parents at those moments; my father was a perfectionist and gave my mother orders, admonished her, and sometimes even scolded her. Mother was offended, but continued helping.

My favorite dish of all was her special soft-boiled egg dish. She would bring the water to a boil in the kettle and put the fitted wooden board that my father had made on top of it, in place of a lid. Then she would add a cube of butter to the pot. When the butter started bubbling, she poured in the raw eggs, stirring continuously until the egg hardened on the sides. Even today, years after her death, I continue to make "Grandma Hulda's soft-boiled egg dish" for my children and grandchildren, who ask me to make it for them every now and then.

My father never spoke about his parents' home or his childhood. The little I knew was from what he said off-handedly, talking about his days as a member of the "Hashomer Hatzair" youth movement in Jaroslavl. He talked about the heated debates involving the activities and visions of aliyah (immigration), about his training period before coming to the Land of Israel and, of course, about what he went through after he arrived in 1926 (in the fourth wave of aliyah) as a young man in Palestine/Eretz Israel.

My father was the eldest son of Shoshana and Moshe Rosenfeld. He was born on February 12, 1906, in the city of Turka in Poland. His parents weren't natives of the area and probably came to the city in the south-east of the country just before he was born. The proximity of the settlement to the Hungarian border, and the first railway line, which arrived there in 1903, turned Turka into a bustling city, with three separate enclaves: Jewish, local ethnic Christian, and the Polish nobility.

Eliezer immigrated from Turka with a Shomer Hatzair group and for several months was housed at the Jidro tent encampment near Kurdani, a British military outpost in the Krayot area outside of Haifa. From there he moved with some of his comrades to Bat Galim on Haifa Bay and joined a group of about 60 "shmutznikim" – that's what they called the members of the Hashomer Hatzair Movement – young pioneers from Galicia who came to Israel as early as the Third Aliyah (1920 – 1922) and went to where there was work, going from Tel Aviv to Kiryat Anavim, Zichron Ya'akov, Neveh Sha'anan, and to the Jidro pioneer camp at Bat Galim. They worked at building roads and housing, dredging the Kishon River, and doing other odd jobs while they waited impatiently for the moment when they could begin to build kibbutzim.

Meir Ya'ari, the historical , ideological leader of Hashomer Hatza'ir, spearheaded the decision to accept the proposal of the settlement institutions to establish a kibbutz in the cooperative at Merhavia, as the first one in the Jezreel Valley. Anyone wanting to join had to submit an application. After six months and a vote, he was formally accepted as a member of the Merhavia group. In March 1927, my father also applied for membership. Along with him, about 20 other members of his group applied, and in September 1927 they were all accepted. Two years later, at the end of the second holiday of the New Year, on September 20, 1929, members and guests gathered at Merhavia with Avraham Herzfeld (head of the Mapai Party) for the ground-breaking ceremony.

The first years at Merhavia were challenging and exhausting. My father said that they had "little sleep and much work," although he never complained or felt a longing for his parents' home in Poland. He kept up correspondence with them, urging them to come. His efforts bore fruit when in 1933 his younger sister, Henia, arrived to take part in a training program, and was sent to a kibbutz on the Haifa Bay. After a short time, Henia, who was two years younger than my father, parted from her friends when she decided to go to work and save money to help pay for the immigration of her parents and her younger sister, Sima. So in 1934, a year after Henia's arrival, my grandparents, Moshe and Shoshana Rosenfeld, immigrated to Israel with their youngest daughter, Sima. (Binyamin, Sima's older brother, enlisted in the Polish army and they lost track of him; he apparently perished in World War II). After a provisional year, my father's parents were accepted as members of the Kfar Yehoshua settlement in the western Jezreel Valley, and they were allocated a plot of land for a house. A favorite story of my father's was how he loaded planks and tools onto a horse and cart and rode together with his friends to build the house for his parents at Kfar Yehoshua.

My father was always close with his family, and we often hosted them at the kibbutz or visited them at Kfar Yehoshua. Sometimes my cousin Sarah would come to the kibbutz by herself, and my parents and I were very happy to have her. When we were older, she told me that she especially loved the dining room and the kibbutz holidays that were always celebrated in a special way – and that she knew nothing about my being adopted.

My father's family had escaped the Nazis just in time, but although he was close to his parents, he wasn't at all nostalgic and rarely spoke about his early life in Poland. Once, after a soccer match on the kibbutz, he told me that he had been an excellent soccer player for his school's team.

The world of music had an especially important place in his life. He played the mandolin, violin, and guitar. He also sang very well, his tenor voice blending in with the kibbutz choir. When I was older, I joined him in the choir, and I remember how he smiled when I had solos. As a child, I mostly listened to classical music coming from the radio receiver in my parents' room – which was my introduction to the great composers: Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Ravel, and Khachaturian.

My parents' radio was a rectangular wooden box covered with a glossy varnish. On school holidays I would go to their room, listen to radio programs, and dance to the classical music, moving around, imagining that I was on a stage, enchanted by the magical sounds and dreaming of becoming a prima ballerina.

On the kibbutz, my father's skills as a shoemaker were immediately put into use. From the day he arrived, he was assigned to work as a shoemaker. Even after eventually moving to work in the vineyard and orchards, he always came back to the shoemaker shop during the rainy winter days or when there was an urgent need for more shoes before the change of seasons. Towards winter, there was a demand for high-top shoes with laces, and with the arrival of spring, sandals were needed.

I loved visiting him in the shoe shop, where the smell of glue and leather was intoxicating. My father would put a stool next to him for me to sit on, and I would help him apply the light-colored leather soles before fastening them to the lower heel. From a square wooden table, he took wooden nails pointed at one end and cone-shaped at the other. He held the nails between his lips, just as he had learned from his own father.

In his right hand he held a round, iron hammer with a wooden handle, and with his left he took the nails out of his mouth one by one and banged them into the holes on the edges of the sole. He pounded and pounded in a continuous tempo like musical accompaniment – three beats…and a pause. I loved the magical moment when he removed the shoe from the mat after it had dried; it always reminded me of the story of the dwarves who worked all night to surprise the poor cobbler in the morning. From leftover scraps of leather, my father made me a case for the stones of the " hamesh avanim " (five stones) game that Israeli children played. I have it to this day, along with the hole puncher and the wooden ruler he used for measuring.

On school vacations I would go out to the vineyard with him, where he patiently taught me how to pick grapes and pack the clusters in a crate in perfect order. I also spent many hours with him in the deciduous trees orchard, which was on the northeast side of the farm. Those hours are engraved in my heart. Every morning, when he went to work, he slung over his shoulders a khaki coat with deep pockets on the sides and smaller ones sewn on the chest area. He was pedantic – a lover of order and cleanliness. Everything had its place, and every object its proper spot so he could find whatever he needed without having to look for it. I learned how to prune trees so that the area around them would be ventilated and open, their branches bending at eye level from the center outwards. I helped him take out "pigs" (soft, unruly branches that grew around the trunk), which dared to burst out of the soil. I even served as his "right-hand man" while he was doing his "grafting," and later he taught me the whole process. We went out to the orchard early in the morning, looking at the drops of dew glistening on the leaves with the flash of the sun's first rays, coloring them a multitude of shades. The fresh, clean morning smell reaching our noses was so different from the routinely suffocating dust that settled on us later in the day. I inhaled the scent of grass mixed with the night humidity that perfumed the air with its unique aroma. The morning inhalation of the blending of dew and the dust of leaves on tufts of soil is something that can only be treasured and preserved..

On the way to the peach tree that was marked with white tape, Father explained to me that grafting is done when you want to expand the tree's variety of fruit, or when the tree has dried up, and on its stable trunk you graft the same variety. When we reached the tree, he bent down and spread a sheet of cloth at his feet to cover the clumps of earth that were soaked with moisture from the night's wet chill. From his coat pocket he took out a "surgical" kit that was rolled up in a leather pouch that he'd made for himself in the shoemaker's shop. It had pockets for each item to be used in the grafting work.

From his other pocket he took out a several small branches that he had pruned the day before and kept in the cooling hut next to the packing shed. He spread them side by side on the cloth bed below, arranged the sharp knives, the dressing, the ointment, the bags, and the plastic tags on which he would write the date of the graft and then hang them on the branch with string.

"Now we're ready," he said. "First, I feel the barrel, the branch where I'll graft the small branches," he explained to me as he carefully made a vertical slit so that the core of the branch was exposed under the bark. "Second, I rub the end of the rider branch and put it on the core, three inches above the sharpened point. Then I attach the rider to the barrel so that core touches core. . . Come here and hold the branch tightly, and I'll wrap the dressing around it." I watched his nimble, skillful hands and thought of Bilha the nurse, who had bandaged my injured knee.

"Does it hurt the tree? Does it cry?" I asked in childish innocence.

"You know, sometimes when I check the grafting site, I see a few drops of sap on the ground," he answered, and then asked me, "What do you think?"

"Yes, it cries. We just don't hear it. The tree is alive, only it doesn't know how to speak."

When he finished tying the dressing, he took out a flat stick and applied black paste where he made the cut. Then he covered it all with an inside-out bag, tied a ribbon on the bottom, and put on a marking tag. "Now they're going to sleep for a month in the dark and humidity. When they wake up, we'll remove the bag and find that the branch is blooming."

In this enchanting orchard, with its many varieties of apple, plum, peach, and pear trees, I had my first taste of fresh fruits picked straight from the tree. I learned to recognize the treetops in all seasons and I knew the strange names: Kelsey, Red Delicious, Santa Rosa, Green Apples, Golden Delicious, Jonathan, and others.

The many hours I spent with my father, who would explain, describe, teach, and sing to me, often seemed to me to complement, even compensate, for my mother's withdrawn nature. She spoke less and was a quiet, passive person, doing only what was needed. My father always helped her, turning things on and off, and making sure that everything was clean and tidy and in the right place. She was a good worker in the seamstress shop and her production was satisfactory. Others made the cut and the pieces of fabric, and she sat and sewed. She always obeyed, didn't disturb, did what she was told…

I always felt that my mother spent her life in the kibbutz "alongside" reality. Everyday life in the Jezreel Valley was different from the way she grew up and was educated. You could see that she was dissatisfied, frustrated, and resentful. Her actions and behavior merely hinted – not explicitly, but silently – "This is not what I prayed for." Status on the kibbutz went according to a hierarchy of "excellence" dictated by members' opinions and work assignments. Everything was based on volunteerism and conformity, but a discerning eye could identify the pushers – i.e., the ambitious ones – who actually ran things. Sometimes it was clear that the "game" was fixed in advance.

The highlights of my mother's dull routine were visits from her family. Six of the 10 cousins she grew up with made their way to Israel, like her, before the Second World War. More than once my parents had guests who arrived unannounced at the kibbutz gates. The joy at their arrival was great, and the house was always ready for them, neat and clean with the aroma of freshly baked goods. No one ever left our home empty-handed. Dad always took the trouble to pack a carton of pecans ahead of time from the huge tree in the garden, or prepare a basket of seasonal fruits. Sometimes he would arrange a bouquet of flowers for them from the garden. The most beautiful gift of all was a bottle of the wine that he made himself (often with my help) in the makeshift "winery" under the house. He was a man of many talents, and he imparted many of his skills to me…with great love.