by Teresa Mastrobuono

Meet Teresa. You can't see her face clearly here. She's beautiful. I couldn't upload the photo of us standing together in the square outside my house. Not skilled. Very fitting. Teresa taught me quite a lesson in skill and patience.

Teresa is one of the first people I met in Castiglione. She is 80-something and was a tenant in my house for the first few months I owned it. As I toured it for the first time, she sidled up to me and said "If you need someone to clean it, hire me. I'm good." It was less a request than an order, said with such aplomb I'd have agreed on the spot if I could have overcome the guilt of putting what felt like my own grandmother into servitude.

Teresa doesn't hear well, but her shining steely eyes miss nothing. Her voice is an unmistakable trumpet (albeit one played by Louis Armstrong) that heralds her presence everywhere. Like other older women of the town, she walks uphill to church every day and wears a photo of her dead husband on a delicate gold chain around her neck. Right from the start we delighted in the fact that our names are the same and our families are both from further south – mine from Campania; hers from Calabria. I fell instantly in love with her.

Like many people of Castiglione MR, she invited me to visit. I took her up on it several times. Once, while sitting in front of the TV, a healthy fire she had made herself warming the sitting room, she railed against Berlusconi's image. I noticed it made her fingers fly faster through the work she was doing. She was making a coverlet for a new baby.

The work is called "uncinetto" she told me: tiny, delicate crochet stitches that add up to doilies, blankets, hats, baby shoes, even an intricate rosary. I watched her needle dart in and out of nearly imperceptible holes, combining to magically weave flower or bird designs into the work. I knew I had to learn this craft.

So, on my next visit, I bounced through Teresa's door with a bag containing two balls of thin white thread and a crochet hook whose end I could barely see.

"Will you teach me?" I asked. Teresa instantly stopped, looked at me as though I'd just proposed going to the moon and then threw her head back into her signature laugh that is both cackle and girlish giggle. Then the lesson began. Teresa made a chain. Wrap and pull. Wrap and pull. When it was about 4 inches long, she handed it to me. "Come back when you have this much." Her hands were spread to about a foot apart - another 8 inches for me to create.

At home, I tried to replicate her moves and rhythm. Wrap and pull. Wrap and pull. Easy! I remembered this from my crochet and macramé hippie days. The problem was the tension. My chain wasn't lacy and consistent like hers. Some rows were big, loose, loops, and others tight knots.

Italians have a saying "Fare e disfare e' l'arte d'imparare" (To do and undo is the art of learning.) Ho fatto io quest' arte tantissimo! I did a lot of the art of doing and undoing. More so the undoing part than I was able to DO the uncinetto.

After two days, I had my chain. Ran down the hill to Teresa's house, pleased as punch to know I'd be initiated into phase two of "fare".

I slogged back up to my house two hours later. Phase two consisted of inserting the hook through holes invisible to my eye, wrapping the thread several times around it, and pulling the enlarged mass back through several microscopic openings.

I fumbled and lost the thread. Got the hook stuck halfway through the holes and I dropped everything on the floor several times. My hand position was wrong, fingers ill positioned. Teresa took them and bent them into place, putting the work into the proper position relative to hands and fingers. OW! I felt like I was being tutored by a master prestidigitator: one finger here, another several awkward inches away, knuckles up, knuckles down, one digit moving in opposition to another, wrists tilted at a strange angle. After 45 minutes of contorting my hands, Teresa took the uncinetto into her own, 80-ish, arthritic ones.