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least three times a week, kneeling in a pew and reciting the paternoster —the “Our Father”—in Latin. At home, she prayed the rosary nightly to calm her soul and to beg the heavenly mother for guidance. “Holy Mary, mother of God, what would you do?”
    By the end of 1913, Maria still couldn’t choose between her home and her husband. She harbored the faint hope that her husband might change his mind about America and that she wouldn’t have to choose after all. She still wouldn’t budge.
    Serafino knew that if he waited much longer, he might lose his American job and dream forever. In January 1914, he decided that Maria had mourned enough.
    “ Either you come with me to America,” he pronounced one frigid night, “or I’ll find another woman there!”
    The choice was hers. She didn’t have room in her suitcase for her homemade sheets. She had barely enough room for a small sack of pepper seeds. She would sail to America, perhaps never to return, but she would plant the seeds of Farindola there.
    Serafino and Maria departed Naples on the SS. Cretic in March 1914. He was 28. She was 20. They arrived in Boston 12 days later, boarded a train, and headed straight for Middle America.
     
    Mason City was a town surrounded by corn, halfway between Des Moines and Minneapolis and readily accessible to neither. With about 17,000 people, the town was a metropolis compared with Farindola. But Serafino and Maria didn’t see much of the town. The Lehigh Portland Cement Company quarry and housing, situated about half a mile north of the rest of town, functioned like a town unto itself.
    The Lehigh housing consisted of five rows of wood frame duplexes—19 buildings containing 38 homes. Most of the homes housed large immigrant families. A few of the homes housed up to 20 single immigrant men who shared beds by working opposite 12-hour shifts. At one time in the teeming neighborhood, the 38 homes housed nearly 400 people, composed of roughly 300 family members and 100 single men. The vast majority of the people came from Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, and Mexico.
    The neighborhood included a separate row of stores for the workers and families. There was a grocery, a bakery, a meat market, a barbershop, a barbeque, and a pool hall. The homes and stores straddled a solitary gravel road that became known as Lehigh Row.
    Each home was built the same. Although austere, it was more luxurious than anything Maria had ever imagined. The downstairs had two rooms. The big room was a living room, dining room, and kitchen combined. The small room was a bedroom. A cast iron cook stove in the big room heated the downstairs. A staircase separated the two rooms and led upstairs to an enormous U-shaped open space, which was heated by a coal-burning potbelly stove. One light bulb hung from the ceiling on each floor.
    “ Heat and electricity!” Maria marveled.
    The furnishings were sparse. The cook stove commanded the front of the big room downstairs. A rickety China cabinet stood at the back. A plain round table and chairs sat in the middle. The kitchen area had a shelf, a sink, a dipper, washboards, and two water basins: one for drinking and cooking, the other for washing dishes, clothes, and people. Upstairs, several steel cots lined each side of the staircase. Each cot had a metal spring and a three-inch mattress. Upstairs and downstairs, the floors were made of the kind of coarse wooden planks that gave people splinters if they didn’t wear socks.
    There was no indoor plumbing. Water pumps had been dug out front between the homes. There was one pump for every four homes.
    The two homes in each duplex were built side-to-side. Each home had a small garden on the unattached side and another small garden in the back. People grew vegetables wherever they could find a spare scrap of land. White pebbly gravel covered the remaining spaces of land between the rows of duplexes.
    Each home had its own outhouse. The outhouses were also duplexes.