One day I was flipping through a gardening catalog and found an example of blight. “This is what will happen to your plants if you don’t cough up $39.99 for the new biodegradable anti-blight spray . . .”

I cut out two blighted leaves and attached them to the earlobes of Allie-Mae Burroughs. She didn’t flinch, and she didn’t stop staring back at me and through me after what I’d done to her.

I tore out another Evans image, of a sink in the kitchen of a Portuguese fishing family in Truro, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, the shabby flowered wallpaper behind the sink, the sink something like a grave.

By now I was reading James Mellows’ biography of Evans. He wrote about the expedition on which Evans took this picture and others; the strange way that people with nothing would pile junk on junk to make it seem like something.  “The jumble of life . . . a meager bouquet in a vase and a sickly fern” . . . “rosettes upon rosettes.” Flowered doilies on the ratty arms of flowered sofas . . . magazine covers tacked up next to florid calendars and religious images . . . the better to cover the cracks in the walls and keep out the chill.

Zora Neale Hurston wrote about this aesthetic among African Americans, the idea being, more is better, a kind of insurance in the form of clutter if you’ve never had much. Mellow called the pile-up of tastelessness that Evans photographed at the shabby Portuguese cottage “floral confusion.”

I had grown up in a world of floral confusion, excess decoration and the juxtaposed bleakness that highlights excess and tackiness. Gilded mirrors on the walls and porcelain roses locked up in glass cases at my aunt’s house, Crisco used as a substitute for olive oil, the TV turned on at all times in rooms decorated with tapestries of the Roman Forum and pictures of the pope, the sacred heart of Jesus, and commemorative plates painted with Kennedy’s face. Excess mixed up with deprivation. Italian Americans were always mixing the impossible with the improbable in an attempt to bring the gold of the Mediterranean to a New England of austere Protestant churches and grey icy winters.

During those grey winters in the nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson wrote about Mediterranean opulence:

Partake as doth the bee,
Abstemiously—
The Rose is an Estate
In Sicily

At the cemetery where both my grandmothers are buried, a vast ugly place with endless rows of granite headstones, almost all of the stones are inscribed with Italian and Irish names. You can spot the Italian graves from afar; they are the ones decorated with artificial flowers. I keep a picture of my Sicilian grandmother’s grave near my desk, the earth, the gravestone, and the plastic roses all dusted with snow.