If you look at an onion from the outside, you see paper thin skin, peeling, fragile. Perhaps a green shoot pokes from the pointy top, the onion left too long in the spidery web plastic bag among its onion pals. Or maybe a sooty mold has taken the onion by surprise, easing its black rot into unsuspecting flesh.

You reach in the onion bag, hanging on a nail in the pantry, and you grab an onion, trusting it will be an onion worthy of your time, worthy of the fine olive oil you have heating to a translucent shimmer in the copper-bottomed pan on the stove. And when you slice into the onion, you step back. Its sharp smell hits you squarely between your eyes, even though you were expecting it, even prepared for it. Still, it takes you by surprise. Tears squeeze past your closed eyes. It takes you a moment to recover enough to carry on with the preparations.

Slowly now, you slide your fingernail beneath its outer layer. The onion’s papery skin comes away, and some bits cling to your wet hands. You try to flick them off, but of course, they stick. Those may find their way into your sauce, or not. You look down at the layers. Layer upon layer of onion, nested close to one another, fitting perfectly in concentric circles. Dependent upon one another to be exactly where each should be.

Some onions have mold. Some have green shoots growing despite a dark pantry closet. All have layers and layers of complexity built into them. Not unlike ourselves.  Not unlike our families.