Bits and Pieces

I just found a journal entry from April 2020.  There is a picture of my newly acquired house in San Pietro Apostolo, the small village in Calabria from which my great grandparents emigrated.  Embedded in the words there is also the voice of untethered enthusiasm.  The voice of a woman embarking on a dream.  It’s written in the Italian that I spoke and wrote more than 3 years ago.  I can’t help but smile.   

The challenges encountered during my “reverse immigration” were significant although I didn’t realize it then.  It is only in looking back that I shake my head and still can’t believe I did it.  In my soul, I just knew it had to be done.  People ask me why.  I tell them I don’t know.  It just had to be done.  Something drew me here and a door cracked open.  I saw a glimmer of light shining through an infinitesimally small space and had the courage to walk toward it.  The world that I have discovered on the other side of that door is a world that I have been looking for my entire life.  I have discovered my place, my home.  I picture it like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz who, after being whirled and spun in the eye of the storm and seeing visions of people and memories flying and tumbling past the window, finally stops and is surrounded by silence.   She has the courage to get up, to open the door.  In grainy black and white, almost sepia tones, she pushes open the door and discovers an incredibly vibrant, colorful, magical world where things are eerily familiar but totally new, where she is still herself but different, where she realizes what is important in her life and, perhaps most importantly, that she will do whatever it takes to live the life she wants to live.     

I write this now, more than 3 years later, sitting in my little house in the centro storico of my ancestral comune, looking at my beautiful mountains and listening to the silence of the afternoon.  Thanks to many hours spent listening and reading and speaking in Italian as well as family and friends gently correcting me, my language skills have greatly improved.  I am now comfortable with it and have become as independent here as I am in the United States.  This makes me laugh out loud.  The first years here I would lie in bed in the morning listening to the village waking up and pray that for just one hour, they would just speak English so I could get the telephone line ordered or the washing machine fixed.  Of course, I still make mistakes and of course I have an accent.  Oh, how I hate that!  Then someone told me that an accent shows courage.  I never really thought of it like that.  Someone else told me that the decision to sell everything and move here also took tremendous courage.  I never thought of that either.  Courage, to me, is leaving this village in 1902 with eight dollars in your pocket and the clothes on your back.  There was no knowledge of the English language or the American culture, no education, no money.  In theory, my great grandparents had nothing.  But that’s not true.  They had the desire for a better life and a future for their family.  They had strength of will and hope and determination.  Looking back on his very successful life, my father would say, “we come from nothing.”  We didn’t “come from nothing.”  We came from here.  To me, that is everything.