Familial journey

We are on our way.

Some time in the next few weeks or months – we haven't yet settled on the date – the four of us will be off to Italy.

The passport pictures have been taken, the lists have been drawn, toiletries purchased, wardrobes planned. We've scoured the tour books and set up an itinerary. We've searched the web and found kid-friendly activities in each of our destinations.

Cousins have been contacted; all are looking forward to our visit.

But this is more than a family vacation.

I will see my aunt, the woman, who along with her older sister, helped raise my father. The woman, who ten years ago when I visited for the first time in two decades, referred to me as her other granddaughter. A woman who knows what my father was like as a child; a woman who holds pictures of my father with round eyes and rounder cheeks; at least, that's how I imagine him since I have never seen them. The woman I will likely never see again after this visit.

Her eyes are so much like my father's that I feel lonely when I look at her. She tells me the same. And we laugh at the idea that we share those sorrowful eyes, dropping down in the corners, with him and with each other. And now with Solanne.

The children carry an Italian name like an amulet, wrapped around them always, but mysterious and whose history is still beyond their understanding. They will, for the first time, meet others with the same name. Some with the same eyes. All with the same long, invisible thread of DNA knitting us together, binding us across languages, across time, across leagues of water.

And we will visit my ancestral village, a town of fewer than three thousand souls. Breathe in the air that fed my father and his family, the air that is said to be unique in the world in its ability to both age Parmesan cheese and cure prosciutto ham to perfection. And we will visit the tiny house my father called home, carved out of the ancient hillside, that held that cobbler's family of six children.

Strange that I feel tied to that land, more than any other. Not to the town, or the villagers, but to the land. I have been there twice in my life, once with my father and mother, once on my own, long after my father had died. Some tie, perhaps that strand of DNA born of that land, makes me long for that place and root me in it when I am there.

I promise to post pics and stories here about our adventures, from preparations, to the journey, and the long road back.