A Window Into The Past

by Kailey Cutillo (Canada)

Making a local connection Italy

The framed picture was hung on the wall for well over a decade; slightly out of place with the floral wallpaper and dark brown panelling. The monochromatic sketch of an empty dirt intersection with one or two quaint houses quickly outlined in the background, went overlooked for most of my life. I remember my grandma pointing to it now and again when she was telling the adults a story about a cousin of hers or a time when she was a child. Now, standing halfway around the world staring at this exact intersection in Sicily, that photo is all I can think of. I watch my grandma’s back as she walks down the dirt road towards her childhood home. We follow behind. The road still isn’t paved nearly sixty years later. We can see the vast acres of vineyard and farm stretching out from the homes and watch the outline of the neighbouring village ripple in the mirage of the summer heat. I only catch a glimpse of her face; it isn’t nostalgic as if she’d heard an old song. Nor was it sad that she saw her youth completely changed. It was familiarity. It is comfort, after so many years, that her life here still exists. No one talks. It’s my dad – never one to dwell on silence- that cuts through and starts to ask questions. She finally turns back to us. “This was my home.” She tells us, pointing to a more modern version of the clay-roofed home in the picture. Years later, we’d be having tea one day when she finally tells me that her family owned an entire part of the village; that all the houses and stores, all the property around, belonged to them. We keep walking through Joppolo and she points out where she went to school and the shortcut she would take to get from her house to her grandparent's store. The path wasn’t there anymore. She talks about how close she was to her youngest brother Steve, how she would carry him on her shoulders everywhere she went, about how he died while she was in Canada. He was the only one I never got to meet. I never heard about him until that day and it was only time she sounded sad. It all felt so similar; I went to school across the street from her house and I would take a little path through the football field to get to her front door. I am standing beside my two siblings, both of them getting on my nerves after two weeks of travelling together. At that moment I saw my grandma as a child, as a teenager, as a granddaughter, a daughter and a sister – as everything I was. My mom and her sat down on the concrete steps of one of the houses. I keep walking, but not too far. I can still hear her talking. She talks about why she moved to Canada, how her family had lost everything and had to immigrate. She talks about how hard it was to leave, how she wanted to come back to Italy the second she reached Halifax. Halifax to Montreal, Montreal to Toronto, Toronto to Hamilton. She lived in a boarding house with her oldest brother. It’s where she met my grandfather. I look at the street where she grew up. It’s eerie to realize that if she had come back, we wouldn’t be here. That our grandma’s home wouldn’t exist to us, that her home would be this unfamiliar place. But it’s not unfamiliar anymore. I always knew my grandparents were immigrants, that they came to Canada, that we were Italian – I mean, we loved pasta and talked with our hands. This was the first time I understood what it meant for someone to be an immigrant, to leave everything you know behind without ever knowing if you’ll come back. Missing things and people and dirt roads, seeing some of them for the last time. Now I see that picture all the time. I sit on the other side of the table just so I can look at it. And I get to see into her past.