An Artist's Haven in the Sun

by Liahona Willcoxon (France)

I didn't expect to find France

The strong Tuscan sun beat down against the cool autumn air, and against the movement of our sweating bodies, coaxed us. I was walking with a friend up the steep hills of south Italian countryside, where villages had sprung up so deeply into and about and had dotted the walls of their green fervent mountains. We had been spurred on by only just a photo, and an address it had been sent from, given to me by my grandmother as the last living relatives I possessed in this great Italian countryside. We had mistrusted in our mobile devices to take us in the right direction, landed in the small town of Borgo-a-Mozzano, where it had been stamped from, and were headed in the direction the GPS map on our phones had decided to pull a little red marker onto. Gasping for a break, I turned to my friend, “Let’s go back,” I admitted defeat, “We’ve passed all of the homes and we’re only lost in the middle of these roads.” My friend, Saoirse, nodded her head, “We can ask someone in town.” We turned back around, heading downwards now, with the view of the rolling green fields, cliffs with scattered grapevines for wine, and Tuscan homes with clothes on a line that would glint in the sun every time the quiet breeze gently carried through the hills. Back at the base, we found a bar just beyond the train station we had arrived by. Eager with thirst we walked in. The woman behind the bar greeted us in Italian, which we answered to but soon made it clear by our broken pleas for water that our Italian was drained, lacking any real extent beyond that found in our own language. After quenching our thirst from the drinks she gave us, I attempted to ask her if she could help me find someone I was looking for. I showed her the address from the envelope and the two women on the front, one being my great aunt. “Yasmin,” she called to a young woman at a table, her daughter, who came obediently. Yasmin smiled at me and asked, “My mother wants to know how you know this woman?” I looked at the bartender and explained, how my grandmother had sent me a photograph, how I was in Italy to rediscover the truths of my family, and how I wanted to see the remains of the home that my family had lived in and that this was the last address we had ever received. Then the bartender spoke to her daughter, who turned to me, “We are going to take you in our car to meet them.” She said. When we stepped out of the car, a balding man thick and hearty in stature greeted us with a friendly handshake and then greeted the bartender as an old friend. He pointed at their home. We were on the curve of a cliff and an old stone building extended up the side of the wall in front of the hill just before us. It was an old stone church that had been their home for centuries. We walked up the steppingstones and a woman emerged from a wooden doorway thickly tucked beneath the stone masonry that shaped the courtyard of their home. The woman seemed to have emerged directly from my photograph, her locks of short dark black hair and plump skin with rosy cheeks had not changed in over 20 years, except time had caught her skin in wrinkles. Their home was cozy and dark. They had a bowl of sweets and cookies in the middle of the table they had poured for us and when I had gotten lost in conversation with my great-aunt, I found myself sharply snapped out of it by her husband’s gentle tap and gesture to the bowl. “Mangia!” He whispered, and any family that has grown up closely to Italians will attest that, this is what truly made me feel at home. Their hospitality taught me that no matter who we are, or where we go, we can find that family is not very far at all.... (abridged).