Colette and Pasquale met us at Aeroporto Palese, the main international airport serving Bari, in the South-East region of Puglia. Our Italian cousins had no trouble distinguishing us from the natives as we exited the terminal doors and wheeled our overpacked luggage to the curb, wilting in the summer sun and wearing the wrong shoes. Dan and I settled into their compact SUV and we all rode out of the city, past rows of olive trees with their twisted trunks, basking in the long, hot summer. We were thrilled to be living a new reality. Pasquale, a non-English speaker, smiled warmly and nodded, as he would do throughout the weekend, in agreement with everything Colette told us about the rural countryside on our way to their home, my husband’s maternal family place of origin next to the sea in the village of Molfetta.
Salt hung in the air like a briny perfume as we stepped out of the car and through a cluster of tropical potted plants dotting the entryway into their family apartment. Bookcases from floor to ceiling lined with current and mid-century art, literature, and family pictures took their places in the hallway and dining room. We settled into seats around the family table with our gentle cousins as their warm, adult daughters Valja and Silvia joined.
Colette, a local teacher, was our translator, describing each of the twelve (it felt like twelve, maybe thirteen) courses of this authentic Italian welcoming lunch. They’d shopped and prepared lovingly for us, days ahead, with so much care and intent we felt grateful and treasured in equal measure. The food was exquisite, paired with the perfect wine chosen by Pasquale, a notable sommelier. We shared gifts we brought for them from home. The meal lasted for hours as is the custom in Italy until finally, filled with good food and warm connection, we fell silent in the universal language of generosity.
The following morning Colette and Pasquale took us on a day-long tour of nearby villages. We bought melt-in-your-mouth butter cookies topped with chewy sugar cherries in Ruvo. Then stepped gingerly through the underground remnants of an early church, only to emerge from the ancient stone into blooms of white oleander tenting the sidewalk. We drove past more olive trees, some older than our country. Cutting through, dry and arid farmland, we saw cows peppering the landscape, grazing lazily on the scorched undergrowth. In Altamura, famous for durum wheat flour bread, Pasquale bought focaccia and set the meal wrapped in brown paper into his backpack for our lunch later in the day. We climbed the elevated hillside streets in the ancient city of Matera and stopped to take our picture (and for the out-of-shape Americans to recover.)
We returned to Molfetta to ten more distant cousins and extended family we’d previously only met in pictures for an outdoor dinner at a restaurant by the sea. A flurry of Molfettese dialect blew from the table like sheets of music in the wind, everyone talking at once, senior family members ordering for us while young children played in a nearby rock garden, self-entertained. It felt so good to be a part of something bigger than us. As the sun lowered in the horizon over the Adriatic I watched a man swimming along the sea wall, arm over arm, steady and rhythmic, like a leatherback sea turtle gliding beneath his rubbery shell, undeterred by the opposing current.
Hope carries me through the pandemic and softens the disappointment of separation. It helps to know it will not always be this way, things will change, they always do. I call up memories of family visits like this one, like folktales, stories I tell myself about love and connection. We wait, we hope, we wear our masks. We plan our soft resting places of gathering in our tomorrows. I tell myself next year will be better and we will soon be with our loved ones again, my daydream inside a plan rooted in optimism.
Copyright (2020) Suzanne Bayer. All Rights Reserved.