DI MILLE FIORI

I traveled to Italy to see my family, to visit the towns they lived in and roads they walked on. “To find your roots” my mom said. She had been to these places before, she knew the language and the stories that gave substance to the strangers in our old photographs.

We stayed with cousins, ate chestnuts and oranges, drank red and white table wine. We celebrated La Festa di Ognissanti, a time to honor the saints and the deceased. We visited the cemeteries where my family rests. A meeting ground for the living and the dead.

I brought flowers to my ancestors graves, the cemeteries full with thousands of blossoms laid in remembrance. Petals layered over stone, over time, over forgetting. Each flower a gesture of love, a marker of presence. Flowers for flowers - people who I never knew, but who I carry in my spirit and my blood and my shared history.

A thousand flowers- messengers between generations, each one representing a life that came before me, their roots supporting the ground beneath my feet.

Io sono di mille fiori.
I am of a thousand flowers.