Annie and Emma

An all too brief visit from my niece, Annie, and her daughter, Emma compels me to take a wee break from the Queen Anne's Lace project. Annie, my brother Rick's daughter, lives in Saluzzo, , at the foot of the Alps in Piedmont, Italy. Every summer she and Emma come to stay in their condo in Solana Beach near San Diego,, where Emma is an American. In the fall, they go back to Italy where Emma seamlessly becomes Italian.

I have always felt a special connection with Annie, probably because, in many ways she is so much like me. And yet, in so many ways uniquely herself. Although she speaks fluent Italian, it is always challenging to fit into a close knit, small town Italian family. We have spent a lot of time as guests in their home, and I really appreciate the seeming ease with which she has adopted a whole new culture as well as the inherent difficulties of leaving the culture she grew up in. She has worked hard to make sure that Emma is truly bicultural as well as bilingual.

One year Annie sent me a picture of her large Italian family. It had snowed the night before, and while the cousins were all making snowmen and sledding down the driveway, the parents were gathered around the outdoor pizza oven her father-in-law had built for them as a wedding present, drinking prosecco. I wrote to her saying that with pictures like that, it would be easy to believe that she lived a fairy tale life, but that I was well aware of the hard work involved in being part of that happy scene.

When I showed Emma her cousin Peter's tree house in the field of dreams, behind our house, I was delighted to see her climb right up and settle down there with her book. I probably bored her to death with my stories of sitting on the branch of a massive pepper tree when I was a child, reading and dreaming….How delightful to hear Emma pronounce the tree house "perfect".

The last bits of concrete and rebar have been cut, ground and chopped out. It has been a heroic task for the guys--I wish we had found a few bars of gold or some other buried treasure under that little fortress. We would definitely share it with them! I'll get back to the final phases of the QEL project tomorrow.