Whenever I tell people about the Last Trip Home I took to Italy with my 87-year-old mother and my older son last summer, everyone has the same response (“Awwww…”), which makes me feel like a fraud because I know they’re imagining some gauzy scene. And to be fair, I’d tried to plan it that way. I’d been dreaming of a “homecoming” for my mom for some time, once the kids were old enough to feel the weight of their grandmother’s origin story as a child-prodigy soprano.
I remember the first time I experienced my mother in her natural habitat, four decades earlier. On a hot day in her hometown of Pesaro, I’d watched her hop on a bike with a gelato in hand, speaking in her native tongue with a…
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O, Quarterly (Digital) - 1 Issue, Holiday 2024