The Accidental Pilgrimage - A Family Trip of Discovery, 2013

There are times in your life that become your defining moments - when you get married, when your kids are born, when you publish your first book. But it's not often that past and present come together, that ancestors and descendants are united in a tiny village cemetary, where centuries are measured in mere seconds - especially during a family vacation. This is what my family experienced during a family vacation in the summer of 2013 - when my husband and I brought our four daughters back to the place of their roots. It all started when I very decidedly informed my spouse that we were going back to Italy, for the second time in three years.

The first snow came rather early that year. I looked out my bedroom window onto the scant fragile mantle barely covering the hearty green ivy and the blue pool cover in my backyard. Early November and sick of snow already. Brr!! I thought of the predominantly rainy, cool summer we had experienced and reckoned that the gods of precipitation shall continue in their merciless campaign to make everyone in Southern Ontario miserable.

For us though, there was a bright spot in the overall gray summer of 2013; my saint of a husband and I took our sometimes dysfunctional and always loud brood on the road, once more, to sunny Italy. When I broached the subject of venturing abroad ever so tactfully to my darling spouse earlier in the year, I could almost feel him shiver and see the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. "No! No way - not again," he said, firm in his resolve that I wouldn't get my way once more.

"Come on now, you knew this was coming." I threw my hands in the air, showing my surprise that he would even question the entire matter. "We missed so much in 2009. We didn't even get to the villages to show them their roots, where their grandparents and great grandparents were born."

It took weeks of imploring, negotiating and petitioning on my part but ultimately, I convinced my hubby that it was our obligation to take make this trip, this pilgrimage. Once in we were done touring Rome, we picked up our nine passenger automatic van after a few days of sightseeing in the raucous and romantic "Eternal City", where we got funny looks from the rental counter guy because usually the only people in Italy who drive automatics are disabled.

Notwithstanding mine and my husband's issues with the stick shift, we shrugged off the snooty side glances and piled up the minibus with our baggage - and our suitcases, too. Picture the Beverly Hillbillies' title sequence, minus the rocking chair and Granny - that was us!

Our journey would bring us to Tuscany. I had booked a winery tour in the intoxicatingly beautiful Chianti region's Verazzano Castle. It was to be the highlight of my entire vacation because wine and myself have developed a good relationship - having four beautiful nubile daughters ranging in age from fifteen to twenty two, I need the occasional swig. But, alas, the exploration of the castle was not to be...we got lost in the Tuscan hills and missed the entire tour. We got there just in time to catch what would have been our guide leading a dozen or so tipsy tourists out of a cavernous cantina filled with oak barrels and dusty bottles of red wine. I thought I would cry right then and there.

Sad as it was, I found strength in knowing that in the next few days we would travel to a tiny mountain village just north of Lucca, a provincial town, to visit my ancestral home. It would fulfill a calling within me to bring my daughters there; I wanted my children to know the red earth from which their grandparents were nourished, where they grew up and got married and where their great grandmother and great aunts and uncles rested eternally in the tiny cemetery just above the village.

My cousins met us in the little hamlet and we shared a lovely luncheon in a nearby restaurant. We shared familiar stories, ate and drank and laughed. Then it was time to carry out the raison-d'être.

With a massive armload of flowers, my family and I trekked through the village and uphill until we reached the intricately worked iron gates of the cemetery. I knew exactly where to go as it was not my first time there. I swung the gates open and I saw my grandmother's photograph on the memorial stone. I saw my uncle and aunts, too. Tears welled up in my eyes. My daughters took the flowers from my arms and began distributing them evenly amongst the places I pointed out to them. My usually vivacious and animated children were reverent and quiet, fetching water from the tap and filling the vessels before placing the flowers by each of their relatives.

"Look, mommy...this man doesn't have any flowers. Can we give him some? And this one, too."

"Of course, give some flowers to whoever you think needs them." The afternoon went quickly. I took pictures of them by the monuments to show my mother. I felt very much at peace that day, like I had crossed a tremendously important item off an imaginary list.

The following week we fulfilled the devotion in my husband's ancestral town in the region of Abruzzi. Dozens of his relatives received a teary visit from our family which once again placed flowers at their monuments as a sign of respect and love for their antecedents. A lovely dinner followed in the company of no fewer than twenty cousins that had gone far too long unseen.

That trip was, for my husband and me, an act of due diligence: a must do before our kids all go their separate ways. This vacation was a pilgrimage in disguise, a vacation of obligation to instill a love of family history in our daughters. A full circle was completed last summer. A circle as endless as the seasons, as constant as the falling, freezing and melting of the snow that lays on the ivy in my backyard.