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| left to right, Maria, brother Alessandro and sister Lauretta |
In the Photo of Us
In San Mauro, I meet my cousins whom I never met before.
They are the children of my grandfather’s brother.
One of them tells me she has a photo she wants to show me,
and she hands me the picture. On the back is a note
my father had written to his mother, dated 1945,
so he would have been thirty-nine,
younger than my own children are now.
In that photo, I am about five years old, skinny
and big-eyed and wearing a dress
that has embroidery on the front and little puff sleeves.
It is an expensive-looking dress,
so I know it must have been a hand-me-down from
Zia Christina’s late-in-life daughter.
Next to me, my two-year-old
brother is seated in a chair. His face is sweet and open.
He is wearing dress pants,
brown leather shoes and white socks.
His hair is in a bowl cut.
On the other side of him, my sister stands.
Her dress looks like a hand-me-down too,
but she would have been the wrong size
to be given the same clothes I was given,
so the dress looks raggedy and worn.
When I send the picture to my brother,
he says, “We could have been people
from the Dust Bowl, we look so poor.”
“But Al”, I say, “we were so lucky!
We had Mom and Dad and each other.
When you look at us, who would have thought
that these three children would end up a writer, a doctor, and a nurse?”
He agrees, but still, I can tell he is shocked
to understand just how the world would have seen us,
what they expected us to do,
and how we proved them wrong.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan is the author of twenty books. Her latest publication is the poetry and art collection, The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets
. Maria's official website is at MariaGillan.com.
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