I am not sure where it is I come from, where my great grandfather called home, but soon I will return home.
What home is, again, I’m not sure, and I am finding it hard to explain to others. It doesn’t seem to be a place you want to draw on a map or wrap in the colors of a flag.
But it seems to be the place one feels the closest to one’s self.

As I walk past their stone wall, the husband and wife look up from their labor of moving a large granite boulder into the place they made for it. They have a weekend house in the remote mountain village of Cola in Val Codera, Italy.
“Where are you from? Germany, France?”
“No. The United States.”
“Wow,” the husband says, “I have a great grandfather who moved to California in the 1920’s, and another who moved to Argentina. They were looking for a better life.” There is a pause and then they both shrug their shoulders. “Now the Africans are coming here.”
The wife rubs her index finger and her thumb together to signal money as a motive.

Inside the box were eight bars of scented hand-made soap, two stuffed mice cat toys, a ziplock bag of Hersey’s chocolate kisses sealed to prevent contamination from the scented soap, a fountain pen, an extra nib for a fountain pen, and two books; “Book Binding: A Step-By-Step Guide” and “Living the Good Life.”
The nondescript cardboard box, smelling of lavender and lemon grass, left the post office in Sequim, WA, on January 7th and was then sent to the USPS processing center in Takoma, WA, and then to the USPS Customs processing facility in Federal Way, WA, two days later.
After crossing the Atlantic Ocean in the cargo hold of a jet, it was registered in the Central Milan Gateway of Italian Post International Processing facility on January 13th. The box arrived in Piacenza, Italy, on January 14th and was in transit for delivery by the 15th.
For a month and two weeks, the private third-party delivery company, hired by the Italian government to deliver the package, registered the box as in transit, then back to the facility for an inability to deliver. According to the third party company, no one was home.
The box was sent back to the Linate Airport in Milan. Return to sender. For two weeks it was sorted and shipped on a cargo jet back to the United States where it arrived in New York City on March 9th, processed and sent to Federal Way, WA, USPS facility where it arrived on March 11th. The box was then sent to Bremerton, WA, to Takoma, WA, for Federal Customs handling, back to Federal Way, WA, facility on March 25th, and set on the doorstep of the sender in Sequim, WA, on March 25th, 78 days after having sent it to Italy as a Christmas gift.

“Pappa, is there an Italian God? Do they have a Jesus?” Pip asks her father as they drive through the Tuscan countryside towards the city of Florence.
“Italians are Catholics. Catholics believe in Jesus.”

“The driver sat in the iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.” ~ John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath