Familial Ties

The next few weeks are full of goodbye-dinner engagements before my departure for the States, and these evenings tend to be extremely heart-wrenching. The positive side, though, is the realization that the past four years here have allowed me to create friendships for which I am incredibly grateful.

One of these stems from a blog entry I wrote in April, about my beloved teenage students. My friendship with Frieda, a German woman from choir, created the opportunity for those lessons, and her daughter Matilde took part. Over the past few months my boyfriend and I have grown closer to both Frieda, Mati and the rest of the family, which includes Gian (dad) and Lucia (younger daughter). We even spent two weekends together in the hills outside Bologna; Frieda and Gian lent me their country house for my goodbye party.

On Monday, I said goodbye to the Frieda-Gian-Mati-Luci conglomerate - goodbye, that is, til I visit Bologna again. We showed up with a bowl full of presents, including from balloons (which Lucia likes to fill up with water), an indoor frisbee (which Gian started using immediately), and washable markers for glass (which the girls started using on the windows).

Above is their family portrait, by Lucia. Below is our "couple" portrait, by Mati. Even the shoes are perfectly accurate!



Of course it was also necessary to start writing a list of "People We Love Very Much". Notice Emma and Max in pink under the list of relatives. We aren't underlined, which was initially very offensive because all important friends are underlined, but then we were informed that there are too many important grownups to be able to underline them all. That seems fair.



I think the best way to sum up my feelings about this family, and the other people I'm saying goodbye to right now, is that I don't even know how to express how lucky I feel. And how much I hope, I really do, that these relationships manage to survive notwithstanding the upcoming distance. It's the only way to make these dinners bearable.