Category Archives: Women

The Courage to Open the Door – Honoring Onorina at Age 92

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In the fall of 1980, my cousin Onorina opened the door and invited in what was to be, for me, a lifetime of friendship and kinship. It was my first ancestral journey to Trentino, Italy, and I was in search of finding my grandparents’ birthplaces. My husband and I had arrived by train, bus and then on foot to Onorina’s doorstep, backpacks on our backs, directed there by a woman in the nearby village of Faida who said that I likely had family who lived there.  It was beyond expectation to learn that I might have living relatives!  

After getting off the bus in what we hoped was the hamlet of Cirè, we walked around in search of a house.  But this was more of a business section. It was Saturday afternoon and there was no one around to ask. Finally, after walking up and down the road several times, we found what seemed like the only possibility: the office door of a sawmill. We rang the bell several times, but no one answered.

Finally, Onorina looked down from the window of her second story apartment above the office. I shouted up to her in my best Italian: “Sono Moser!” I explained. “Sono una cugina da America!” “I am a Moser! I am a cousin from America!” She shook her head in disbelief–and later confided that, seeing my husband’s beard, wondered if we were vagabonds. Then she shook her head again in surprise as I gave her the name of my grandfather, Giovanni. Onorina came downstairs, laughing in disbelief, and opened the door, inviting us in to have coffee and cookies. All the men – her husband, Giuseppe, and his brothers, Costante and Angelo, were out, she explained, having gone to the mountain cabin for the afternoon. They owned and operated the sawmill. She told me their names and their birth dates, and explained that they were the children of Rosa, sister to my grandfather! Rosa’s brothers had emigrated, but Rosa had stayed behind. It was true, these were my precious cousins! She gave me a small photo of Rosa and I promised to write after I arrived home in the US.

Over the years, I have returned many times, and we have become friends as well as cousins. Decades later, Onorina granted me an oral interview for my dissertation research on Trentino folk wisdom. I learned of her resilience as a girl who had lived through WWII, with bombs falling nearby. Her stories revealed a lifetime of skills. “When I got married, I could do everything!” she told me, with pride.

In the song-like cadence of Onorina’s voice, speaking the original language of the people, I hear the voices of my ancestors, and the wisdom passed down orally over the centuries and millennia. There, alone in her isolated apartment of the sawmill that day, Onorina had the courage to open the door to strangers. Onorina’s courage, then and now at age 92, reminds me to open the door to new experiences and new people.

A Tribute to Irma: Friend, Cousin, Wise Woman

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Over the years, when I needed to imagine a place of comfort, it was with my beloved cousin Irma, at her kitchen table.  Today, January 2nd, would have been her 84th birthday.  In July of 2020, we received the most difficult news from our cousins in Italy that she had left this world. Irma felt like more than a cousin, more than a friend. She was a living connection to a way of life that allowed me to see into my family’s story.

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Comari, Grandmothers, and Godmothers: Wise Women Speak from Experience

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Old Woman

Illustration by Paola de Manincor

Folk stories were the myths that guided my ancestors’ lives in the villages and valleys of what is now northern Italy. They were told in nightly gatherings, known as the filò, a word related to the Italian verb filare, meaning to spin. Words were spun into stories about every aspect of life, as fibers were spun into thread and baskets were made. The magic and wonder of the natural world came alive and not only entertained the families gathered there, but also conveyed valuable messages.

As an academic researcher searching for her cultural identity, finding these stories written down became an invaluable source of knowledge for my dissertation, as well as a repository of wisdom that serve as guidance towards sustainable living in harmony with the cycles of nature. I have come to appreciate the value of older women in my family and communities, women who hold a culmination of spiritual agency from their experience. I have sought my own value and validation in a youth-oriented patriarchal society and have dedicated decades of research to my own family’s history and to the untold stories of women across time.

In the folk stories, old women were counselors and advisors, knowledgeable in matters of health and love. As comari, (“co-mothers” or “with Mary”) women shared their knowledge in sisterhood with friends; as godmothers they held babies at baptism, as midwives they were present at birth; as grandmothers they were the storytellers, the conveyer of the culture through their words. Although women’s wisdom was negated as “old wives tales,” and the old women of the folk stories sometimes became described as witches, the Wise Women have always known and understood their own power.