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.