Okay; I've gone on and on and ON about getting ready for this trip, both here and here. And there was talk of my mother possibly coming along with me for this looming Italian trip-- talk which, in a Northern Italian woman, is spoken silently but nevertheless reverberates along the horsehair-and-plaster walls of her 1912 semi-detached house in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. We'd always spoken about making the crossing together, a trip I know she'd love. After all, Mom hasn't been to see her cousins since 1950. That trip was captured on film, all stored in yellow Kodak boxes and annotated by my family in various handwriting and spelling: "Porto Gallo" my grandfather wrote on the box that featured the ship's stop in Portugal; "Le fabbriche" notes the Italian town he grew up in ("The Factories"); and
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