NIAF essay II

As a Strega descendant, the question of how my relationship to my heritage differs from that of my ancestors can be answered very simply, by borrowing from a Greek. It’s an Archimedean Spiral, a series of 360 degree turns that have landed me, ultimately right back, not in my ancestors' precise belief system, but in their understanding of the annual cycles and the connection between human lives and the natural world.
My mother was an art student in Rome when she met an fell in love with an American Air Force private. I was born a year later. She met the man I would come to know as my father years later at a foreign student picnic hosted by Yale University. He was an astronomy major at Yale while mom was studying anthropology at Wesleyan. My childhood was an array of mom's myths by day and corroboration of those myths while stargazing with my dad at night.
My career as a massage therapist put me in touch with an ability to channel the dead. I had always spoken to my Biz Nonna Adele (who died during WW II) as a child, but I was never clear at such a young age whom exactly I was talking to. Through massage, I began to understand the magnitude of my strong sense of connection to my ancestors. I then began seeing my clients' lives in my hands. I incorporated Reflective Listening into my practice and helped the clients resolve their own childhood issues or relationships with relatives who had passed on.
Today I am married to a hunter. We plant soy beans for the deer together every summer. I can stand in a field of wheat and tell you exactly when the summer solstice will arrive without looking at a calender. It's when the corn and wheat are exactly the same height. I trace this ability to my ancestors' agrarian rituals.
The Ohio countryside may not be quite as mountainous as Umbria, but the vineyards here remind me very much of my grandparents' home in Castleviscardo. So does the taste of fresh wild boar. It's my evolution into this lifestyle that are the turns of my Archimedean Spiral; seer, healer, stargazer, storyteller, hunter and chanter of Italian poetry.
The game pole in my Nonno's garden routinely had wild game hanging from it. Rabbits and chickens would be chilled in la cantina, the caves below the house. Large game was hung to cure for three to nine days, depending on the weather. The game pole in my own back yard is brimming with deer from October to February.
My great grandmother was not a licensed massage therapist, but she was a healer and a seer. My grandfather worked for the Ministry of Interior. So I have no work skills in common with him. But like my ancestors, I still skin squirrels and rabbits each September; eat and can only locally grown vegetables; and say a decade of Hail Mary's to La Madonna Negra eight times a year. Our family lives in harmony with the wheel of the year, both in Italy and here in the states.