Homecoming (Sequel)

Prologue

They always say ʻHome is where the heart isʼ, but I didnʼt really feel like that saying applied to me. My heart was a Roma gypsy on its own. A nomad. She had been drifting from one home to another for eighteen years. Eighteen long years Iʼve spent on this wonky merry-go-round, riding a disfigured horse with a candy-floss-colored mane over the vast expanse of this earth. Two continents divided by one large ocean. Three countries, two of then being islands bordering a sea of salt water. Four homes in four different places. I was a world traveller, and I hadnʼt even wanted to be one.

The kick-off to my wandering life was in Sicily on August 25, 1978. In the town that sits on a hill, looking down at the city of Palermo as it laid in the valley. My life began in Monreale.

I was born into the lives of Mam and Dad, Anna Crosby and Domenico Luciano. To say I was an accident was harsh, but true nonetheless. They had tempted fate at eighteen and twenty-three, and as a result, they got me nine months, wrapped up in a layer of white residue. As premature baby, I was a proper ghost at birth.

Accident or not, I was taken into a big family like I was the embodiment of the second coming of Gesù Christo. Every member of my ridiculously large family, wether blood or non-blood, attended my christening. In a long white dress, I was christened as Demetria Anastasia Dominique Luciano. I was Mam and Dadʼs gift, and they gave me both of their family names to introduce me into this world as such. Anastasia for Mamʼs female family founder, Dominique for Dadʼs great grandfather in the third degree.

From inhabiting diapers and being carried around to wearing frilly tutus and running around, I had been a happy child. I had lived the ride on the merry-go-round to the fullest, even with my noticeable shortcomings. Literally.

I had always been tiny, a gene passed onto me from Mamʼs side. As a child, my head hardly skimmed the door knob whereas my cousins were forest emergents. I was the youngest and the smallest, the runt of the Luciano litter. They called me Piuma, which means  ʻfeatherʼ. Anyone could pick me up and carry me around like I was just a newborn. But my size never stopped me from being a child like the others were. I wandered around the streets of Monreale and Palermo, screaming and running, cartwheeling on the railings of the Kalsa Piazza as a make-shift monkey bar. I did everything just as joyfully as them.

I was an outdoor-child to the core. Only when it was time to eat or sleep, then I would be inside the house. Mam had told me I would start to cry when she held me inside to stay clear of the heat. Even as a baby, I didnʼt want to be nay-said, not even by my own Mam. I wanted to be outside. Either I was playing footie with my cousins and neighbor-children in the street, or I was standing in one of my most favorite places in the world to this day.

As I child, I was at my happiest when standing in the Piazza, on the boardwalk right alongside the Tyrrhenian Sea. When it was summer time and the tourist-season was well in action, I would be a tiny saleswoman for our stall at the tourist market. Like most families here, my family members were seasonal workers and Summer was the most important one for us. Money in other seasons didnʼt flow for us like Summer did. We profited from the many tourists looking to spend their money on frilly baubles as long as we could before September ended, and my family was back to scrambling for money. Or at least I thought they did at the time...

I did my share by getting rid of the sea shells I had gathered on the beach the day before. With Mam standing behind me like a proud lioness smiling down at her only cub, I said thank you to the tourists in my chipmunk voice and collected their posh money when they bought a handful of my shells. I was the luckiest girl in the Piazza, Mam had always said to me. She said, because I was so small and had a pair of eyes that were too big for my face, they always gave me more money. How could you be mean to a cute five year old? And, besides the fact that I was fluent in Italian and Sicilian, I knew my fair share of English. Mamʼs handy work that had lucrative consequences. Usually, the majority of tourists, stemming from Spain to as far away as Sweden, came back the next day or the day after that, wanting more seashells from the tiny English-speaking Sicilian squirrel.