What We Carried With us

Some things arrive with you without ever being packed.

They come folded into habits, tucked into recipes made from memory, carried in the way a house is kept or a table is set. They travel quietly — across oceans, through generations — often unnoticed until one day you realize how easily they can disappear.

My parents carried their lives from Ischia, Italy, to Canada long before I was born. My father arrived first, in 1953, a young man learning how to build a future in a country so different from the island he had left behind. Years later, through photographs and letters, he met my mother. For two years they wrote to one another across the ocean — words filling the distance — before marrying in Italy in 1963 and beginning their life together in Canada.

By the time I arrived in 1971, those choices had already shaped the world I was born into. I grew up in British Columbia, surrounded by siblings, routine, and the quiet structure of family life. We went to the beach. We visited fruit farms. We gathered at the table. Nothing felt extraordinary — it was simply how we lived.

My mother taught through example. I learned by helping, by watching, by repeating what had been done before me. My father worked with his hands, and as I grew older, I worked beside him, learning about landscaping and responsibility without ever sitting down for a lesson. These were not traditions announced out loud. They were lived.

Later, as life unfolded, I drifted from those ways without noticing how far I’d gone. Marriage, motherhood, and the blending of cultures reshaped my days. I raised six children, focusing on the needs of my family, and in doing so, much of what I had absorbed as a child fell quiet. The foods changed. The rhythms softened. The old ways became memories instead of practices.

It wasn’t until much later — after loss, change, and remarriage — that something stirred again. Being reunited with familiar customs, familiar flavors, familiar values reminded me that what we carry does not vanish easily. It waits.

This blog is a place to gather those things again.

Here, I will share the family traditions, recipes, and ways of keeping a home that shaped me — not because they belong in the past, but because they still have a place in the present. Some will be imperfect. Some remembered only in pieces. All offered with care.

This is how we lived.
Maybe it can live again.