Moving to Italy--Some backstory

Before we left California, George had worked for four years in Los Angeles County's Child Protective Services, and he was worn out with the stress of overseeing children in abysmal conditions. The almost-daily task of removing children from their parents had drained him.  Even though their mother had abused them, it was still “Mommy!” they cried when they were taken away.  On one long and difficult day, a father threatened him with a gun.  George just looked at the man, sighed and said, "You'd be doing me a favor."  When he came home that night and told me the story, George said that when he saw the gun pointed at him he was so emotionally depleted that it would have been a relief to end it all. It was obvious he had to leave the agency. 

We stayed up late discussing alternate work.  He wanted to try teaching but didn’t have a credential.  He couldn’t afford to quit work to get one, and night school would have taken years.  He needed relief quicker than that.  We didn’t consider my return to work; without a college degree and with four little ones, the childcare costs would have exceeded any salary I could make. Late in the evening he brought up an idea we had discussed before.  He felt ready to return to his family farm in northern Italy, in a rural Piedmont valley between Turin and Milan, to work the land as his grandfather had done, and as his two uncles were still doing.  Since my mother’s death and my sister’s marriage, I had no strong ties in the U.S. His parents were delighted to retire back to the farm with us, and we knew our children were young enough to adapt easily to another country.  I had no idea what life on a farm meant, but I was willing to find out. I was 24 years old, and George was 28.

To me, Italy seemed an exciting and exotic country; to George, it was returning home.  To both of us, it was a place to escape from the tensions, troubles, and divisions in post-Vietnam America to what we thought would be a less complicated life.  We could work for ourselves, raise our own food, and determine our own hours.  We could let our children run free in the fields, breathe the clean country air, and learn about raising animals.  We wanted to go backwards in time and distance to a less poisonous environment than what we saw all around us in 1970s California.  Since George’s parents owned a four-bedroom house at the farm, with a town nearby, it seemed the perfect solution. So with stars in our eyes we boarded the plane, first for England to visit my relatives, and then on to Turin where George’s cousins were waiting.

 

Visiting my grandmother in London