MONTE -- THE MAN OF THE MONTAGNE!!!!

Dear Monte -- it is 3:31 p.m. on Saturday, November 26, 2022, and you are barely 12 hours old! Can you see me smiling? My face feels like it's fixed in a permanent grin. Me? Who am I? According to your Uncle Evan (cousin Ronen and Dani's father) I am "GMA x 3" (Gma with three grandchildren) or as I prefer to call myself "Gmax3."

You and your cousins fill my heart with immense joy.

OK, that's putting it mildly.

I am wildly in love with you, you brand new little man! I am wildly in love with your cousins too. As I said to someone this morning, my heart feels like it's going to BUST APART WITH LOVE!!!! Just like this lady in the painting I did so many years ago, a painting I call "A Woman Madly Chasing Her [Busted] Heart." The painting that appears, oddly enough, on the novel I am publishing, quite coincidentally, the same week that you are born!!!

I realize that great forces of biology are at work. Somehow we are programmed to procreate. In this way, you, baby M, will carry me forward, into a future I will never see. But as I wrote recently, that idea doesn't scare me, the idea of someday passing into the Great Beyond. In fact, when I wrote my last blogpost, I said that I was delighted to realize that because of my grandchildren, I am an ancestor in the making!

But don't worry, I'm hoping there is plenty more time before I actually pass into the realm of ancestorhood!

*****

It was 6:30 in the morning -- pitch black -- when my cell phone rang. I sprang up, saw your mommy's name on my phone and I panicked. You weren't due for another nine days, was something wrong? After all, your mom took that gigantic fall onto the cement sidewalk just a week or so ago. But no, there most certainly was nothing wrong! There on the phone was your mom and dad, looking exhausted and elated, and there was you! YOU! Bundled into a blanket! You Monte came rushing into the world in a big hurry, you certainly did! And now it's a few days later and my head is still spinning. A brand new baby, a book, and a big birthday all in one week. No wonder my head is a "squash," as your great grandmother Dena used to say. I sit here thinking, THIS IS TODAY AND THIS IS LAST WEEK AND THIS IS 70 YEARS IN THE PAST AND THIS IS TOMORROW AND THIS IS 70 YEARS FROM NOW INTO THE FUTURE.

Is that you I see, with greying hair and creases at your eyes? How can that be? You haven't even opened your baby eyes yet!

But no, I look 70 years into the future and there you are, 70 like me, I see you clear as today is sunny, you are an older, good looking man, still tall, but sitting now, beside a cabin next to a stream,

a mountain in the distance. You are surrounded by golden aspen and deep green pine. Your wife of 40 plus years is beside you, you sit in the two wooden chairs that you made by hand out of trees on your land. The palms of your hand, and your fingers, are rough to the touch, much like my dad's were -- dad being Richard Ricci, your mother's grandfather, the man who in this photo is holding your mother as a baby. He too worked with wood!

And in one of your hands you have a beer from a local Colorado craft beer company. The sun is lowering in the azure blue sky. And like me, you have children -- two? three? and a couple of grandchildren but they are far away. And now that you are retired, you spend more and more of your days up in the mountains! You are a man of the mountains -- in Italian, montagne -- Monte! Your mom and dad, Lindsay and Geoffry, named you for the mountains of Colorado -- "monte" in Italian, is "mountain" in English!

*******

Smiling, smiling, I am just washing back and forth in time. I feel like I'm riding in a bubble of light in the white and turquoise green waves of the Ocean of Life.

In the Pearly Everlasting of time!!

*******

Today is Friday, December 2nd. Tomorrow you will be a week old! It's still dark outside.

Yesterday, one of my poet friends, Nancy Dunlop, saw your first photo and called you "a beautiful little nugget."

You are a tiny orb of light landed on Earth in the form of a rather rotund new baby!

Here's an amazing coincidence: just as you were being born in Denver last Saturday, my brother, your great Uncle Ric Ricci, was traveling in a van with his wife and whole family up to Montereale, the mountainous provence in Italy where my grandfather Claude (your great great grandfather) and my Grandma Mish (short for Michelina -- your great great grandmother) were born. These people are your great great grandparents on my mother's side of the family!

This mountainous region, called the Gran Sasso, includes a set of three grey summits that -- just like the Colorado Rockies -- sit elegantly dusted in snow in the central part of Italy in a region known as the Abruzzi. Where your Great great grandparents Mish and Pop Rotondo grew up! The highest peak in the Gran Sasso is Corno Grande, 9,554 feet high! Just about the same height as Mountain Village, Colorado, next to Telluride, where I spent three lovely days this past October with my husband, your grandfather, GPa Richard (who is also turning 70 in a few weeks.)

OK, so know I get it: you, Monte, have returned to some of your roots: the landscape of your Italian ancestors! You did it via your mom, Lindsay, who left the East Coast because she fell in love with the Rocky Mountains! And then she fell in love with your wonderful father, Geoff! Now it all makes sense! But how can I possibly bring all of your ancestors alive to you? The short answer, is, I can't. I can only give you glimpses here and there! Which is why I'm writing these letters.

In my last letter, I wrote to another one of your ancestors, Pasquale Orzo, on my father's side of the family, a man who was born in November, 1870, in the very southern part of Italy.

He is my great grandfather, and so he is your great great great grandfather. Ayayayayay there are so so many many GREATS! But isn't it just so great that we have so much family?

WE HAVE MOUNTAINS OF FAMILY, MOUNTAINS AND MOUNTAINS, STRETCHING ALL THE WAY FROM ITALY TO THE BERKSHIRES OF MASSACHUSETTS AND THE ROCKIES OF COLORADO AND CALIFORNIA TOO!!!

I've got to pause again. My brain is on overdrive! Steam is blasting from my ears.

It's time to do yoga. I need to. Breathe. Stretch. And try to absorb the momentous events of the LAST WEEK AT THIS TIME YOU WERE STILL

JUST

AN

IDEA!