Luciana

The past couple weeks I have gotten closer and closer with Luciana, my host mom. The third girl living in our house ended her program and returned to Switzerland, and with just three of us now at the table the conversations have gotten increasingly personal.

Luciana is an amazing woman, she curses every night at dinner as we watch the news, she hates politicians, and criminals and judges everyone initially on their appearance, though she is willing to change her mind if said person turns out to be a good person inside.

She told me the other day that her sister has always had to tell her, “Luciana, count to three before speaking.” She told me that she is just blunt and she never lies. And I believe her. After using a curse word she laughs and looks at us, “we only use these words in the house, right?”

Her husband died of lung cancer fifteen years ago, I think this is the same year she started hosting exchange students. It is also the year she quit smoking. Now she has two sons and three grandsons. All but the youngest grandson are smokers, and she calls them idiots for it. When Katherine and I first got here we couldn’t figure out if her husband had died or if she was divorced, over time we knew he had died. She speaks of him often and always fondly. He was a professor, he sounds brilliant, and I’m sure he was because she is too.

I think Luciana is in her eighties, though when I first got here I thought she was in her younger sixties. She doesn’t have a wrinkle on her face and she is always smiling. She says when she was younger she was beautiful, and I believe her. She says men used to follow her every time she left the house, but that back then it wasn’t a scary thing. She said her husband was one of those men. She never paid attention to them, but he figured out a way to get to know her. Even today she says men will offer her wine at restaurants or ask her out on the street, but she says, “they are all old,” and she will always love her husband.

Sunday over breakfast she told us this year has been hard. She has three friends in the hospital, two, she says, she’s sure will be going to the other world, one she’s not so sure about. Friends call her house all morning and all evening and she is out almost every day going to the movies, or going to lunch with them. She told us you reach an age where you have more dead friends than ones alive. She is never overly romantic or emotional, just honest. She looked at us and said, “but we’re all here, and you two get to go to the soccer game today!”