The Weekend That Felt Like Home
This was a beautiful weekend — maybe the kind I wish could repeat itself every year. The Romano family gathered again to celebrate my grandmother’s birthday, though this time, for the first time, she wasn’t with us. It felt strange, like a new chapter beginning without the person who wrote the first lines.We rented a big house in Estremoz, Alentejo, an old Portuguese house with long hallways, uneven floors, and furniture that looks like it belongs to another time. It’s always fun walking through it for the first time, choosing which room will be ours, imagining all those empty spaces soon filled with voices.
On Saturday morning we learned that another family member had passed away, and my father and his brothers had to leave for the funeral. Even with that shadow, the rest of us stayed, remembering our grandmother’s stories. My aunt brought something unexpected, a small bundle of letters that my grandfather wrote to my grandmother in 1952, three years before they married. The letters were short, innocent, delivered secretly at their workplaces so their parents wouldn’t know. All of them ended simply: “Goodbye and a handshake.”
That phrase stopped me. I kept thinking how even something so ordinary, written by hand, could hold so much. Those letters, though not about anything important, felt eternal. I felt sadness knowing that we no longer write like this — that handwriting, like oil painting, is slowly disappearing. I even thought that I should handwrite some of my own letters from the website, to leave behind something that breathes. A trace that lasts beyond me. I know my grandmother would have been proud. She always asked us never to stop these reunions, and even without her presence, she was everywhere in the food, the laughter, the patience we tried to show one another.
At some point I started sketching. I drew a distant cousin who joined the weekend for the first time. The moment I finished, everyone asked for a drawing of their own. My father was the first to critique it. He said, “He has white hair and a white beard, and your pencil can’t show that.” He’s right — and I love that about him. His opinions always cut through praise. If I ever seek honesty, it’s his voice I want to hear. Maybe that’s why I work so hard: to make him proud, to show him I’m still learning. Even with wrong proportions, those sketches mean something to me. They’re made quickly, in real time, without help, without technology — pure presence. Each one is a fragment of my own truth.
Back in Lisbon tonight, election day, I feel a strange mix of gratitude and restlessness. This city used to feel like home. Lately, it doesn’t. I live in Intendente, and sometimes it feels like the city is pushing me away. The streets smell of trash, construction never stops, and yet inside the apartment there’s beauty — Tarla’s decoration, little objects that hold our memories together. I dream of a house in the countryside, like the one in Estremoz. A place with a studio big enough to step back and look at a canvas from a distance. A place quiet enough to hear myself think. I don’t need much just a room of my own to paint, to breathe.
Maybe that’s what this weekend was trying to tell me: that home is not only where we live, but what we carry forward. The letters my grandfather wrote. The family my grandmother built. The drawings that may outlive me.
I just hope that one day, someone will read my words or see my paintings and feel the same warmth we felt, standing together, reading “Goodbye and a handshake.”
