I’ve called you mother for some time now, maybe it was meant to be for me to eventually live somewhere where I can speak English on a daily basis. To me, you are not mama, you are mother. And yes, I love you, mother.
And I loved the fact that we took the time, this past September, when we celebrated your 75th birthday, to share your first encounter with the man who was to be my father. Alexandru. The one I still wish I was named after. When I was a little girl, I used to say that my name is Anca Bunea Alexandra. It never was, but it made me feel closer to my father.
You shared this beautiful story of how you and my father got together, how you knew each other from before, being in the same large group of friends in neighbouring villages, but how you actually saw one another before Silvia’s wedding (who happened to be an old girlfriend of my father’s), when you were both picking up wedding invitations for your side of the family. It was summer, late at night, 10 pm, and you gave him the first wedding invitation. And then you mentioned you were going away on vacation soon, to Sinaia, and my father said: ‘Send me a postcard’. You said, ‘But I don’t know your address.’ And my father said, it’s okay, you can send it to the factory, there’s only one Alexandru Bunea there. And then you went home, told your mom the story of the encounter (I’m sure that you left out the part with the postcard), and my grandma said that you two should go on to seeing one another. And you said ‘But he’s too short for me’. Not that you were tall or anything. Yet, once on vacation, you did send him a postcard. And his brother, who worked at the same factory, picked it up at the gate, and brought it to my father, asking him who is the postcard from. And my father, God bless his soul wherever he is, said ‘It’s from your future sister-in-law.’
What I wouldn’t give today to have that postcard! You were married six months later and then had three beautiful children together, me in the end, whom you loved unconditionally throughout their lives.
Te iubesc, mother! And I will always love you.