Otea Pollera is Cara’s great-aunt, a woman she never met, yet has always felt she somehow knew. Though separated by time, distance, and oceans, Otea’s presence has lingered in the family like a melody passed down by ear: reshaped, reimagined, but never forgotten.

It was Otea who stayed behind in Italy when she was just three years old, wrapped in the tender care of Aunt Ida and Aunt Oleanda. While others crossed the Atlantic to chase uncertain dreams in a new world, Otea remained in the old one, growing up under the Mediterranean sun. She was adored from the start, spirited, quick-witted, and full of laughter that seemed to echo through the cobblestone streets of her small village.

And while her feet only touched American soil once, her story traveled there ahead of her, carried in letters, in recipes, in half-remembered anecdotes. She became part of the family’s mythology, a beloved figure both real and imagined, woven into their collective memory.

To Cara, Otea is more than a name or a face in a faded photograph. She is myth and memory and all of the textures of heritage stitched into the patterns Cara paints today.