My family has hauled a lot of weird stuff from place to place. Saint Anthony. Fifty pounds of cheese. My dead aunt’s cedar chest with the Last Supper and a cuckoo clock in it.

It all started when our boat people came to LaMerica from Sicily, carrying little or nothing, other than kids, off the boat at Ellis Island. My Nani Sorbello was herself carried off, seasick and pregnant with her second child. She did bring her wedding shawl, a mauvish pink silk that she cut in half to use as kerchiefs, which seemed practical, though hardly sentimental. It was rescued and sewn back together years later by one of her seven daughters, and is now mine.

My grandfather Pennise, single when he arrived, brought along his discharge papers from the Italian Army and a scarf with the map of Italy showing all the crests of the provinces in the Old Country. My mother had it framed to hang in her dining room. He also had a photo of himself in uniform, his thinning hair styled in an obvious comb-over. And a pair of military gauntlets that my Uncle John used on the farm until they wore out.

My Nani Pennise, who came alone as a teenager, brought nothing.

I marvel at the fancy stuff other immigrants arrived with–linen, silver, jewels, even furniture. Our nicest item that came off the boat at Ellis Island hangs on my wall now. It’s a photo in a wooden oval frame with curved glass. Francesco, in his army uniform, looks very elegant with white gloves and a stogie the size of cordwood. He was killed in World War I by friendly fire in the Alps, but his picture came here in 1923. It was wrapped carefully and packed in a wooden suitcase by my great-aunt Rose, his only sibling. That photo stayed with her her whole life.

But mostly, they came with nothing.

So. Now we’re here. With lots of stuff to carry, ways to carry it, and places to carry it to. Which brings us back to the 50 pound roll of smelly cheese my uncle hauled from western New York to eastern Texas in the trunk of his very large, very red Cadillac.

This is the same Cadillac he used to deliver bedding plants. We were horrified at the mud and mess in the car, but he just shrugged and said that he wouldn’t have such a ritzy car if it weren’t for the dirty plants.

Which leads with perfect logic to the pigs my brother transported in the cab of his pick-up–Christmas gifts for another brother. And, though less logically yet still tangentially in the animal kingdom, my Uncle John brought a cardboard box/casket with a dead cat named Poochie in it to my parents’ to store in the basement freezer/mauseleum until the spring thaw when he gave it a proper burial beside a pink rose bush.

In recent years, Texas plays heavily in our expeditions, due to my cousins living in Beaumont. Besides the cheese, which my cousin claims she couldn’t find down south, there is Saint Anthony. As our family’s patron saint, he has travelled north and south wrapped in a blanket and stuffed in a car trunk, much like a character from a Godfather movie.

A plaster statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe, bought cheap because she was cracked, came all the way from Ojinaga, Mexico wrapped in corregated cardboard ripped out of a Corona beer carton and held together with masking tape. She’s in my yard, guarding a pink and white wax begonia plant.

My late aunt’s cedar chest, once filled, weighed more than my SUV and took three men and a boy to move. That’s probably because, in addition to an imported bas-relief rendition of the Last Supper and a solid oak cuckoo clock, it held various doodads, knick-knacks, photos (in frames of course), silver and china that my aunt left to her daughter.

It fell to me, as the only family member sufficiently eccentric, in a family that defines that term, to drive to Beaumont in July. There I was, in the swampiest, buggiest, Spanish hanging mossiest city in Texas, just spitting distance from Lousiana, which is what it feels like someone has been doing.

Later that year I drove down again and delivered a fake Christmas tree, complete with ornaments, and some homemade strawberry freezer jam. Why not?

Years ago, my 104 year old great uncle Turiddu in San Jose, California, insisted I take home a package for his sister, my Nani Sorbello, in Rochester. He sent lemons, oranges, and almonds from his back yard. And they were delicious. Almost as good as in the Old Country.

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