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The legend of April Fools’ Day
What a treat to celebrate a day for jokes and playing pranks on each other, isolated in our houses during a pandemic. It looks like the joke’s on us right now.
I wondered all day yesterday about the origins of this day. Most of my research led to Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, and even Google Scholar led me on different paths. Thus, I decided to write my own fiction version of the legend around this day.
On the outskirts of Florence, in a time when Renaissance was showing its innovational signs, there lived a family of five. A mother, a father, three children, all girls, aged three, five, and ten-years-old. The ten-year-old worked along with her father in his leather shop. Piera, that was her name, had to keep her hair short; girls were not allowed to mingle with men and their crafts. Outside the family home, she answered to Piero. While her little sisters were learning how to cook and keep a clean household, Piera cut, measured, sewed, and managed tools that constantly changed the shape of her fingerprints.
On a rainy, late March afternoon, the girl dragged her feet through the thick mud in the central market. Once in a while, she stopped and looked up, closing her eyes, allowing the raindrops to fall on her face, then glanced down and wiggled her covered in mud toes that made their way out of her broken shoes. She knew how to…