Your Excellency,
The Lord has looked upon His lowly handmaid that is why all peoples will sing the greatness of His Mercy. It seems to me, Your Excellency, that Our dear Lord deigned to favor me with the use of reason from my earliest childhood. I remember being conscious of my actions, even from my mother’s arms. I remember being rocked and falling asleep to the sound of lullabies. Our Lord blessed my parents with five girls and one boy, of whom I was the youngest, and I remember how they used to squabble, because they all wanted to hold me in their arms and play with me. On such occasions none of them ever succeeded, because my mother used to take me away from them altogether.
If she was too busy to hold me herself, she would give me to my father and he also would fondle me and cover me with caresses. The first thing I learned was the Hail Mary. While holding me in her arms, my mother taught it to my sister Carolina, the second youngest, and five years older than myself. My two eldest sisters were already grown up. My mother, knowing that I repeated everything I heard like a parrot, wanted them to take me with them everywhere they went. They were, as we say in our locality, the leading lights among the young people. There was not a festival or dance that they did not attend. At Carnival time, on St. John’s Day and at Christmas, there was certain to be a dance. Besides this, there was the vintage. Then there was the olive picking, with a dance almost every day. When the big parish festivals came around such as the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Our Lady of the Rosary, St Anthony, and so on, we always raffled cakes: after that came a dance, without fail. We were invited to almost all the weddings for miles around, and if they did not invite my mother to be matron of honour, they were sure to need her for the cooking. At these weddings, the dancing went on from after the banquet until well into the next morning.
Since my sisters had to have me always with them, they took as much trouble in dressing me up as they were wont to do for themselves. As one of them was a dress maker, I was always decked out in a regional costume more elegant than that of any other girl around. I wore a pleated skirt, a shiny belt, a cashmere kerchief with the corners hanging down behind, and a hat decorated with gold beads and bright colored feathers. You would have thought sometimes, that they were dressing a doll rather than a small child.