I first encountered 'The Aunts' through word of mouth. It must have been around the first week of October 2018, when I'd returned to Südtirol to spend time with the person I had then been 'seeing' long-distance. We had decided it was in our best interest to practise our togetherness on neutral territory. The residency in Eppan was therefore more perfectly suited than his home in Tramin. Our relationship was too nascent to factor in what his parents or extended family might make of us. We didn't want to expose ourselves to any external pressures. We wanted to indulge our intimacy, live in the bubble we had preciously built across months through video calls, intense email exchanges and text messages. He had shopped for basic supplies the day before I was to arrive via Flixbus from Vienna. He stocked the kitchen with other treats too, like excellent wine from the J. Hofstätter winery in which he lives, honey, and jam, made by 'The Aunts'. He mentioned that they, his father's two unmarried sisters, lived in the same house in which their two unmarried aunts once lived. The evening he took me to Tramin for dinner, on his birthday, he even roughly pointed out that house.

When I came to Tramin in April-May this year, I had the pleasure of finally meeting them. By then, they had assumed mythic dimensions in my imagination. Monika and Maridl, I observed, possessed an age-defying stamina. What was most alluring to me, what most aroused my envy, however, was that they were the kind of professional housewives and caretakers I have always aspired to be. I suspect that encountering them made me realise what I want most in life—a kitchen that I can call my own, and a garden, where, like them, I could grow at least 30 to 40 per cent of the ingredients I needed to run my household. I wanted to be a housewife-writer. I envied them even more because they chose not to be someone's wife. They therefore had a chance to truly occupy the conceptual territory of the housewife as women who were wedded to the places they inhabited.