Several different moments of thought and conversation over the past few days have led me to the point of this blog post. Here are a few of those threads… a conversation about the cost of a language learning system, and the ease with which I fell into speaking conversational Italian (years ago) by actually conversing with others in Italy… an obsession with thinking back to where I was “ten years ago today, or three months ago this week, or how I’ve been a member here for fourteen years, or I’m five years removed from that… (all of that brought on, I’m sure, by the fact that we are attending M’s twenty year reunion shortly)…a random stumble upon this blog, and then this one…an NPR bit about the stagnant economy in Southern Europe…the train station scenes in the final Harry Potter movie that we saw on Saturday night…my near constant thoughts of escaping to a beach in my vacation-less year, and remembering what it was like to live for months on end with a view of one right outside my bedroom window.
And all that leads back to Genoa, Italy.
So I got excited for a moment and thought I might spend a few days scanning in some of my pre-digital photos from my life there, some sketches I made along the way, some faltering Italian (if I can remember it) and a few good stories I have that usually revolve around food or train stations. And then I remembered that my photo albums, my sketchbooks, all of it – packed up in boxes and sitting in the basement waiting for a finished living room project that never comes. So I’ll put that on hold, and revisit it again, when the boxes come back up to sit around in the house. To say that this has been a difficult summer would be an enormous understatement. The proverbial straw lies shattered beneath the feet of my personal camel, and no amount of bacio gelato is going to make me feel better.
I’ll get there, I promise, but don’t mind me if I escape to previous lives every once in awhile. Previous lives where I called this place home.
