Counting the Days

8 days til SYA students depart

14 days til I finish the school year

21 days til kids and Daniel finish school

31 days remaining in Italy (we're taking two week trip to Spain and France in June)

44 days til we fly to Boston

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How have all these months passed?  All these days?  Almost an entire school year.  I wonder what our kids will remember and what they won't.  I remember what Daniel and I will remember.  Right now I want to hold so tight to so many things.  I'd like to take pieces of our life here in Viterbo home.  There are no photos for the feeling of the feet on the ground or for the sound of the easy "Buongiorno" or even "Ciao"  as we walk down the street or for the Italian I hear our kids speak or for the coffee I just met Daniel for before returning to school to proctor the AP Latin exam.

With school both winding down (no classes) and winding up (grading returns in days with students' Capstone reflections and final grades and comments), I am reading for next year (TA sophomore English reading) and trying to write all those unfinished blog entries that I started, some with only a title, because there must have been some thoughts one day that made me want to write whatever that title indicated, e.g. a Palermo entries from March that I just hadn't finished yet.  If I cannot hold on to things here, I guess I want to give them words. 

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Two nights ago friends from home emailed to say that they were in Rome visiting their daughter and her family (who have lived in Rome for years), and on their way north, they could stop in Viterbo to visit for a short bit.  We were wonderfully surprised, and yet, when I saw Joe and Ailene walking towards a bar across the street from the Porta Romana train station, it seemed the most natural thing in the world that they were here.  We went into this bar that I'd never been inside, sat down, and talked.  And when the server came to take our order, everyone (they also had one of their daughters, her husband, and their daughter with them) just ordered cappuccino and caffe as if this were the most usual thing in the world, sitting in a bar in Viterbo having coffee together.

Ailene and Joe aren't just friends: they're neighbors.  I realize that that sentence might seem backwards, but it's not.  The thing that our kids miss most (I think) from home is our home and our neighborhood.  And while Ailene is 79 and Joe is 89, they are home, even to our kids.  Some days before we left, Mary and I stopped in to say hello -- and perhaps goodbye? -- to Ailene and Joe.  Joe was working on his Italian (they had visited same daughter and traced his family back when they had come the year before) and shared some Italian-learning apps and websites with us, and Ailene and Mary and I sat in the living room and talked.  I imagine that we talked about Italy and the upcoming year, but I don't remember specifics.  I remember Ailene's and Joe's both interacting easily with Mary, Mary's enjoying the visit with them, my being relaxed and grateful and delighted for our evening stroll by their house and our visit.

Days later, Daniel tells me, Ailene stopped by our house to say goodbye, and he and she sat and had a cup of tea together.

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This fall when we went to Rome to meet friends (also neighbors!) from home, we met up with Joe and Ailene's daughter, the one who lives in Rome with her family.

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I asked Joe and Ailene about their coming back to Italy -- they'd never suggested that they might repeat what seemed like a once in a lifetime trip two years ago.  They said that Joe said at Christmas that he'd like to come to Italy, so their oldest daughter planned it, and they came.  He said that he doesn't really care what they see.  He just wanted to be here.

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Our hour together yesterday feels like an almost-bookend, starting to close out our time here in Viterbo as we started to close out our time last summer before leaving Waltham.  An Italian bar instead of a living room on Clark Lane, but the same: some Italian, some talking, some laughter.