I wondered how it would feel to be back in the US for our first visit since moving to Italy. I wondered if I would be overwhelmed with nostalgia, sink into the comfort of understanding everything being said around me and of knowing how everything works. I wondered if I would feel regret.

Um, no.

America seems gritty and frenetic and angry. There are many consumer goods and I was glad to be able to buy them, but people eat their lunches too fast -- it is not good for the digestion. And afternoon naps are frowned on for everyone over the age of four -- no wonder there is so much rampant crankiness. And the political scene is a chaotic dystopian morass that would be bizarrely fascinating, in a freakish circus sideshow sort of way, were it not in the global center ring, threatening to take the rest of the world's economy down the drain with it. That cretins such as the American Republicans (who by rights should be relegated to carefully controlled institutional settings out of the way of decent people) should have such global power makes their clown act no longer funny. It is horrifying.

But.

It was lovely to see the people I love. One cannot make an old friend over night. And to be with my boys, however fleetingly, is a piece of heaven.

One of my relatives asked me what I miss about America. I miss the people I love. I miss the boys being little and asleep, tucked into their beds at night in the quiet of our house and me as I was then, in those late evening hours of serenity. But all of that is gone and moving away to Italy had nothing to do with its loss.

So we did the slog of 23 hours of travel and arrived at last back to our little house  on the hillside just in time to see the sun setting blood red into the sea. The wind was very fierce last night -- these are the winter winds of the Mistral.

But the famous Tuscan sun is out this morning, drying all of our travel laundry. The winds blew the air so clear that right now from our windows we can see the snow on the mountain tops of Les Alpes-Maritimes across the Ligurian Sea in France.