Aiden and I moved to Colorado in 1996. He was one year old and I was 33 and for a long time it was just the two of us. Then Tris was born and it was the three of us. I went to work and knew people there and made friends. But that was all outside my real life in those early days. My real life was Aiden and Tris and me and the magical little world we inhabited alone together.

That first autumn, back in 1996, Aiden and I drove up into the mountains west of Colorado Springs and got lost on a dirt road on the back side of Pikes Peak. Bumping along the ruts, we came around a bend in the road and suddenly a ravine filled with aspens opened out beside us. It was a sunny day and breezy and the aspen leaves had begun to turn yellow and the whole glen was filled with luminous, fluttering gold. I remember that I gasped. It was like being stabbed through the heart with beauty.

Over the years, we went back to that place many times, all through the year, but especially in the autumn when the aspens were turning yellow. So last week, when Jonathan and I were in Colorado to supervise the loading of all our worldly goods into the shipping container, we went back one last time to our secret hideout off that rutted dirt road in the mountains on the back side of Pikes Peak. Purely by chance, it was aspen season and a sunny day and breezy and I gasped again when the glowing, trembling ravine opened out beside us. And I thought, "I will never see this again" and I said goodbye to it and goodbye to all those days when it was just me and my babies alone together. They were good days.

But Jonathan and I are happy to be back home.

Now, in September, the house is at its most magical and when I go up the drive to pick a bay leaf for the dinner I am cooking, turning and coming back to it, I have to stop, breathless for a moment, at its russet loveliness in the light from the setting sun among the dark green chestnut leaves, with its red tiles and pots of geraniums and ancient stone walls and serenity. This is our hideout now.

Coming through passport control in the Pisa airport, the separate line for Italian citizens that we got into (thinking that it would be the fastest) was, in fact, the slowest because of the large number of arguments that people in line chose to have with the border police. One man even got through and then came back to argue one further point. The Italian word for "to argue" is "litigare" and, truly, Italy must produce the greatest litigators in the world. 

"Ah," Jonathan said, as the line came to another standstill, "it's good to be home."

 

It took Phineas Fogg 80 days to go all the way around the world. It took Jonathan and I twenty-five hours to go from lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea to Anchorage, Alaska, ten times zones away, to see my all-grown-up-now baby. But we might just have well have gone all the way to Alpha Centauri for the difference in culture from our tranquil little world in the olive groves.

An example: We took Tris to a store to buy some new clothes and there were many, many large taxidermed animals strewn about the place. But even weirder (to our no-longer-inured-to-America ears) was our conversation with the chatty and jovial cashier. Here is a transcript of our conversation, as exact as I can remember it:

Her (referring to the previous little boy in line): He just passed his driver's test.

Me: Wow -- he looks so young.

Her (laughing): Well, up here, they can get them at 14. You can start working at 14, too. That's when I started working. At one of those places with the trays (looking at Tris and laughing more.) You wouldn't remember them.

Me: A cafeteria. We used to go to Furr's Cafeteria every Friday to eat with my grandparents.

Her (still laughing): That's it -- Furr's cafeteria. That was one of the big chains (really laughing up a storm now.) That was were the first mass shooting ever was -- in a Furr's Cafeteria in Texas. A guy went in with a gun and just mowed everybody down. When my mother heard about it, she said, 'Well, he went to high school with me!' (Uproarious laughter)"

Me (backing away slowly): Have a nice day.

We are not in Capriglia any more, Toto.

The Trofeo del Leone is happening this week and we went Tuesday evening to watch a couple of the games and eat grilled sausage sandwiches and hang out in the cool night air with our friends. There was a horse and a pony for pony rides and much excitement because the soccer field here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea is less than half-sized (the steepness of the mountain slope making big flat places nonexistent up here) and so the players kept inadvertently kicking the ball into the spectators or even into the people who were not really watching the game, but were instead standing chatting to their friends or quietly guzzling inexpensive prosecco out of plastic cups until they were blind-sided by an incoming soccer ball to the head.

The teams themselves were made up of players of varying ages and abilities and although Daniele was the coach of one of the teams and although the teams had names like "The Drinking Monkeys," I didn't know any of the good players. It is possible that there is a connection between being able to run around with agility on a soccer field and not spending all day drinking in the pub. That might explain why the good players were unknown to me. Just a thought.

There were children and lemonade and laughter and bright stars slowly making their way across the summer night sky. But there was also the moment of silence at the beginning of each game when we bowed our heads and remembered Leonardo. And at one point, I noticed Geppolino, Leonardo's increasingly frail father, standing by himself looking lost, all alone in the crowd.

Today it is raining and the forecast is for rain most days all next week. Jonathan and I went down for one last ice cream at the beach yesterday afternoon. I have put the comforters back onto our bed. Summer seems to be over.

 This morning at the Frutta D'Oro, there were these little round peppers. 

"What do we do with them?" we asked Barbara.

"Well, you cook them in boiling water and vinegar for a few minutes and then you stuff them with things," she said.

"And what are they called?" we asked. "What is their name?"

"They are called 'those little round peppers that you stuff with things'," she said. 

Presumably, it sounds better in the original Latin.

The summer tourists all had to leave their rental houses yesterday. So today, even though it is still as hot as ever and sunny, the beach has an atmosphere of winter coming on. Only a few of us are left. We have been nodding at each other all summer and now we recognize each other -- not only as faces, but as members of the fraternity of permanence.

The sea is strangely flat and still and clear today. The cold water feels lovely after a sleepless, sticky night. I saw four dead meduse washed up on the sand. Their season is coming to an end, too.