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."