Author: lesleyklenk

When I was a little girl, my mother washed my hair every Sunday night in preparation for the school week. Back then you didn’t go to bed with wet hair; it was thought you could get a cold. So, while my hair was drying, I could sit in front of the television and watch Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Every time I heard the opening music of the show, I leaned forward and scanned the screen for elephants. If they were there, I willed my hair to stay wet and heavy.

On our recent trip to Thailand, we visited the Elephants Hills Sanctuary in Khao Sok National Park. We stepped out of the vans and watched the sixteen gentle giants emerge from the fields and walk in a single line towards us. The youngest was fourteen and the oldest was seventy-six. As we stood in the shade of the trees and listened to the guide, I slipped through the group towards the ancient female.

Mai Ri, the oldest elephant at the sanctuary, was born in 1943 when thousands of elephants were used as laborers to haul logs out of the Thai forest. They were used by the military to carry supplies, and they were captured in the wild and shipped to countries all over the world to work in circuses. Mai Ri has difficulty standing, so she shifts her weight from one leg to another. Her breasts sweep the earth as she walks, and she is blind in one eye. When she passes by a tree, her scarred ear flap catches on the bark and tears her already shredded skin. She has only one tooth in her mouth. No one knows her complete story; likely she was one of the rejected elephants found on the streets of Bangkok carrying tourists for less than a dollar a ride.

Before we bathed and fed the elephants, we got comfortable with their immense size by stroking them and touching their ears and trunks. The mahouts—the elephant caregivers who spend twenty-four hours a day with them—watched carefully and used commands and thin sticks to guide them. Mae Ri stood as if she were asleep while I patted her shoulder and ran my hand down her trunk bleached yellow from the years of sun.

We walked the elephants to a pond and stood on the trampled grass while the animals slid down the muddy bank. They blew water out of their trunks and jostled each other looking for the coolest spot. Mai Ri slowly sank to the bottom of the pond and rested there. Only her trunk was above water.  Soon, the mahouts spoke to the elephants and they all lumbered out, climbed the hillside, and rolled their skin back and forth, side to side, like ships bobbing on the water. Mud streamed from their sides and hit the path in circles. Mai Ri stayed on the bottom until her mahout crawled down the water’s edge and spoke to her. She followed the others to the bathing stations.

Paul and I joined Mai Ri at her pad. She waited for us, lifting her feet and swaying back and forth. Paul sprayed her with the hose, and I tossed buckets of water on her back. Together, we used coconut fibers to scrub her skin. Her one big brown eye gazed towards the empty, green field beyond us. A little afraid, I leaned my head to rest on a real-life elephant’s trunk. I felt her skin, smooth in some places and bristly in others.

I held Paul’s hand as we left the elephant sanctuary in the air-conditioned van. The driver (who I can only assume was fired upon our return) decided to take a short cut back to the camp. We bumped over craters in the road and rounded a corner where a traffic jam of vans was negotiating the entrance to a large, penned area with wooden viewing stands. Elephants wearing traditional Thai decorations stood in a line with giant rickshaw baskets high on top of them. They lowered themselves to their knees to allow people to climb them like a ladder. Once the baskets were bulging with people, the elephants stood up and began to walk. Heavy chains rattled with their footsteps, and they were prodded with a short hook, an ankus, by their mahouts. Riders kicked the elephants behind their ears urging them to go faster. The massive creatures ascended steep, man-made hills and the riders screamed as the basket slid backwards. They shouted as the baskets slid forward on the downhill side. As far as they were concerned, it was a roller coaster ride.

Is there a difference between the sanctuary and the tourist attraction? No one knows how many of Mai Ri’s babies were taken from her, how much pain and indignity she endured over the years, and even now, the performance she does twice a day at the sanctuary—swimming when she doesn’t want to, getting baths she does not need, and waiting to be fed by people afraid of her searching trunk—likely try her patience as an elderly matriarch.

The other people in the van shouted at the driver for taking us past the attraction. They contended we shouldn’t have been exposed to such cruelty. But not one of us unlocked those heavy van doors and demanded an end to the atrocity. ‘We went to a sanctuary,’ was the sanctimonious message passed through the seats as if that absolved us of putting our own desires above those of the elephants.

Travel industry experts say the elephants cannot be released into the wild because there is not enough habitat left to support them, and financial resources are limited, so there must be a means to recouping the costs.

Protected by the swaths of cool air and the guilty silence all around me, I sent a message out to the universe hoping Mai Ri recognized that my touch came from the truest part of me—my childhood self—and I wanted only to honor her. Given her long life, and perhaps her longing for her lost children, I hope she understood.

(I’m tidying up my electronic files and discovered this one was left behind a few years ago…)

I am a person who lives by the ocean. I look out my window or stand on the beach and know that what I see and what I touch will not be the same the next time my gaze wanders back or I feel the rocky shore under my feet. In some moments on my trip to Switzerland I have felt a tightening in my chest and an impatience in my search for a limitless view. It was not the landscape that caused my distress, it was that I couldn’t connect. To put it simply, every time I called Switzerland, I got a busy signal.

To be amid such beauty—soaring, pointed, silent, massive Alps, glacier lakes in a teal green that forced a scream of ‘cold!’ from me each time I burst from the water, Heidi chalets tumbling across unbelievably emerald grass that undulates across the valleys in waves—all of it delivers such pleasure to the eye. However, beauty is not everything.

Someone told me once that people can be kind, but it does not equate to friendship. I would say that is true in Switzerland. Everyone has been unfailingly kind, but I have not met anyone who was willing to pull back the curtain and let me into their interior space where they unpin their hair and let it swing free.

For most people life is messy, and perhaps for some Swiss it is. Hot mess should be my first name. I am the one whose bra straps never tucked neatly inside my shirt as a teenager; I am the one who threw my head to the skies and howled to my children ‘you two are killing me!’; I am the one who “ugly cried” in public places and couldn’t stop it if I wanted to.

I want to be perfectly frank: I am writing about MY experience in Switzerland. I am writing from the lens in which I see the world. I know it is my experience, because I’ve spent the last few days wondering why I could not string together a few words to make a sentence. I’ve stared each night at a blank computer screen and questioned what was wrong with my fingertips. Most of the time they trip merrily across the keys. For a week they have been silent. They woke up this morning.

We left central Switzerland yesterday and drove as far south as possible while still staying in the country. We are in Gandria, a tiny hill village on Lake Lugano, a few miles from the border with Italy.  There are four languages spoken in Switzerland—German, French, Italian, and Ramanesh (an old dialect of Italian). If you divide Switzerland into sections that touch the surrounding countries, you can see that the Swiss who live in Geneva and farther east speak French while the Swiss who live in the north, for example Appenzell, speak German. Here in the south Italian is the language for the Swiss, but in my experience, I see no Swiss—it’s Italian through and through.   

The sound of people speaking Italian swirls around me like curling wisps of smoke. “Buongiorno!” cries the tabbacci shop owner as he peels back the doors to his kiosk. “Buongiorno,” sings the waitress next door as she sweeps crumbs from the table. We even got a muttered “Buongiorno,” from a grisly fisherman as he passed us in his dory while we bobbed in the lake during our morning swim. My heart is light, I traipse along the crooked, stone paths, and my smile is wide as I raise my wine glass and grin at the waitress.    

Why is it that I can embrace one culture and be untouched by another?   

There is only one war memorial in Switzerland. It is the Lion of Lucerne, carved into a rock in Lucerne. It is a dying lion, head in anguish on its paws, lying on its side. It commemorates the Swiss Guard soldiers who were killed in 1792 during the French Revolution. The monument is visited by over a million people each year in Switzerland. It acknowledges the loss Switzerland endured fighting for someone else. Mark Twain called it “the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world.” The Swiss revere the monument but still feel the sting of its controversy. Switzerland is adamant. They will not glorify a moment in history where Swiss citizens died for a foreign monarchy. After the defeat in France, the country turned inward—developed their own economy, kept their own counsel, stated their own neutrality. That is the way it has been for generations, despite what happened to the rest of the world.

So, it has me thinking about the concept of collective history. I do not advocate for war as a resolution to a disagreement, but I do believe in two things: the value of speaking your mind and acting with your heart. Simple, I know, but those two values have been my North Star. Collective history means we were all there even if we saw it from different perspectives. It means we were all changed in some way and the memory of the events continue to inform us over time. Being a part of something bigger than yourself allows you to become something more. You may not have thought you had the courage to do something unknown, but with allies on your side, you trust someone has your back. Leaders are created through collective history. Leaders emerge because of events, not in spite of them. Sacrifice inspires us to find a common purpose and to rise above the fray.       

A few years ago, we visited Normandy, France, and Paul and I walked along some of the D-day beaches. We sat on the bus with people from Canada, England, France, and even Germany. Being American, I expected the tour to be all about the American’s role in D-day, but I was soon silent in shame. Yes, the United States landed on Utah and Omaha, but the British stormed Gold, the Canadians fought on Juno and the British and the French commandeered Sword. Collectively, eight allied countries, 7,000 ships and landing craft, and 160,000 troops stepped onto French soil on June 6, 1944.

The Swiss did recently break with some of its strictest approaches to neutrality—they joined the U.S. and others and imposed sanctions on Russia after it invaded Ukraine. They also contributed 1.3 billion francs to aid Ukrainian refugees.    

So, what does this have to do with Switzerland and my struggle to connect?  I’m not sure. Just as I choose to stand on my ever-changing beach with its detritus floating in from all directions, the Swiss have their immovable mountains. We each know our place in the world, but perhaps visiting one another is worth answering the call.   

(I’m tidying up my electronic files and discovered this one was left behind a few years ago…)

We made our way to the crown jewel of Venice—the top of the Rialto Bridge that slices across the Grand Canal. The aquamarine water churned below us, and boats of all kinds dashed helter skelter across the rushing water. Black gondolas with curved tips steered by with men in striped shirts poled and oared with the precision of threading a needle. Lacquered speed boats rode low in the water with tinted windows and hidden occupants going to even more secret destinations. My least favorite, the vaporetto (government water taxis), chugged up and down the canal picking up and dropping off passengers in a smog of diesel fumes. The commotion, the fervor, the energy was intoxicating.

Paul squeezed my hand. I squeezed back. It was our signal born of twenty years of marriage where we had to sneak around our three children to have some semblance of a love life.

Before we met, I felt seasoned by life and was sure, even as a single mother, I knew what I was doing. I could work all day, drop one child off at baseball, pick up the other child from art class, get us all home, take the pantyhose off, feed the dog, pop the frozen chicken cordon bleu in the oven, put peas in the microwave, and crack the lid on the 1-minute rice. In 18 minutes, we sat down for dinner. Later, after the homework and brushed teeth, we all went to bed. In the space between the efficiency and the certainty however, I was lonely. I read books in the silence, a cat laying at the very end of the bed my only companion.

Then it all went to hell. We met, dated, and got married all within a year. There were three kids to haul around, a new house with acoustics that made it sound like I was the one playing Call of Duty, a fenceless yard that caused us to cajole and beg the dog to come in from the night, homework was forgotten, and cavities happened. Life was no longer lived with a precise certainty, but I was happy. A husband lay beside me each night.

That brings us to our 20^th wedding anniversary trip—three weeks in Italy. The children are grown, I’m paying the dog sitter $75 a night for peace of mind, and there is a nine-hour difference between Europe and Washington state. Everything is in place. An open-ended, lazy schedule has allowed for plenty of time for…hand squeezing.

“Where are your pills?” Paul looked up from the toiletries bag he was unpacking.

“Here,” I held up my daily vitamins and apple cider vinegar pills.

“Not those,” he said. “You know…the medicine.” He gave me his little boy it’s-almost-Christmas-morning face.

“Oh no,” I sat down on the edge of the bed and twisted my socks in my hands. “I forgot that medicine.”

Paul’s face looked exactly like it did in 2011 when Michigan beat Ohio State scoring 40 points in the game. Coach Urban Meyer had let him down that day. Now it was my turn.

I have chronic bladder infections caused by narrow ureters that hold onto germs and turn them into infections. These infections aren’t the kind where you just take some drugstore pill that turns your pee orange. My bladder infections cause me to scream in childbirth-like pain and, as Paul drives me to the emergency room, I yell at him that it is all his fault for injecting germs into my ureters.

It was an untenable situation until a kind, elderly doctor wrote me a prescription for Macrobid, an antibiotic, and leaned into whisper, “Take one after intercourse. It’s enough to kill the infection in its early stages. But,” he cautioned me, “no more than four in a day.” Right.

So, what does all this have to do with Venice? Everything. Absolutely everything.

The next morning while Paul was still sleeping, I decided to find a pharmacist in a city with maze-like corridors, twisting waterways, and bridges to somewhere that become nowhere. The faded Italian lettering on the sides of the buildings was meaningless to me. I opened up Google maps without a lot of felicity; I’m a give-me-the-directions kind of girl. And, I have a history. I get lost everywhere. I went to a mall in Thailand and forgot my phone; I wandered around Notre Dame in circles and finally collapsed in a Chinese food restaurant and cried; I took the wrong staircase to our resort in Zihuantanejo and ended up in a secret drug meeting in the jungle run by the cartel (I think). Hence, Paul doesn’t trust me to go anywhere in a foreign country by myself. But, this was important. Italy would not be Italy if…well, you know.

I somehow made it to the Rialto Bridge. I waded into the mass of people swirling around the coffee places, elegant stores, and tabbacci shops. On my phone screen I looked at the picture of the Farmacia Morello. I ignored the address. Landmarks. I needed landmarks. Google answered my prayer. Basilica S.Maria Gloriosa dei Frari rose out of the melee, and blessings of all blessings, the Farmacia with the bright green cross stood across the street.

“May I help you?” A young man with a nose ring and curly black hair leaned forward and I cleared my throat.

“Macrobid? Do you have it?” I stood up straight and tried to look respectable—not like a foreign hussy.

“That medication is an antibiotic. You need a doctor note,” his eyes were kind above the nose ring.

“I have a prescription. The medicine is at home. I am on vacation,” I paused for effect. “with my husband.” I tried my best to look rational. He knew that I knew that we were playing the let’s-not-talk-about-what -we’re-really-talking-about game.

The pharmacist studied me for a moment with his head titled to the side. “Okay, okay.” He hustled behind the counter bending to grab a white box. “I give you Macrobid.” He handed me the box. “Seven euros.”

“Seven? I echoed.

“Yes, ma’am. There are twenty pills. Will that be enough?”

“It better be,” I muttered. “Grazie.” My head held high, I sashayed out of the farmacia. I could tell he knew it wasn’t just about sex; it was about the Call of Duty, the recalcitrant dog, and those subsequent visits to the dentist. We’d put in the time then, now was the payoff.

So, that is how I saved Venice. And Florence. And Tuscany, Rappallo, and Rome.

Zihuantanejo is a magical town. If you read my blogs you know it captured my heart years ago. I just found out Mexico feels the same way I do.

There are 177 Pueblos Magicos in the entire country of Mexico. What is one? A “Magic Town” is designation granted by the Mexican government as a best place to go in Mexico. It is not an easy title to earn. The town or village must apply for the special status and form a committee to showcase their town’s beauty, historical importance, natural wonders, and cultural traditions. If the town is successful, the government provides funds to improve infrastructure, communication opportunities and tourism-based employment.   The government insists on one more quality before it bestows the moniker—magic. How can a town demonstrate magic? Read on.

It is our third trip to Zihuantanejo. We are awakened each morning by roosters lustily crowing in the sunrise; we keep the toilet lid closed in case an iguana takes up lodging there, and the local waiters in the bar downstairs sing “American Pie” and “Islands in the Stream” with gusto even though they are still mystified by the difference between American syrup and jam and bring them both to our table for our inspection.  Yoonel, one of the staff who remembers us each time we come, sidled up to me at the doorway and whispered, “Miss Lesley, I am now the Assistant Desk Manager.” He raised his eyes heavenward in gratitude, and I gave him an elbow squeeze. To me this is all magic. Even the possibility of an iguana surprising us in the toilet bowl.

One online dictionary defines magic as, “an unaccountable noun.” Another says, “the power to use supernatural forces to make impossible things happen.” Still another postulates, “a person’s magic is a special talent or ability that others admire or consider very impressive.” So, magic can be an impossible event made possible or a single person with a special gift. My daughter, SarahKate, said, “It is a thinning of a veil between this world and another.” I like that.

Put all of it together, and you have Zihuantanejo.

Zihuantanejo is a small town on the Pacific coast where blue-footed boobie birds soar overhead with neon-azure feet and western Mexico chachalaca pheasants rustle in the bushes as loudly as miniature elephants. Other than the way the crow flies, Zihuantanejo residents are five hours from aging Acapulco, twelve hours from sophisticated Puerto Vallarta, and six hours from stalwart Mexico City. Few people own cars in Zihuantanejo that would actually make it more than 100 miles, so double all of those times and imagine spending them on a dusty bus–that’s how isolated this small town is.

 Most people in Zihua (short version the locals prefer) start their day by sweeping their front stoop or walkway. It is a beach town and sand is everywhere. The act of sweeping off the old is necessary to welcome the new. It is creating a blank slate and being open to unknown possibilities.  Yesterday a butterfly landed on my nose and studied me gravely before taking flight. I’d be lying if I didn’t think in that moment someone or something was putting a spell on me.

Zihuantanejo is a place where a single yodeling goose can guard a family’s house, people sternly tell their dogs to stay home and see them in town an hour later, and children teach their younger siblings to navigate a skateboard through the Zocalo (town square) by riding three across, all holding hands, and people have to scatter or risk getting tangled in the mess of beribboned braids and scraped knees.

On Thursdays in Zihuantanejo, you are only allowed to eat pozole soup for lunch. Seriously. Made of chicken, radishes, onions, jalapeno peppers, and these odd little things that look like tiny spines (hominy), there are three choices of color for your soup–red, white, and green. If you just thought of the colors of the Mexican flag, congratulations, you pass. Pozole is also served with shots of mezcal. Don’t even confuse it with tequila. Mezcal comes in unmarked bottles and is stored under the counter. You hold up your tiny mug, and a nonchalant young slip of a thing will fill your cup so it is quivering to the top about to cascade over. (Or, maybe that is your hand that is quivering after too many free shots).

Even the locals recognize tourists if you visit often enough or you are a heavy-handed tipper. You guessed it–that’s me. There is a teenage couple we see at nighttime. She wears a dress with a wide flouncing skirt, and he is garbed in jeans, large boots and an even larger cowboy hat. They carry music from restaurant to bar and dance the zapateado—a combination of toe taps and heel stomps matched to traditional Mexican music. Paul thinks it is a 4-H project, I think it is college savings, but we both agree they are the real thing.

There is one more example of Zihuantanejo’s magic, and it causes my eyes to crinkle at the corners in a rush of emotion. All over town umbrellas pop open like luscious tropical flowers when you least expect it. They burst open unexpectedly at the beach while crossing the sand, or drift in and out of the foliage in the trees on the way home from school, and even two of them will pop at once in a boat crossing the bay. These nylon flowers dotting the landscape are carried by children to protect beloved grandparents from the sun and it is a honor to carry them.

I love the yodeling geese, flying skateboards, whirling umbrella flowers, foot-stomping music, shockingly hot food, burning, mysterious alcohol, and more. I love the chaos of Zihuantanejo. I love it all. Each day from sunrise to sunset, Zihuantanejo is a blaze of color, light, and sound. The events happen in singular moments, yet they all belong to the collective whole.  

All of this is magical to me, but I am on vacation, and I don’t have to chase down the cheeky dog or walk carefully around the goose’s pen. So, it brings me back to SarahKate’s words and I think I know what Mexico requires of its magic towns: to thin the veil between my experience and the town’s life. They must be kept separate, so it remains authentic and real, yet the near opaqueness allows me to know Zihuantanejo in an intimate way without approximating it. Magic.      

Fisherman fish at night at Zihuantanejo. Their panga boats (tall bow with a low stern) are beached high on the sand all day, and when the sun begins to set, the men, their hands full of tortillas stuffed with beans, finish their dinners, and walk down to the water’s edge to help one another push their boats across the wet sand. They place logs under the sky-blue bottoms and roll the boats on the logs.  It is the smallest man’s job to race to the back of the boat, grab the last log and run it around to the front of the boat so there is no pause in the boat’s return to the sea.  

The boats come back with the sunrise, and Paul and I join the rest of the town to greet them at first morning’s light. The boats float offshore and bob across the horizon in an orderly line. Then, one by one, a fisherman guns his motor, flies through the water, and hurtles his boat as far up onto the sand as possible. At the last minute, he pulls his motor up and the boat glides to a stop in the sand. Other fishermen rush forward with the logs, and they grunt together and push the boat up higher. By eight in the morning, the entire flotilla is back home. The crews unload their catch and spread the fish on blankets next to their boats. Townspeople and restaurant owners come to purchase fish for the day. Children dash between the boats clapping their hands at pelicans who, although huge, are known to sneak between the boats and gobble up a mess of fish right in front of a tired fisherman.

The daily ritual of the boats departing at night and returning in the morning is the magic that holds the lives, culture, history, and beauty of Zihuantanejo together. I think of it as the continuous drumming sound of the waves on the beach, but to the people of the town, it is the steady beating of the heart. I feel the thrill of the impossibility of boats flying onto the sand. The veil is lifted, and I am welcomed to a town that embodies magic in all its grubby, funny, sweet, and lovely splendor.

November has rolled around again as it inevitably does, and here it comes: my birthday. Every year without fail it comes barreling down the freeway of my life bringing with it all the detritus of my years which includes—unhappily and shamefully—my furniture problem.

Each November I re-arrange furniture all over my house. I move rugs from one floor to another and empty bookcases and swap them with ones from another room. I have even moved my bed from one wall to another and then back again–and Paul never even knew it happened.

November is a hussy who whispers in my ear, ‘here we go again. Another year you haven’t lost ten pounds, another year you haven’t finished a new book, another year your family is growing without you.’ My birthday month is the eleventh of the year. It has none of the excitement of Month 1: New Years! new start! OR Month 12: Cozy Christmas and hot toddies.

November slaps me in the face with dead, wet flower beds, winds that scream up the inlet and threaten to rip off my roof, and rain, lots of it. I can’t really blame my birthday month for the weather, however. I do live in the Pacific Northwest.

Weather be damned. I know how to defeat the Novembers of my life. My mother taught me a wonderful trick using towels to move furniture. Just lift one end of a couch, shove a towel under both feet, do the same at the other end, and you can merrily push a giant couch around a room like it was shopping cart. I have even perfected the towel solution on stairs. Lay down thick blankets, turn the desk on its back and slide it down the stairs without a scratch. So many things take place while Paul is at work…

Sadly, moving my old furniture to new places only satisfies my need for escape for so long. Then an itch comes to buy new furniture and, of course, there is the need to sell old furniture. It’s like an infinity ring. It goes and comes full circle again and again. If I was a thoughtful, planning kind of person, this could all be accomplished in a time like Month 4: April. Nothing happens in April.

I swear, the furniture itch becomes a frenzy the minute I put away the Halloween decorations. All Souls Day dawns wet and miserable and I rise from bed with a single goal: get new furniture. If I attempt to psycho-analyze myself, furniture becomes the symbol of distraction. Creating the perfect room with the right colors, feeling of whimsy, and solidness of wood hides my fear of growing a year older. I can’t stop the onslaught of time, but the purchase of a beautiful buffet and hutch can make me feel better. It’s a high I can ride for a long time. At least past Christmas.

A dear friend said to me this summer, ‘I love your house. There are so many odds and ends and inherited things, it’s just you.’ It was a compliment I know, but it haunted me. If only she knew. I own a teal rug that was my mother’s, and I had to promise to keep it for life; I have an entertainment center I painted dark navy blue–Lady Sings the Blues–last November, and it hulks in the corner of my family room like a cave; I have lamp shades that have to be turned delicately so you won’t see the scars of their previous lives at Goodwill.

I did a terrible thing ten years ago. Chalk paint. It’s where you take a perfectly good piece of wood furniture, and you paint it a color like Robin Egg Blue, Versailles Green, or Lady Sings the Blues. I have all three colors in my house. Paul even had a high boy with thirteen drawers, and I painted them different colors. It was cool. Until it wasn’t.

I am stuck with the Lady Sings the Blues entertainment center, but I am ready to discard my Versailles Green bookcase that was once a beautiful cherry wood.

“So, you see,” I explained to Paul sweeping my arm across the span of our living room. “In a well-dressed room, solid, matching furniture anchors the space and allows your eye to travel from one vignette to another.” I lifted my eyebrows and shifted my head to the corner of the room.

“I don’t see the problem.”

“The bookcase. It’s green.”

“You painted it.”

“I know. It was a mistake.”

Paul raised his eyebrows and pointed back over his shoulder to the family room.

“Yes, I realize the navy blue entertainment center is quite intense, but I am not interested in touching that this year.” My voice remained calm. “I want this hutch and buffet. This lady had it online last summer for $1700, now it’s down to $1200, and I bet I can get her to knock off another $100. I know how to work FBM.” Paul tilted his head to the side.

“Facebook Marketplace, of course.”

“Of course.”

I held up a finger in warning. He went silent.

“I’m going to West Seattle tomorrow to view it. If I like it, I will give her a deposit and we can pick it up after we get home from vacation.” Oh yes, did I mention that? We’re going on a two-week vacation in a few days, I’m having a birthday dinner party on Saturday, and I have yet to get a pedicure. Priorities, Lesley…but it was November.  

I didn’t clean my car before I left on the 70-mile trip to West Seattle. There were the usuals: a bag of ten bathing suits and their matching cover ups for Goodwill, two mysterious wire baskets begging to become a new project, and a quilt. Quilts are a touchy subject in our house. I have 57 of them. But do you know how much a good Pottery Barn Kids quilt is worth? When the grandkids come they can have a new one on their bed every day for a month. If they ever stay a month…

I got to “Bobbi’s” house (some people have fake names on FBM), and it was a three-story, multi-million-dollar abode with views of Seattle, the Olympic Mountains, and Vashon Island. Solid wood furniture anchored every room, cashmere throws were tossed with abandon on the edges of couches, and I didn’t see any odds and ends. It was perfect. So was she. There wasn’t a wrinkle on her face, her hair was that silver platinum that looked good enough it might not be a dye job, and she was barefoot. Even her painted toes looked effortless.

 “It’s down here in the basement,” she called as she swept down the stairs. There it was. It was even better in real life. Sixty-five inches wide by eighty-eight inches tall, the Stanley Villa Library Bookcase was solid, timeless, elegant, forever. It was everything I wanted to be.

“Do you have any room in your price?” I asked innocently.

“Do you know much this is discounted already?” Her eyes darted with fire.

“How about $1100? That way I can tell my husband I got a great deal.”

“Fine. But I want it to be through Zelle. I don’t do Venmo.”

I sat down on the edge of her Restoration Hardware white, duck cloth couch and prayed I knew our username and password to Wells Fargo. While I typed away, she removed all of her collectibles from each of the sixteen cubby holes. I noticed they had Home Goods stickers on the bottom of them. My stomach rumbled a bit. I started to sweat. Why was she moving her things off the hutch? Didn’t I tell her I couldn’t come back for two weeks?

Now, there are lots of kinds of sweat—clean running sweat, hot summer day sweat, but there is one sweat that is like a runaway train. Nervous sweat can fill a room with its pungent odor. It’s a wrinkle-your- nose, move-away-from-the-person, wonder-why-they-aren’t-wearing-deodorant kind of sweat. It had a name: fear sweat. Out of control sweat. November Furniture Problem sweat. I was wearing a cashmere sweater. You could almost see the sweat climbing out between the fuzz. I was nervous. I was fearful. I stunk up the room. It was bad.

“Okay, let’s move this.” She grabbed one side of the buffet/hutch combo. It towered over her head.

“I can’t pick it up right now,” I stammered. “I was hoping you’d hold it until we get back.”

“Why don’t you take the bottom half now and come back for the top on Saturday?” she demanded. She tapped her tanned, bare foot with the tiny, painted toes on the couch cushion.

“I guess I could do that.” How long does it take to cook a prime rib? How many people was I having for my birthday party? Maybe my neighbors could come over and turn on the oven for the prime rib. If they put it on low, maybe I could pull this off.

I went over to the other side of the buffet/hutch. It was mine now. If anything happened, she had my money, and I had this humungous piece of furniture that needed professional movers not two fifty-something year olds with flabby arms.

“Lift the top off,” she instructed. “We’ll put it down and then move the buffet.” We both strained at our corners. It lifted two inches. “Come on, you can do this, right?” She lifted her side, and I lifted my side with bent knees and shaking legs. Then Bobbi decided to step over the corner of the couch while carrying her side. I saw the top of the hutch begin to tip, its crown molding the first to go. My mouth opened to scream, but it was too late. The eighty-eight inch hutch crashed onto Bobbi and pinned her onto the crisp, white couch. The glass shelves fell and shattered around her. She was silent and didn’t move.

In addition to fear sweat, I have another horrible habit. I laugh in really bad situations. I laugh cruelly when someone slips on the ice, or falls into the bushes, or farts in a quiet room. I can’t help it.  I began to feel it bubbling from the bottom of my gut and I dug my fingernails into my sweaty palms. “No,” I growled inside my head. “You can’t do that.”

But Bobbi looked like the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz after Dorothy’s house fell on her. All I could see were her legs sticking out. She began to move under the huge hutch.

“Bobbi,” I yelled. “Don’t move. There is glass everywhere.”

“My shoes,” I heard her mumble underneath the Stanley Villa Library Bookcase.

I dug around in a hallway and grabbed the shoes. When I got back, she had pushed the hutch so it was standing on the carpet. Her face was white, and she looked dazed. I looked away as she put her shoes on. I couldn’t look at her. I knew I would start giggling and that would be bad. Terribly bad. I carefully picked up all the big shards of glass and put them on the wet bar.

“Where is your vacuum?” I whispered.

“I’ll do it later.” Suddenly she looked old and tired. She had wrinkles just like me. “I was in an accident and destroyed my knee. I couldn’t even come down here. That’s why I am selling it. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to get new glass for the shelves.” I nodded miserably.

Don’t ask me how we did it, but we got the buffet into my car. I wrapped my grandkids’ new Value Village Pottery Barn quilt around the massive bulk, and I squeezed the bathing suits and coverups into the nooks and crannies of the cubbies.  

I cried all the way home. It took two hours and eleven minutes to drive the seventy miles from West Seattle to Olympia in rush hour traffic. I drove in the slow lane because I knew if I had to slam on the brakes that thing was going to shoot out the front window like a casket out of a hearse. I cursed my November Furniture problem. It had seemed like such a lark. Just drive to West Seattle, negotiate a deal, pick it up two weeks later when I would be tan and my hair would be bleached. Now I had half a piece of furniture with broken shelves. A woman had been injured because I hadn’t spoken up and said, “we do not have the skills to lift this furniture.” Now I was going to have to rent a U-Haul truck, beg Paul to come with me, cook a birthday dinner in absentia, and, most grating of all, live with the Stanley Villa Library Bookcase forever. It was never coming out of my house. No one would be able to move it. My birthday had won again. It had defeated me.

I know the only escape from impending birthdays is the final goodbye. The vignettes of my life, (the odds and ends) bring me the thrill of the chase and the satisfaction of the deal. Almost everything I own is second hand. There is a tale behind every nick, scratch, broken shelf, stain, and loosened thread. They are evidence of a life lived well. My November furniture problem rears its ugly head once a year as a reminder to keep moving, fix the broken, do away with the no longer needed, and even, sometimes, buy something new. New to me, of course, and always brimming with a story.

Poor Bobbi.

Postscript: I originally published this essay a year ago. I still suffer from my November Furniture problem. This year I switched my two guest rooms and moved my grandkids’ bunkbeds and a murphy bed downstairs while moving a double bed and all of our exercise equipment upstairs. Oh…and I also moved the Lady Sings the Blues (navy blue) entertainment center upstairs. I ditched the towel trick and asked Paul for his help on that furniture move. I’m not stupid. I don’t want to end up laying underneath a bemouth bookcase looking like the wicked witch of the Wizard of Oz.

My loneliest time in traveling is when everyone I love is sleeping at home and I am awake and by myself in an airport. I feel as if I have been forgotten, and if I wasn’t careful, I could end up on the wrong flight and find myself in Istanbul or some other faraway place when the doors opened on an unknown world.  

I left my favorite dress in Budapest because I couldn’t imagine wearing it again. The memory of it swooshing around my ankles as I watched couples waltz in circles in a city park while the sun set over the Danube would make my heart ache for not being there again. But just as the old adage is correct—you can’t go home again—it is also true a lifetime happens once, and you can’t get it back to do a do-over.

I have struggled with my writing while I have been on my trip. The heat was so oppressive, and our schedule had this start and stop shuffle to it like I couldn’t find the notes to the music I usually hear or feel the drumming in my chest that whispers, “Lesley, write.” I also couldn’t pin myself down. Who was I? I was no longer the mother responsible for the child, I was, at times, the travel companion whose skills tended more in the direction of asking for help instead of figuring it out through observation. SarahKate is latter if you didn’t know.

I think the dissonance happened because of the span of time that stretches, overlaps, and extends beyond in a parent child relationship. Think of it as a series of roads going in all directions. Where the roads intersect, your life joins with someone else’s, and you add a new name to your identity. I’ve always been a daughter. Throughout my life, I happened upon new roads and added the titles of sister, mother, wife, friend. Sometimes the roads are just crossings, other times they parallel one another, and even other times they merge for a long time, seamless, the two signposts becoming one before finally separating, because roads are by nature and design meant to be singular.

I’ve known SarahKate since before she was born. Before her birth I had a childhood, friends, lovers, an unhappy first marriage, and another child all tied together like a knitted wool hat that prepared me for her, my child. I knew from the time I was young that I would have a redhaired daughter. I can’t tell you how, but I knew it as firmly as I knew my middle name, my favorite book, or the qualities in a best friend. SarahKate has known me for as long as she has had memories. She was not born with the knowledge that she would someday have a mother with red hair. It just fell from around my face and brushed her newborn cheek from the moment she opened her eyes. I was 26, and it was the flaming, bright, startling red hair that she now sees in the mirror each day.

We had only a few scrapes on the trip—a incorrect train platform, a couple of misunderstood comments—but it was SarahKate who brought me to a place of acceptance that no one else has been able to on an issue I am facing as thick and impenetrable as the thorny thicket around Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

My parents helped me raise my kids after my divorce when my kids were tiny. I moved to another state, got a job working in a downtown office building, bought a house by myself, and traveled around the country delivering workshops. While all of that was happening to me, my parents were there for SarahKate and her brother—fixing dinner, lighting candles on the table, taking them to sports’ practices, tucking them in at night. They (except for the respite time they had in Arizona in the winter) did it all. It allowed me to work on my career which gave me the experience I needed to get my job in Olympia where I ultimately met Paul and knew that I was home for good.

SarahKate can tell me things about my parents, particularly my mother, that I didn’t know because I was gone so much during that time in her life. My mother brushed her hair, took her shopping, made cookies with her, watched television with her, walked the dog with her, and in general was always a buzzing presence that made everything else happen. My mother was the glue for them just as she was the glue for me and my brother when I was growing up.

Out of the deepest respect for my mother and her privacy, I won’t go into the particulars of the challenges she is facing as she grows older or how helpless I feel as her road diverges and leaves the one we shared. Many senior citizens experience breaking bones, becoming a widow, losing a pet, watching friends pass away, staring at a family vacation spot in the rearview mirror, and feeling a quiet despair about the days that seem endless—all markers on a road they alone know. It is her journey, her destination. I can only hope to wrap it in some semblance of dignity, so she doesn’t awaken one day to find the doors have opened at Istanbul or some other faraway place.

If do-overs could happen, I would find my mother’s Budapest dress for her to wear again. My father’s arms would be the ones around her impossibly tiny waist, his cheek would be against hers with his Aqua Velvet aftershave mixing with her Chanel No. 5 perfume as they swayed to Moon River, the song from the movie, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the song they owned together. Her brilliant, stunning red curls would swing in the light as they danced in circles.

Moon river, wider than a mile

I’m crossing you in style some day

Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker

Wherever you’re goin’, I’m going your way.

   –Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, 1961

When your daughter says, “Do you want to go on another trip?” You say YES. You always say yes, I told my husband Paul, because the moment may not come again. Life has the habit of sometimes getting in the way. Last year SarahKate and I traveled to Iceland together, and this year it is three countries—Switzerland, Hungary, and Austria. Nine months ago, when we did the long-distance pinkie-swear promise that neither of us would back out, I remember thinking what a nice calm trip it would be…central Europe. How much trouble could we get into? The real question was how could we manage our different styles? One thing I know for sure is when an American redhaired mother daughter duo come to town it can be a hot mess.

My daughter is all logic, and I am…almost entirely imagination. Yet, we are each successful at solving problems. I can feel her reaction to that statement before she even reads this essay. SarahKate was born a teenager. When she is annoyed—or better yet, aggravated—she drops her arms to her sides, rolls her eyes heavenward, and drags herself across the floor like a juvenile gorilla whose character has just been besmirched. Then she’ll pause…and remember that I do indeed get us out of scrapes.

So, let’s cover a few problems we encountered on this trip. You tell me: is using logic or imagination better for solving problems?

We met in the Zurich airport having arrived from different parts of the world. I had fluttered over to Europe by taking the short cut—the North pole—in less than twelve hours. She had spent twelve hours in New York’s JFK before she even boarded her transatlantic flight.

“I have the keys to the rental car, a nut thing for your low blood sugar, and you better hope your bag made it.” She stopped and put her hand on her hips. “Let’s go.”

I stared at my little girl. Her long, curly red tresses were gone. Her hair was cut so short I could see the skin of her scalp peaking out from the precise lines made by skillful shears. There was just one beautiful curl left in the front. I clamped my lips together.

“I got tired of being hot all the time,” she countered with a frown.

Well, she always was a sweaty kid, I thought.    

I trailed along in her wake as we waited for my bag to show up. SarahKate has been a social worker for the last ten years, and it has worn on her. It’s been my experience that sometimes people’s edges soften over time. SarahKate’s have sharped. Not in a bad way—instead, like a chef’s sharp knife. She’s turning thirty in a few days, and that sharpening is purposeful. A career change is in the works. SarahKate is not making a slight turn. She is working on an Master’s Degree in Emergency Management, taking nursing courses and even working on a ship captain’s license. I am just glad to see her.

My bag in tow, we reached the ladies room and encountered our first problem. The airport had installed a coin machine and a turnstile at the entrance of the restroom.

“Try a quarter,” I twirled my suitcase in a circle.

“It doesn’t work.” Her head was deep in her purse.

“Try a euro. I bet they aren’t picky.” I slowed the suitcase when I saw her eyebrows touch each other in a scowl.   

“I only have one franc and we both have to go to the bathroom.” She sighed. “Let’s go get some change.”

“Nah, we can do this.” I mentally measured the distance between the turnstile bars. I positioned her against the first bar and slid in behind her. “Put the franc in and we’ll both go through at the same time.” It worked just like a greased pig going down a chute.

“What about your bag, Mom?” It sat on the other side of the turnstile. I imagined myself crawling back under the bars. It might work.  Imagination versus logic. I’m generous. Put a point in each column.

During SarahKate’s childhood, I was the undisputed boss of the family. Ask anyone. They will shudder, drop their heads and whisper, ‘It’s true.’ But, I have gladly given up my title and I’m now grateful SarahKate takes the lead on the things I don’t want to do—drive, navigate, keep track of time, and remember to bring the tickets. That leaves me responsible for shopping, drinking and eating. It’s the perfect partnership.

“Hmm…Fast route or safe route?” she asked as we sat in the idling car. Putting our favorite Van Morrison on the playlist, we took off for the journey between Halisberg and Meiringen, the two Swiss towns in the vicinity of our Airbnb chalet. A mere 8.6 miles, it should have only taken us thirty minutes on the curvy roads at the most. Google Map’s evil side (Fast Route) emerged and lead us onto a small dirt road that got smaller, darker and twistier.

“Pretty sure we’re on a bike path,” I piped up.

“No. Google Maps is constantly being updated, Mother.” When she calls me “mother” I know she is feeling superior to me.

“Oh dear,” I whispered, my eyes gleaming in triumph. Ahead of us a group of cyclists all dressed in professional gear with padded shorts and skintight shirts were grinding up the steep grade. They crested the hill and pedaled towards us. Their eyes were hidden behind their dark glasses, and they streamed by us in the red and white colors of the Swiss flag. They did not speak, and I could hear the straining of their breath as they passed our windows. Put a point in the imagination column.

We prepared for the trip by each choosing an activity that was a “ten”—in other words non-negotiable. We HAD to make them happen. SarahKate chose to go to Carl Jung’s House in Zurich. The Jung Museum had an address, times of operation, tour guides, and pamphlets. It was going to happen. I chose a Cow Crossing. It is a traditional event in the life of a village in rural Switzerland. Each year in late summer, the Swiss dairy farmers climb high into the alpine meadows to retrieve their large herds of cows that have been munching on the brilliant green grass for a couple of months. The cows wear large, heavy bells the size of soccer balls, and, as they descend the rocky paths, the townspeople hear them coming by the dull tinkling of the bells.  Everyone celebrates by meeting the cows and guiding them through the town. The people wear traditional festival clothes, the cows are given crowns of flowers, and they sing (the people, not the cows). I knew cow crossings were taking place all over Switzerland in September, but there certainly wasn’t a schedule, at least not one I could find.

“Explain to me how we are going to find a road where the farmer has chosen at that magic moment to bring his cows down from the alpine meadows and take them home to the farm’s pasture?” SarahKate’s hands gripped the steering wheel. The little Hunyadi came with lane assist which meant my daughter was constantly arguing with the car and pulling the wheel back into her control.

“It will happen. I know it will.” I gazed out the window at the sedate scenery of small rolling hills with flashes of bright blue water darting between the dells. We had headed northwest out of Zurich after SarahKate went to Jung’s house. She had seen his study left untouched for over fifty years. I had picked up two new cashmere sweaters at a garage sale that I had dickered down to thirty francs. We were both pleased.

“Let’s go to Appenzell,” I yelled pointing at a sign the Hyundai had just passed. “I have a feeling.” We trundled into town and sat down for lunch. Our waiter was friendly and even knew how to tease two American women who bickered non-stop while eating fried perch and coleslaw.

“Hey,” the waiter paused at our table and bent over to speak in a low voice. “Go to the street. Something magical is about to happen.” My eyes blazed at him. I knew instantly what it was. I heard the low, hollow sounds of the heroes’ bells returning from their summer away.

“Where are you going?” SarahKate called as I dashed out of the courtyard and into the street.

The cows walked like royalty, their milk chocolate-colored bodies swaying side to side as their hard black hooves clomped along the street. They were led by an older gentleman wearing brown leggings, a fringed leather coat and a white blouse that blossomed out of the top of his collar. More people wearing aprons, feathered hats, and smocked shirts walked alongside the herd, switches in hand, guiding the cows through the streets of Appenzell. I expected to hear singing, but instead the townspeople chanted and crooned in the same tones as the bawling of the bells.  

“Thank you,” I said to the waiter. “That’s all I really wanted from Switzerland.” He bowed and gave me a salute. Point for imagination.

Later that night we sat, exhausted, at a local pub and ordered dinner. I was still on my cow crossing high and SarahKate was explaining to me how Sigmund Freud was jealous of Jung’s popularity. Hmm. Although it would be a detour, I was interested in the roots of Freud’s jealousy. Another time.

“Here you go,” the waitress said with a flourish and set down my plate. Scallops of pale white meat swam in a rich brown gravy. “It is your calf.” She smiled politely.  

 “Don’t call it that,” I felt my eyes burn.

“But, what is wrong? You ordered calf, did you not?” She looked uneasy.

“Mom, it’s okay.” SarahKate patted my hand.

“I know what veal is, but no one has ever called it a calf right before I ate it,” I pushed my plate away. “I feel terrible.”

“Mother, you are not a bad person for eating veal. In fact,” SarahKate said stabbing the pork cutlet on her plate, “that little baby calf probably gave someone just like you great joy when it participated in its first,” she waved her fork like a conductor’s baton and swallowed her bite, “and ONLY cow crossing. Be happy.”

Point for logic, I suppose. There are some things you don’t want to imagine. I dug into my veal and chewed thoughtfully. It was delicious.     

The Cinque Terre is part of the Italian Rivera where small villages hang off cliffs of granite and hover over the waters of the Mediterranean. The most famous towns are: Manarola, Riomaggiore, Corniglia, Vernazza, and Monterosso al Mare. Painted vibrant pink, yellow, and coral, they string along the coast connected only by hiking paths. To reach them, visitors must park their cars high in the hills and walk down. Vehicles are not allowed in the villages, so unlike the constant and annoying buzz of the Vespas in Rome and Florence, all you can hear is the sound of daily life drifting out the narrow open windows of the tall houses connected to one another. Dogs stand in the doorways and peruse the tourists passing by, and children play ball in the piazza, often scolded by the elderly men who collect on park benches and tap the rubber ends of their canes for emphasis.

The first time I was in Cinque Terre, in 2007, I was on a day trip with Paul from our Mediterranean cruise. I half-listened to a guide explain that all house colors must be approved by a “Commissioner of Good Taste,” but what I was really doing was watching an older gentleman in an apron and baggy, worn polyester pants stand in his window frame and use an extended paint brush, like the ones kindergarten children use, to daub green paint onto the worn slats of the shutters of his house. They are open during the day to string laundry out to dry, but they are pulled shut at night to deter the mosquitos. He winked at me. Enchanted, I promised myself I would return to the Cinque Terre.

In 2013, my best friend Belinda suggested a trip to Cinque Terre. For the four years I lived in Tulsa while working on my doctorate, Belinda and I had tea most afternoons together. We nursed babies and commiserated on my miserable first marriage and her pie-in-the-sky (now deceased) husband. A friendship of thirty plus years, there is no one I’d rather go to Cinque Terre with–other than Paul.

“Are you okay, Paul? We can go together in a few years.” I saw him hesitate for a moment. Not to say yes or no, but, instead, thinking, ‘I don’t want to miss it.’

I was 46 in 2013. I am a firm believer that the most beautiful time in a woman’s life is when she is in her forties. Her lifelong friendships are made. She’s had enough relationships in her life that she knows a good man (or woman) when she has found one. She drinks champagne in her cozy pajamas, hands the car keys to her children trusting that someone will watch over them, willingly contends with an acquaintance about politics, mourns for longer than is necessary when her dog passes, and has discovered a moisturizer for life. She is not afraid any more.

I write this, and I fervently wish I was in my forties again—this time to savor the years like beads on a string that get lost one at a time until you have only one or two precious ones left in your fist. If you still have them, hold them fast. You’ll need them in your fifties. That’s a whole other decade better addressed another time.

I was primed to meet Billy. Belinda, already in her fifties, knew so much more than I did in my forties. She knew that a Billy meant trouble. A Billy meant flaking paint on tall shutters. A Billy meant a lark is never just a lark.

Trattoria dal Billy sits on the top of Manarola’s largest hill. It has three levels: a few street-level tables, two inside rooms with a large open space from where you can see the sea and the sky meet, and a protected outdoor terrace with a rock wall that overlooks the steep vineyards. An almost vertical stone staircase, shaded by a lemon tree, connects the spaces together.

I don’t know what it was about that night that made me laugh with abandon, flirt without shame, put my glasses in my purse and lock eyes with a man who stared at me—Billy.

Billy was not much to look at. He was short, dark haired, and with a shadow of stubble on his cheeks and chin. He hunched over the reservation book and constantly conferred with his staff preparing tables and cashing out customers. His eyes slid to our table and in between plates of bread, fish, and potatoes, I blushed when I saw him whispering to our waitress with his eyes trained on me.

“He wants you to see a picture of him from his fishing days. He had curly hair.” She handed me a dusty 8×10 frame that had been propped up on a long shelf that extended across the room underneath the large, picture windows.

Billy’s photograph was faded with curly edges under the smeared glass. Without my glasses, I had to hold it close to my nose to see it clearly.

“Oh my,” Belinda said taking the picture from me and looking closely at it. She and I put our heads together and giggled. Out of the corner of my vision I saw Billy’s head snap up and turn to me. In the photo he was wearing a tiny, red speedo bathing suit and lounging against the side of the boat. His hair was indeed curly and long. He was holding it back with one hand and an easy grin was spread across his face. He was holding a giant swordfish and blood covered his hand where he gripped it tightly.

When I stood to return the frame, he motioned to us for a picture. Belinda and I stood on either side of him, and he put his arms around our waists. Just as we pulled apart, I felt a quick pinch of his fingers on my butt. Startled, I yelped.

“Watch yourself,” Belinda advised.

“It’s just innocent, B,” I said.

“Maybe to you,” she whispered.

Then the lights went out and the whole restaurant went dark. Voices started singing happy birthday in the kitchen, and as the waitresses entered the main dining room, they made their way to our table. The rest of the diners, now swigging the free grappa and limoncello being passed around the room, joined in the song. Although it was not my birthday, the girls set the cake down in front of me, and one of them leaned down and whispered, “he wants to kiss you.”

I felt Belinda’s hand cover mine, lightly like a piece of gauze applied to a burn. For a moment I knew what it was to be a comet streaking across the sky. It only happens in a blue moon; it’s never in the same place twice; it’s meant to be enjoyed for the moment, it’s never to be spoken of again.

“No,” I said smiling at her young face. “No.”

Now, in 2022, Paul and I are within a couple of hours of the Cinque Terre. “Let’s go to dinner there. I want to see Billy,” Paul jingled the rental car keys in his fist.

“I’m sure he doesn’t work there any longer,”I said.

“No, Kathi and Mike said he did when they were here in July. Come on.”

It was cold the night we went to Billy’s dal Trattori. I had only a cheap rubber coat I had purchased from Walmart to ward off the chill of the evening. The wind was blowing in from the water and even though we were far from it, I felt the salt brush my face like a kiss. We carefully walked down the steep steps, a few lemons still high in the tree above our heads. I had my phone clutched in my hand with the picture of Billy, Belinda and I saved on the screen. Nine years is a long time and many, many guests ago. I wondered if our encounter still occupied a part of his mind like it did mine. Unlikely.

We didn’t have a reservation, and I watched Billy and his head waitress argue over whether to give us a table or not. “I’m sorry, we just don’t have room for you,” she said coming back and speaking to us.

I held up my phone. “I met Billy nine years ago,” I felt a little dizzy balancing on the uneven stair. “I don’t think he’ll remember me, but I thought I would show it to him.” She took the phone from me and began to laugh.

“Eduardo, come here. Come see how handsome you were!” She held my phone to him, and he squinted and put his reading glasses on. He shook his head and spoke in rapid Italian. He shook his head again and threw up his arms motioning towards a table in the corner of the terrace. They seated us and I sat down stunned. He was not Billy, the owner of the restaurant. Nine years ago he acted a part that was not his. He waved his hands over the top of the restaurant like a conductor working his orchestra. Feeling sick, I realized I did too. We were both actors that night. For me, it defined the margins of my marriage and they are crisp, white, and well-trimmed like good sails on a boat should be. Paul took in the shock in my eyes, and I understood that moment of hesitancy he had when I left for Cinque Terre with Belinda. It wasn’t an issue of trust; it was a knowledge that a moment would take place that would change me in some undefined way, and he would not know how it happened.

It became so windy, we gathered up our things and prepared to go. Eduardo came out of the main building and motioned impatiently to me. He shoved two bottles of thirty-year aged balsamic vinegar glaze into my purse. He put an arm around my shoulder and another around Paul and nodded his head for a picture. I stood there, confused, my Walmart coat hanging from my hand and the precious balsamic vinegar bulging in my purse.

“Hey, now,” Paul said patting Eduardo on the back. “Don’t go pinching my butt or anything.”

I loved my husband so much in that moment.

There are nights you feel like a princess, and you just have to go with it. My new dress and shoes—a silk gown with gauzy, see-through sleeves, the fabric scattered with blooms, and the length hitting above my knees just right, and then, of course, paired with four-inch-high Tommy Hilfiger wedges all made me feel willowy and sensuous.

“Wait up, Little Goat,” Paul called huffing behind me a good twenty feet. “My feet are hamburger, give me break.”

“Little Goat?” I laughed. If I had not been in such a good mood, it would have been a much different conversation.

“Yes, you are bounding around on your toes on those shoes. I just see you head bobbing up between all the people.”

“I can’t bound on my toes, wedges are platforms; it’s like regular walking just much higher,” I retorted.

Florence had changed during our five-day visit. The first day was ninety degrees and our cotton clothes clung to us in the heat and humidity. Tonight, the wind was brisk with a little bite to it. The air was clearer, and everything–the white façade of Santa Croce cathedral outside our porch, the thick, red tiles of the immense round dome of the Dumo, and the lantern-shaped lights on the street corners—stood out in stark shadows in the twilight.

I shivered.

“I wish you had a regular coat,” I told Paul as he adjusted the collar of the sports coat I insisted he bring.

I had told him, “You never know when you’ll need it for an event you hadn’t planned on.”

“What do we women bring for those moments?”

“A pearl necklace.”

“Why aren’t you wearing yours?”

I didn’t feel like it.”

And then, just like me not minding Paul calling me the Little Goat, he didn’t mind wearing the sport coat. He didn’t mind at all.

We should have been exhausted, in our pajamas, drowsing in front of the TV. In a single day we have visited the Uffizi Art Gallery, climbed the Duomo’s dome and bell tower, and now we were on the way to a Three Tenors concert. We sped through the streets where the owners of restaurants were pulling down plastic curtains to protect the diners from the wind. We were late for the performance. The proprietor at the bottom of our building offered to put our dinners in a warmer for us to eat later, but instead we jumped up from our table, grabbed hands and shouted, “We’ll see you for dessert, Ciao!”

When you start shouting the language of the place you are visiting, you’ve made it. Florence was ours.

The Uffizi Gallery, opened in 1560 when the local mafia family, the Medicis, started hauling in art they had in their palace and hanging it on the walls. Five hundred years later, the Uffizi is stuffed with art. Shaped like a horseshoe, two sweeping galleries are crowded with thousands of years-old marble statues and paintings of historically important Romans and Italians as well as the ubiquitous Madonna with Child. Who knew though, that most of the statues had been repaired over the centuries with extra body parts from defunct statues, and many of the works were painted by one artist but a different one had signed his name over the top after the painted had dried?

“I’d be pissed for eternity,” I said solemnly to Paul. “I’d find the faker and haunt him and his family forever.”

“Yep,” Paul patted my shoulder. “I have no doubt.” I’ve been known to wish for revenge.

Now is moment I have to apologize to Paul. I called him an idiot. He wanted to climb the 463 steps of the immense Duomo dome. Its real name is the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, but she is called the Duomo. Massive, she dominates the skyline of Florence, and you can feel her ownership of the city. Calling them “interruptions and resumptions,” it took 150 years to complete the Duomo, and Filippo Brunelleschi, the final architect and builder, burned his notes and plans used to build the double dome (one inside the other to hold it together) making it a near impossibility for the current architects to figure out how to maintain the structure. Idiot.

Back to the other idiot. “We are fifty-five years old, we do not exercise AT ALL, we drink way too much wine, eat too much cheese, your blood pressure medicine had to be increased, and I am considering botox. Why do you think we should climb it?”

But we did. We used the same staircase the workers did all those generations ago, and at the top we saw the whole swath of Florence stretching out in red roofs, church spires, the glinting Arno River, and palaces on the hills in the distance. It was so exciting that, buoyed by our success, we dashed across the piazza and climbed the Bell Tower which was 414 steps. On our way down, the bells began to toll, and I felt like I was being rolled from side to side on an old ship. We passed the opening where we felt the powerful push of the metal bell through the air as its gong, gong, gong pulsed steady and unrelenting. Though my teeth were bouncing around in my skull, it was stupendous.

So, it brings me to the last event of our crazy day. I had bought tickets for a Three Tenors concert. Now I knew they weren’t the real Three Tenors—Carreras, Domingo, and Pavarotti—but I was hopeful it would be like Las Vegas where we once saw one guy who could sing exactly like Billy Joel and Elton John.

These guys? First of all, only one of them was actually on the cover of the program. The other two were subs. They sang for an hour and a half, and they were pretty good. I called one of them Hair Flipper because he liked to bend deeply at the waist and throw his head back, so his hair cascaded around him, another guy I nicknamed the Hulk, because that guy had a head like a boulder, and the last one I called Mike the Neighbor.

“What? He doesn’t look like Mike (our best friend),” Paul wrinkled his forehead and frowned.

“No, he looks like Mike the neighbor who only replaced half his roof and doesn’t mow his lawn,” I whispered.

“Oh,” Paul said nodding. “He does look like Mike the neighbor.”

They sang arias from La Traviata, Rigoletto, and Tosca. They entered the stage and exited the stage. Over and over.

“Why don’t they just stay up there?” Paul asked.

“It’s all about getting in character,” I sat on the edge of my chair. I just wanted to hear them sing Nessun Dorma—a song I first heard in 2007 and makes me weep every time I hear it. But it wasn’t to be. When people started leaving during the third version of The Marriage of Figaro, the three tenors hastily tied it up and bowed. Hair Flipper, the Hulk, and Mike the Neighbor. They held hands. Ooh, gross, I thought.

Giggling, we ran back through the cold where the owner of the restaurant called out, “You’re back! Come tell me about it!” We sat with him and drank Moscato wine and ate tiramisu while I told him all about my names for the three singers. He wasn’t offended at all.

So, we’re packing up. We will look like idiots once more as we wheel our four robin’s egg blue suitcases across the piazza towards the taxi stand. Florence has been glorious; Tuscany, we’re on our way…

There are 5, 518 miles between Olympia, Washington, and Florence, Italy. The time difference is nine hours which means Paul and I have just a couple of windows of time when we can talk with our friends and family. Our house sitter, someone we have known for years, made some serious mistakes at our house, and, per our ADT alarm system, we realized people were coming over to our house all night long every night for five nights. On Saturday night alone, our front door was opened 19 times between midnight and six am.

Paul and I spent all Sunday in a tiny Fiat car with our six pieces of luggage piled to the ceiling behind us arguing over how to handle it. It was supposed to be a beautiful drive through the countryside from Venice to Florence, but we somehow got stuck on the autostrade, and all we saw were tall grey, metal walls and the inside of tunnels. Paul thought if we gave the house sitter a good chewing out, he’d snap out of it and get better. I didn’t think so. Something had withered inside me. My trust was broken.

We have no idea how many people went through our house, if they looked through our messy pantry with all the boxes of forgotten taco shells, laughed at the absurd number of pillows on my couch, upended a cup and saucer from my great-grandmother’s china and pretended to drink from it, or (bile races through my stomach here) slept in our beds. I don’t know if they looked at my photo albums on the living room coffee table and flipped through the pages, a drink in their hand or a joint pinched in their fingers and skipped to the end because they were bored.

I don’t know if they petted Sibby or pushed her away because of her horrible habit of jumping on people. I don’t know if Lily cowered outside afraid to come in but more afraid of the coyotes who have treed her in the past.

We talked to the house sitter, and he promised no more guests, he’d settle down, it would be quiet.

“Please send me a picture of Sibby and Lily,” I asked. “Please, so I know they are okay.”

When I woke up the next morning, there was no picture. I had no way of knowing if they were okay. I sucked in a giant gasp of air and fell into a panic attack where I couldn’t remember how to breathe. I say fell, because it is like falling. Air can only come in, the room spins, the dizziness makes me want to throw up, and my legs won’t work. The worse it gets, the more I panic, and I am convinced I am going to die. In the deep recesses of my brain, I remembered a trick someone had told me about.

“I7, 84, 46, 3,” I wheezed. Random numbers. By talking, I must breathe out. “64, 17, 32, 17, 42,” my shuddering slowed. Paul held my hand and looked at the floor. There was nothing else he could do. My breathing finally returned.

“You sure like the number 17,” he said rubbing my back.

All day I was as brittle as glass, and I stepped carefully on the cobblestone streets afraid I might slip into the cracks.

Operation Move Sibby went smoothly with the help of neighbors and friends. She is now staying with two other golden retrievers and I hope they are speaking their special language of limited conversation but lots of smiles. Lily is back home with three different families caring for her in the next couple of weeks.

I don’t know what you do to thank the people who saved the places of you that are the most vulnerable, the most exposed, the most naked. I will find a way. But it will have to be without words because if I had to speak of it again, I’ll have to start counting.

Perhaps you wonder why this hit me so hard.

In July, my son was diagnosed with cancer. I was there for the surgery, but he didn’t want us to miss our trip to Italy, so he and his family are weathering his bouts of chemotherapy alone. They are taking it one trip to the clinic at a time. He counts the days of treatment he has left. His goal to is to be well enough to shoot his bow during deer season November 1.

Having a child with cancer makes me feel like all the doors and windows of my house are open and I cannot return home. It makes me feel like my grandchildren have wandered into a cornfield and I can’t hear their voices over the clatter of the corn stalks in the wind. It makes me feel like a part of my body that became a part of his body betrayed us both. It makes me feel like strangers are idly riffling though our lives with little interest.

So, I guess you could say being unable to stop the violation of your home shares a whisper of a resemblance to being unable to stop cancer invading someone you love.

Every day since July 7, I have practiced self-talk. He will be okay. He is young and strong. The survival rate is over 95% with the chemotherapy. He will be okay. It is my mantra and I say it over and over again every day.  

Last night, as we walked back through the maze of streets, the hulking, silent Duomo brooding in the twilight and the Ponte Vecchio glowing in the last of the sunset, we heard the sound of music. We crossed the street and followed the sound of a single violin. We found the violinist in the piazza outside the shuttered Uffizi Gallery where the Birth of Venus lay sleeping inside.

He played for the crowd, he played for himself. He spoke little, but the music soared up between the walls of the buildings and seemed to weave its way between all of us sitting on the stairs. It grew darker until we could barely see him, but he continued to play. Paul and I left while he was still playing. I wanted to remember his music living and breathing, strong and knowing, healing and whole.  I wanted to remember that even though I could not see him, he played through the darkness.  

“No, no, Miss. Say it again.” Our tour guide, maybe eighteen years old with spiky hair and a chipped-tooth smile, pinches his fingers and thumb together, Bacaro!” He kisses his fingers and explodes them open in the sky. “Bacaro!”

“Bacaro,” I say enthusiastically and kiss my fingers and watch them fall open like a drooping flower.

“Better, better!”

Paul and I are on the Definitive Bar Tour, advertised as visiting six bars with six snacks with six glasses of wine—all in three and half hours. Easy. The Klenks can handle that no problem.

We met Francesco in the university district where the Grand Canal opens up to the enormous lagoon of aquamarine water churning with the passage of speed boats, vaporetto (water taxis), gondolas, and tiny fishing boats manned usually by a young boy or two. Imagine a cruise ship and a canoe next to one another. It is stressful to watch, but so far, we haven’t seen any collisions or casualties.

We take off—Paul, me, Francesco, the tour guide, and a couple from Chicago. They didn’t talk the entire tour. I watched them chew and swallow—that’s it.

“Stop here.” Francesco left us in the middle of a street in Piazzale Roma with tourists surging around us. “Come now, now,” he waved from a tiny, low doorway between a lace shop and a hotel.

“Dive bar,” I whisper under my breath to Paul, as we squeezed into a narrow room with flapping posters on the wall and a table-like counter running around the perimeter of the room. Older men stood at the bar top eating bread with toppings without expressions. When they were done, they threw back a shot glass of wine and left greasy napkins that floated to the floor.

“Ooh,” I breathed.

“You can pick a cicchetti for yourself or I’ll select some for the group and we’ll all share them together.” The Chicago duo chose their own. Reluctantly, I wished I could read the Italian and know if I was choosing octopus or not.

The glass case was probably five feet long and filled with slices of French bread piled with meats, cheeses, spreads, and unrecognizable lumps.

“Cicchetti?” Paul asked. He totally massacred the word, but Francesco did not correct his pronunciation.

“Yes, yes. It is what separates Venetians from Italians. You will not find cicchetti, a small snack, in other places on your vacation.” He laughed. “Sir, I tell you what is here, and you choose. And then your wife.” He smiled at me.

Bud, if you want a tip, learn my name. Paul gripped my hand. Twenty years of marriage and he didn’t just read my mind. He heard it.

“Let me see what we have here. We have like your grilled cheese, I think.” He pointed to a fried bread sandwich. “But in Venice, we add a surprise, an anchovy in the middle and dip the sandwich in a batter to fry in lard. Delicimo!”

“Next one?” I inquired.

“This is Baccalà Mantecato,” he said pointing to crostini spread with a white fluffy concoction that looked like marshmallow. “It is salted cod spread.”

“Next?” I asked peering into the finger-print smudged glass case.

“Fior di Zucca, fried pumpkin blossoms stuffed with ricotta,” Francisco said meeting my gaze. “Very Venetian, you know.”

“I’ll try that one,” I spoke up. Paul picked one piled high with meat. We stood along the countertop and chomped on our cicchetti. Mine was creamy and salty and Paul’s took a bit more effort. He tried to eat it in several bites, but the meat was layered and didn’t pull apart well.

“Now the other part of visiting a bacaro, which now you should know is a local bar, is you drink a small glass of wine. Venetians pop into bacari all day long for a snack and a little glass of wine.” He carried four tiny glasses of white wine to us. Paul and I looked at each other. We tipped them back in one gulp.

“Very good. You drink like Venitians, no?” The Chicago couple drank theirs in sips.

“You can carry it, if you like,” he offered them. In Venice, you can walk with your drink. Never plastic, no.” he shook his head in disgust. You take a glass, you bring a glass.”

“These small glasses are for just a taste of the wine. When you order one, say ‘l’ombra bianco if you want the house white wine or l’ombra rossa for the house red. I’ombra means shadow in Venetian culture. It means the little shadow it makes in the face of the church.”

Paul and I looked at each other. All good information.

“So, this is called a desk.” He patted the scarred countertop. “A true bacaro has no chairs. You eat standing up and then go about your business. If you want to sit at a table in a bacaro, you pay two euros more each.” We gathered our stuff up and prepared to move along to our next five stops.

We ate Sard in Saor, crostini with fried sardines and pickled onions garnished with raisins and pine nuts in the Jewish ghetto. Throughout the centuries and during World War II, Jewish citizens were locked into a gated square each night in their neighborhood even though they spent their days building and working on Venice like anyone else.

We tasted glasses of fresh red wine that had been harvested, pressed, and immediately put into wine barrels for sale. It was delicious and reminded me of the fresh sangria I made at home.

The time flew by as we inhaled giant meatballs made of finely ground beef, egg, Italian bread, milk, Italian parsley, garlic, salt, pepper, olive oil and some Grana Padano cheese. Then, it is fried not baked. We slurped tiny tastes of Tuscan wine.

By the time we finished olives stuffed with meat, prosciutto and gorgonzola, pecorino and sottocularino, we were stuffed. However, those miniature glasses of wine didn’t seemed to complete the snack.

We said goodbye to Francesco and the couple from Chicago. I did give him a tip. His enthusiasm was fetching, and his dimples were delightful. I still can’t say bacaro with conviction, and cicchetti is way beyond my pay grade.

The next day through, Paul and I confidently made our way to the glass case in a bacaro and ordered three crostini a piece. A pair of young women watched us as we pointed and selected our snack.

“Do you need to know what to do?” I asked.

“Yes, would you help us?” they said visibly relieved.

“Okay, pick out which cicchetti you want—that is the name for the crostini or a fried thing—and then tell them what kind of l’ombra you want, white or red. It’s a little glass of wine.”

“What about you guys?” One of them pointed to the large glasses of wine we carried with our plates and the table we had commandeered.

“Uhh, I paused. “What can I say? We’re as American as it comes.”

Icelanders believe in Huldufólk—hidden people—supernatural, mythical beings that live high in the craggy, green bluffs that circle the sky and alongside the tumbling, icy streams that meander through mossy flatlands that lead to the sea. Appearing and disappearing just out of the corner of your eye, elves, fairies, trolls, and ghosts look and behave like humans and enter and depart a person’s life leaving a faint mark only the wearer can see. The mark they leave, you ask? It is a pointer—the direction in which to go.

Although my Nancy Drew heart beats fast at the thought of tripping over an elf who impudently steps in my way, it is not I who will bear the mark when we leave Iceland, I believe it will be my daughter, SarahKate.

SarahKate invited me to accompany her on the first leg of her three-week journey through Iceland, Scotland, England, Amsterdam, Norway, and Denmark. She is in that in-between place that some of us experienced in our youth—momentarily free from responsibilities and brave enough to embrace the unknown.

I see her clearly at moments on this trip—the stubborn little girl who hated to wear shoes—and then she wavers out of my sight when her eyes gaze far out into the sea and I have no idea where she has gone. Unlike my boys who are…well, boys…SarahKate is introspective, loyal, and to be perfectly honest, somewhat of an Eeyore (the donkey from Winnie the Pooh). If there is a cloud in the sky, she will point it out.

We have switched places. I refuse to drive; there is no need to be criticized for something I know I am barely competent at. At the rental car place, they warned us that car doors can get caught in an Icelandic wind gust and tear from their hinges. Now each time I go to open the car door, she peers over the top of her glasses as if I am a teenager and warns me to “watch out for the wind.” Yet, when she spots a humungous waterfall from the road, it is I who says, “are you sure?” We return to the car waterlogged wishing we hadn’t spent so much time on our hair that morning.

While in Vik, a lovely village adjacent to a black sand beach, I feel an oozing wetness trickle down my calf and discover a rope burn from Sibby’s leash has burst open. Her face blanching at the sight of the mess and my grimace of pain, SarahKate hustles like a parent and talks to a local woman who tells her to take me to an unmarked clinic high on a green hill where a kind doctor applies a burn patch and bandages me up. I feel comforted and safe with my daughter at the helm.

We have merged our pictures through Air Drop and, although it appears seamless which are hers and which are mine, there is a freshness and an eagerness in her photos while I feel mine look still and staged. I realize that, although she came from me almost twenty-nine years ago, she has cut the last tether and is leaving on a road of her choosing.

The hidden people of Iceland are known to cause mischief, speak in the wind, and drop trinkets at the feet of the unsuspecting. Tomorrow SarahKate will get a new tattoo that symbolizes who she is grounded and whole and who she will be in the unknown world that lies ahead. My reasons for finding the hidden people are different from hers—I want to catch them by their sleeves and hold them fast, while my darling, Eeyore daughter would say to them “climb aboard and come with me.”

I wrote this essay a few years ago when my son, Connor, and his wife, Samantha, were expecting their first child. That baby turned out to be CJ, Connor Junior, who will turn four this December. His sister Harley also has a December birthday, and she will celebrate her third birthday this year. Paul and I had the privilege and honor of spending the last four and a half months living with Samantha, CJ, and Harley while Connor was deployed in Kuwait. Our driveway was crammed with toys, books burst out of baskets, and playdough found its way into the most unlikely of places. Every day was a treasure, and a week before they were to return to Texas to welcome Connor home, the pumpkin patch opened. CJ and Harley did all the same activities my children did years ago, and, from the glimmer in their eyes, I have a feeling some unknown pumpkin patch in the future will suffer the same fate ours did.  This essay is a compilation of conversations we have had over the years about this happy day at the pumpkin patch, so while my grown kids may protest the veracity of the setting, I can assure you all of the memorable events of that day DID happen.     

My daughter SarahKate, son Connor, and daughter-in-law, Samantha were going through a stack of old family pictures. A picture of Connor and SarahKate as teenagers made me pause.

“Wait, what day was that?” I asked. The kids sat on the steps of the porch each holding an orange cat. Our golden retriever, Tucker, sat on the step below them and looked over his shoulder at the cats and the kids. Pumpkins were packed in untidy piles around them.

“You don’t remember that day, Mom?” Connor said. “Really? You spent the entire day mad at us.”

“It was a great day,” SarahKate grinned.

“It was a long time ago.” Connor handed Sam the picture.

“You were thirteen and eleven, then? They look happy. Do you remember why you were mad?” Sam handed me the picture.

“I’m not sure.” I stared at the photo. Connor, not yet in the Army, had curly hair. SarahKate had just started wearing make up and her fresh, peachy skin glowed through the luminescent powder. They leaned towards each other teasing the cats.

Something stirred in me.

“What happened that day?” I inquired. “On second thought, maybe it’s better if Sam doesn’t find out and I don’t remember.”

“Oh, no, I want to hear all about this day,” Sam said.

“Mom, come on. It was Pumpkin Patch Day.” SarahKate huffed. “Seriously, Mom? The cow, don’t you remember the cow?”

“Maybe,” I offered, probing my memory.

“What happened?” Sam asked.

“Connor hit a cow.” SarahKate’s face was solemn.

Sam turned to Connor. “How could you hit a cow? How mean.”

“SarahKate, you shouldn’t put it like that,” he glared. I held the photo in my fingertips and searched the young faces in the picture.

They were so young.

“There’s this pumpkin patch we go to every year since we were little. They have games, a petting zoo, and a big field where you can pick your own pumpkin.”

“Apple fritters, too,” SarahKate added. “They’re amazing. All drippy with frosting.”

“SK, I’m talking,” Connor invoked the nickname he gave her years ago. “So, there was this game called the Apple Sling Shot. There was a huge rubber band that you put mushy apples in and you pulled it back as far as you could and then let go. If you were really good you could even aim it.”

“So, Connor aimed for a black and white cow out in the field and he hit it right on the side. We heard a thunk.” SarahKate smirked.

“You guys are being totally unfair,” Connor ran his hand down his face in disbelief. “There were big circles spray painted on the grass. They had to know that people were going to hit the cows standing in the bullseyes.”

“So, you got mad?” Sam asked.

My eyes held hers for a moment.

“If it happened, I’m sure I hustled them out of there as fast as I could. I wouldn’t have wanted to pay for the cow.”

I didn’t want them to see me laugh either, I thought.

“Then,” SarahKate snorted, “she got really mad.”

“No, no, let me tell it,” Connor said. “She marched to the barn and told us to wait while she got fritters and cider.”

“Hmm, let me guess. You didn’t wait like she told you.” Sam frowned at her husband.

 Her husband, I thought to myself. My son is someone’s husband.

“Of course not,” Connor and SarahKate screamed with laughter.

“No, my turn,” SarahKate rushed in. “We each had two tickets left. The train was for little kids, but Connor and I jumped on just as it took off. I had the cat,” she purred.

“Always picked the cat,” Connor muttered. “I had the elephant. So we couldn’t fit our legs in the seats, so we sat on top of the cars and held on to the sides. We thought we had enough time to get back before Mom came out, but,”

“I saw them,” I blurted out. “I was so mad I was running next to the train yelling at them to get off the kiddie cars. The cider spilled on my hands and the fritters got mushy.”

“You do remember that day,” SarahKate said astonished.

“I do now,” I retorted. “You kids were so bad.”

“Please tell me they didn’t do anything else,” Sam said.

“Come on, Sam, don’t you know us by now?” SarahKate teased.

My heart sang at the unexpected familiarity.

 “All we had left was picking out our pumpkins. So Connor and I got a huge wheelbarrow to carry them back. We always picked out the biggest ones we could lift.” SarahKate looked innocent. “It was Connor’s fault after that.”

“Oh, no,” Sam said looking aghast at Connor. “You didn’t.”

“Oh yeah, we did,” Connor said. “SarahKate climbed in the wheelbarrow and we raced up and down the rows.”

“Then it got wild,” SarahKate broke in. “Tons of little kids were crawling into wheelbarrows and big kids were pushing them through the vines. Parents were yelling and slipping in the mud as they tried to catch them.”

“Oh, my.” Sam was shocked. “What did you do?” She looked at me expectantly.

“I hid in the minivan.” I held my palms up in defeat.

“We had to roll our pumpkins to the car. The cashier took our wheelbarrow away, obviously,” Connor sighed.

“The pumpkins wobbled a lot,” SarahKate remembered.

“It was the happiest day of my life.” I whispered.  

“Ah, Mom. That’s nice.” SarahKate smiled.

“Thanks, Mom.” Connor kissed my cheek.

 “I want a day like that too, but I think we should leave the cow part out,” Sam said.

“Oh no,” Connor and SarahKate chimed together. “You have to hit the cow.”