This Month's Story

During the several years my work required extensive foreign traveling, I tried to take Stella with me on at least one trip a year. On one trip to La Spezia, Italy, she couldn’t come with me and I had to go alone. That weekend I went with some friends, Paola and Mario, to their place in the hills 40 miles from the city.

It was and is a wonderful retreat. My room that night was the upper floor of a small stone house a thousand years old. I slept on a straw mattress and was warmed by a fire in the small raised fireplace by the bed. I fell asleep watching the firelight flicker on the stone walls of my small room. Later that night, I awoke and listened to the night noises around me. Outside my window, I could hear a waterfall and a bird that sang to me and the rest of the world through most of the night.

The next morning we had an Italian breakfast of coffee, toast and fruit and went to the rear of the house to look at Mario’s small vineyard. He proudly showed me his rows of grapes and assured me that if I came back the next fall we would make wine using the old wine press under the village church.

At midday we went to the local restaurante / bar and sat in a room with the locals from the tiny village for our Sunday meal. The room held only a few large tables; no real menu. People sat wherever there was room and were served by large plates of food that continuously came out of the kitchen. Through the windows, I could see the valley and hills and another small village on the hill to our right.

Paola, Mario’s wife was upset that Stella had not made the trip with me. She said so to me and also to the people that joined us at our table, and to the restaurante proprietor at the bar as well as the cook in the kitchen (who had learned her English in Scotland and spoke it with a rich Scottish burr).

I sat explaining why Stella wasn’t with me for perhaps the tenth time when I heard Paola’s voice over the noise in the room, “Stella! How are you?” I looked up to see Paola on the phone in the corner of the room. She had called Stella in Mississippi!!

I quickly got up to go talk to her myself, when someone stopped me to say hello. When I looked again, the proprietor was talking to Stella explaining something about the menu, then the cook came on to clarify what he had said, then someone I knew couldn’t speak English, started singing her an Italian song.

It seemed everyone in the room got to talk to Stella before I did that day.

Later when I returned home, Stella told me about having the wonderful experience of going to bed in Mississippi and waking to the phone ringing and finding herself for a half hour in a small village in the northern hills of Italy.