I made $18 today.

It’s raining now, and listening to the rain and looking out onto the drops hitting the street outside this borrowed home I think of most mornings in Cetona when I was in my teens, when I would get up at 6 and make my bed and tiptoe downstairs with my clothes and books down the spiral staircase through my parents’ bedroom, still asleep, to the first floor. I would wash and dress in the bathroom with the yellow-and blue-flowered tile, tiptoeing between rooms, and close the wooden door to the little kitchen and make myself breakfast.

When it was cold and rainy, which in Cetona it most often was in winter, I would warm my bread in the oven and leave the oven door open for heat. Sitting there in the warmth and the dim light I would have my caffelatte and biscotti while reviewing Dante or Latin or math or history or whatever it was that called for our attention that day — something that surely I had fallen asleep with the previous night, for I was the dutiful daughter, and a bright one, too.

Sitting there in the silence with my books I listened to the raindrops falling on the terracotta terrace outside and the dimness of the countryside enveloped in sleep and wetness. There was a certain sound to it; nothing carried — not the call of a rooster or the bare moan of a car somewhere out there in the countryside, and it enveloped me like a cocoon. I never dreaded venturing out in the rain to go to school, though, strangely. There was comfort in the walk to the bus, the habit of it, in retrospect, or the surety of me having done what I was supposed to and feeling prepared for whatever came. I knew it would yield reward in my small world and, perhaps, someday, in the larger one, too.

After having my small breakfast I ducked out the door under my umbrella in the silence of our street on the edge of town. The thud of the heaviness of the brown wood door and the latch catching still ring exactly in my ear, though I would pull the door shut quietly as to not wake my parents or our sleeping neighbors next door, Pio and Bianca, tired and old. I walked up our winding unpaved road, skirting the puddles in the dark gray light, the sunlight still budding unclear, walking methodically to reach the piazza, up and up the hill, where I would catch the 7 am bus to Montepulciano. In the rain the countryside was quiet except for the rush of water in a small stream below where as a child I looked for frogs and flowers, and I would see no one on the street, not even the farmers that every day passed me on the road to school, not Genoveffa going to feed her chickens or Silvia’s grandmother, who otherwise I crossed every day going down to her campo carrying buckets and food for her rabbits. The montagna of Cetona stood to my left quietly, tall and embracing, enveloped by fog and rain, and the sweet smell of the earth drenched in rain filled everything.

I waited for the bus in the piazza in front of the Bar Cavour with its dim lights and the smell of coffee and cigarettes and a handful of kids who went to the liceo with me or caught buses here and there to other towns for other schools. In the rain the bus came and took us through the countryside from Sarteano and Chianciano to the Piazza della Stazione in Montepulciano. From there we walked up to the fortezza and to class. Every town was enveloped like Cetona was in the rain, from Chiusi to Montepulciano and beyond, a reign of gray and water, and outside the fortezza the landscape sat gray and indistinct as we listened to our lessons and passed – or didn’t – our tests.

At 2 we walked in the rain through Montepulciano’s steep streets back down to the bus that took us an hour back through the countryside by then enmeshed in fog that made everything a mystery, back to Cetona, with Monte Cetona still blanketed in rain and the top hidden in clouds. There was the piazza again, deserted and dreary, the rain pounding the pavement, and back down the silent road home, to lunch and home and homework and, later in the afternoon, friends in the piazza, if any could be found. So much of everything was a mystery then, so much to unfold; an entire future to discover, in retrospect. This little town in the middle of nowhere — where would we go from there? Where would I go? I don’t think I ever wondered that. Looking back, everything seemed so much surer then, and so much more reassuring. Everything was right there, and everything sufficed, even in the mystery of the rain.