In the past few days and weeks Charleston has offered up a head-full of magnificent smell, from magnolias to jasmine and roses and honeysuckle … and a combination, on one single street, of all of the above mixed with warm grass and a newly blooming flower, barely fragrant, aided by the pure air of lessened traffic. Smell and color make me particularly grateful — one of the things that make my spirit awaken and remember forever.

This morning, not for the first time, while walking by a honeysuckle bush whose blooms has just passed, ripe, decaying a bit perhaps, I was reminded of a middle-school trip I took to Capri. On that trip I did not have much spending money: even sending me had been, I think, a bit of a sacrifice for my parents. We spent a few days in Amalfi, and Positano, and Sorrento, then took the boat to Capri. Rowdy kids, out of control.

This afternoon, a rainy one, as I lay silently in the bathtub, Joe came to look for me, as he usually did when he woke up from a nap and he didn’t know where I was.

He stopped in front of the open bathroom door and, having located me, he sat, curling his striped tail around him. He focused his pale green eyes on me and batted them twice, in salute; then he lowered his gaze and washed his paws, briefly, just a touch-up.

Then, intrigued by the sound of the water trickling, he walked toward me, to the tub. Raising himself on his hind legs, he put his front paws on the edge of the tub and for a long moment stood looking curiously onto the flowing water. With my finger I petted his creamy paw and smiled at him. “Hi Joe,” I said. He batted, and smiled.

Satisfied, or bored, he lowered himself down, turned, and walked out, leaving a feeling—an ache—of orange in my eyes.

Or so I saw.

Happy birthday, Joe, wherever you might be. You are missed, still and always.

It suffices to let go

For a mere moment

For the rain to wet you

For the kiss to melt you

For the dog to lick you

For the color to smear unexpected,

A mere moment for the look of the stranger to reveal you,

For the eye to linger

For something to open luminescent,

A mere second

To stop and let the question recede

The moment intercede

For the present to be

For the fear to go

For the shame to resolve

For the doubt to dissolve

To touch the hand

To feel the skin

The warm tongue

The cool drops

The wet clothes

Clinging and nude

For joy to surge

For life to be

What it is.

Surrender.

Since my father died on this day a year ago, I have often revisited in my mind, or in my imagination, the last moments of his life. What they were like. What he felt, what he knew. What he heard and smelled. Did his life flash before him on a reel, the hills of Tuscany, the words of his mother, the laughter of his children. Music. Love. Did his heart ache?

I was on the opposite coast of the United States when he exhaled his last breath — the word I so like in Italian, spirare — but I know that he had been sleeping peacefully after a fitful night. And then, at the turn of the head he left. He went off somewhere.

Where did he go, I wonder often sitting in the bathtub, running hot water over my flesh, so finite. Where do we go?

The act or fact or reality of my dad’s last breath, the thought of it, irretrievable, absolute, irrecoverable, irrevocable, the mere thought of it, the words themselves, cause me infinite ache right in the hollow on my chest. Lost to the wind, that last exhale cannot be caught and put back, like I’d like to do with the hands of a child, stuffing the air back into his mouth with little fingers and then covering it, laughing, telling him to not let it out again, and him holding his breath laughing the way we used to do, his dark eyes playful above my grasping hands. Breathe it back in, Dad, I say! Breathe! Come back! Come back!

But no, it is not so: That final flame of energy glowing in his heart till the very final instant of life went out like a single last piece of coal left burning in a fireplace after the rest of the house has turned off the lights and gone to sleep. So it is with the heart, the last keeper of us.

And that was it. He left.

Since that day a year ago I have often tried to recast that image, a suffering one in the end because I know that my dad, I am confident, was acutely aware of dying and I think that before that peaceful final sleep he had wrestled with death hand to hand over two anguished and restless nights, and that image, that thought, hurts me, it hurts me to the bone, that suffering that I know he felt, and I push it away and push it away, and so in the process of recasting it I have come to a memory, an image of my father that I have always held dear.

When I was little, well, all throughout our lives in Cetona, sometimes in the afternoon Dad would put down his tools, take off his white lab coat, and go upstairs to take a very short nap. On the upper floors our house didn’t have any doors (the Miesian idea of privacy) — all the bedrooms, each on a different floor, landed straight off a spiral staircase — and if I walked up to my room through my parents’ bedroom tiptoeing on the steps to not wake him, I would see Dad asleep on the bed in the position he always napped in: fully dressed, on his back, hands resting on his chest, fingers intertwined, ankles neatly crossed, thin black socks, always black, face upward and at rest, head a bit tilted to the left, thick black hair slicked back, and his chest rising ever so slightly.

It never varied, really, from my young childhood through my early twenties, from when I was downstairs playing with dolls to when I was downstairs studying for tests in high school, and there was something comforting and reassuring and tender in this, my dad resting just so, and me tiptoeing on the wooden steps to not wake him and to watch over him. And today, today and all days when I wonder about that last breath, that’s where I picture him, in his faded jeans and favorite terracotta-colored turtleneck, looking forward in his sleep, at peace on the brightly colored bedspread, the bustle of the house quieted for him and the countryside peaceful outside.

That’s the way I like to imagine it all. Quiet sleep cradling him, forever.

Rest well, Daddy. Missing you every day.

I read recently about a family in a shelter in New York.

The parents had given birth to a child who had the saddest, saddest distinction of being born homeless, and so distinct it was that it was mentioned in the New York Times. This news of this baby filled me with dread, wondering what it, this status at birth, might mean for the baby’s life, for the future of the person he will become, or never become, future imperiled and today already laden.

I shudder still, because I cannot entirely understand. I have not reached that place. I do not know that station in life, and I hope never to.

And yet there was something in that story that I could understand.

In the interview, the father said that he and his family had become homeless when he had lost his job and they had lost their apartment. Before moving to the shelter, they had put all of their belongings in a storage unit, and they paid $200 a month to keep their things, what had they had left of their life before.

I am sure many or some among the rich readers—or even not so rich—sitting in their well-appointed apartments or houses thought that it was a superfluous expense, that of paying storage to keep one’s (we assume miserly) things while one is homeless.

And yet that father and I, he in a shelter in Manhattan and I in an apartment in Charleston, SC, have something in common: My things—all of them, every single one—also are in storage, in a metal unit twelve by twenty for which I pay $200 a month.

Immediately when I read the story I understood why it was important for that man and his wife to keep their things—the roots back to a stable life and, too, the memories of one.

It made me shudder in my borrowed bed in my borrowed (and lovely) apartment keeping homelessness at bay to think that our stuff could be something, a thread, to let us hope for a regular life once more.

I try not to think about my stuff much anymore. I used to think of my stuff a lot. Constantly. In the middle of the night it would wake me, crying, and during the day it would sway me away from my work. It would bring me sobbing to the floor, my stuff, curling up on the carpet. Its smell, the dust, the colors, the memory of lugging it around the world, comforting rather than heavy. All the memories within, and hope, too, of a life now suspended.

With a shrug people say to me, sell it all, let it go. ‘Who cares about stuff?’ On Facebook more than once I have been told what to do with my stuff.

But I inveigh against their thoughtlessness and ignorance, for my stuff matters, and it gives me joy to think of it all. Unlike a burdened donkey, it gives me wings to fly among the chapters of my life and unfold its pages, some otherwise dusty and unvisited, beginning, oh let’s see, with my wedding gown, satin pearl, with organza layering inside, hanging on a clothes rack barely beyond the portcullis.

I wore it, the gown, one apricot evening in July in the Tuscan hills from whence I come, and while the marriage ended, the memory of my princess-ness and the stability I thought it contained—and that precise light of the evening—still drags me back to wonder what exactly I was meant to do and why it did not work.

I kept the dress and hung it there when I returned to Italy for a year to write a book and ended up putting my stuff in storage, and so the thread goes backward, through my stuff, as I open the sliding metal doors onto all that I had and all that I seem unable (unwilling?) to redeem quite yet. Destiny speaking in metaphors, perhaps?

Just inside past the wedding gown and piles of boxes are the cow skulls from a cattle rancher in Montana. After I became a vegetarian and started painting animals and birds, I began a collection of skulls—bird heads and lizards to start—and I really wanted the skull of a big animal to revere and remind me of my place on the planet. I called a farmer in Montana who had advertised two skulls from long-horned highland cattle, one, he later told me, who had frozen to death in a long winter freeze, and the other killed by a predator, a wolf, he thought. We spoke on the phone about the long-haired, majestic animals for a few gracious hours, and he shipped them the following week in winter when the freeze let up and the FexEd guy could get through to his home.

I awaited the skulls and unpacked them with trepidation, and I have conserved those skulls as if they were human, or perhaps with greater care, for they were good animals and with humans you never really know.

There are etched silver plates from Athens in my storage unit, and some from the Greek islands with weather-beaten shores and merciless winds, bought on my honeymoon to faraway places full of treasures from centuries before anyone thought of this continent. There are rugs shipped and carried by me in duffel bags from Malta, with colors of pigments undreamed and undreamable, made by hands unshaken and poor in villages I will never know.

There are paintings from Istanbul, on parchment paper, from an artist I found in a store on a side street who flipped his stack of paintings like carpets and whose work, blessedly colored that blew my mind away, I wanted to buy all. There is a painting from Santorini, of the water-lapped houses on the harbor, painterly, detailed red and blue and turquoise, whose sight I took in while sitting in a bar—the kind of bar that makes you feel like never, ever, ever leaving—with my new husband listening to Loreena McKennitt whose stirring and melancholic voice awakened me to the fact that this would not last long, in spite of everything I wanted.

There is the painting of the goat—wistful? laughing?—that Mike and I bought at a pop-up gallery upstairs at Sermet’s Bar on King Street, before we were even married, the goat frisky, savvy, perhaps, or skeptical up on a hill, with a little white church in the background, painted by a young Asian artist, that we took home in the rain, under an umbrella, holding hands, and Wes Fredsell, the Charleston photographer, captured us on camera, unbeknownst to us, and published the photo in Charleston Magazine.

In a little box are all my Christmas things I wish I now had in my borrowed apartment, now, as Christmas approaches, and particularly the fragile clay ornaments my father made with my brother and me, several Christmases in a row, using the cookie cutters my Oma had used for butter cookies, and sugar cookies, too. Shaped like Christmas trees and reindeer and chickens and Santas, we cut the ornaments out of clay thinly rolled out on our marble dining room table in Cetona, and baked them and painted them by hand—some masterfully, my father’s—and glazed them to shine in the lights of the tree. They were so beautiful we shipped them in sets to relatives and friends everywhere and I remember one, a particular one, a sheep, painted by my father, that I long to see again.

In my storage unit I have stacks of photos I took of mosques in Turkey, many in Istanbul, but mostly of the stupefying Green Mosque of Mehmed I in Bursa, where I traveled across the mountains alone trying to find freedom and discovery and found myself on a bus of people who hated me because I had sat in the wrong seat and could not speak the language to make myself understood. In Bursa I ate stupendous food and was given overly enthusiastic massages by a Turkish man on the edge of a pool lined in marble turquoise and white. I learned to wash my feet at the entrance of mosques and to humble myself before the belief of others, and I spent hours there, humbled, so goddam lucky to be there, with the little glass lights suspended above me like lanterns from a lost dream I had never had the fortune of having.

Stacked in the storage unit are little azure blown glasses from Mexico, each more exquisite than the other, and my collection of ceramic bowl made by Pippo, the ceramist in my hometown in Tuscany, and some of my father’s drawings, too, made in youth, when he was at the University of Virginia, of the Rotunda and Jefferson’s room.

Resting in storage silent and neglected are my many hundreds of books—Italian, French, and English, from all phases and passages of my life, from childhood to adulthood, bought and given to me, read by me and read by others, dogeared and ragged, new and old, gifted and regifted around the world—to which I used to turn for thought and recollections and words and memory, books that I have studied and leafed through and been given and many of which I have yet to read and which remind me of all that I want to learn and need to learn.

My father’s first violin is there—the first violin he made—and the first one he played, and all my furniture, some worthy, some not, and the chairs, original bentwood Thonet chairs given by my Auntie Phil, the heiress of the Bronfman fortune, to my father when they were partners in architecture in Chicago, when I was born. Auntie Phil took the first pictures when I was first born—also in storage, with every other photograph I own—and doted on me until we moved to Italy and she disappeared from my life. The chairs were shipped to Italy, then shipped back when my parents divorced, then given to me after my father died, and now they rest in my storage unit, looking, they too, for home once more.

In boxes somewhere with many, many paintings I care about, mine and of others, is the little etching of the joyful dancing man by Dürer, a treasure given to my father when he was a child and carefully kept through the decades, given to me at some point when I didn’t even understand its importance, to the point that Charleston painter Jill Hooper, visiting at some point, remarked how I should move it from the door, lest someone steal it. My father, just before dying, reminded me of the joy this etching gave him, and I cannot wait to see it again.

So beloved to me in storage are two dozen small beautiful ornamental mats from Afghanistan, intricately beaded, made by women in villages lost to the universe of the west, given to me over the course of some years by Mike after we separated. Every time he traveled to Afghanistan and returned alive, miraculously, he visited me bearing a few of these mats, something akin to doilies, because he knew I loved them. They remind me of the vastity of the universe to which we belong, the lives of women afar, the peoples I will never know, the landscapes I will never see, and I would choose them, those little mats, above all else in the case of a fire.

I have in storage rugs from Persia and Turkey, and rugs sent to me from Pakistan, and black and white pictures of children in Afghanistan atop dead tanks and cannons on barren landscapes. I have scythes from Cetona, from farmers I knew who used them to cut grass and wheat, and my Raggedy-Ann and my favorite doll, a black doll bought for me at Marshall Fields in Chicago as a goodbye gift before we left for Italy.

In a box, well wrapped, is my rice painting of a butterfly, from kindergarten in Chicago, which someone took the care to keep for me, perhaps in recognition of a first sign of something artistic in me, or perhaps a casual parental moment of affection. Little distant is a needle-point painting, of a delicate unicorn surrounded by a round fence, stitched by a friend of my parents on occasion of my birth. Bon-Bon Cooper, the wife of the architect Alex Cooper—she made that for me, to celebrate my birth into this world.

There is a collection of small hand-painted tiles from Sicily, and my collection of wooden cutting boards, scarred and carved out and concave and cut and breathing of faraway smells of herbs and foods, cutting boards marked and cut by the hands of women I knew and some I don’t. With it is my collection of wooden spoons, germinated from my mother and my Oma, steady Germanic cooks, and added onto at every occasion from the markets of Cetona to the many kitchens of women I love and grew up with, at whose tables I have eaten and whose food has inspired me. Their spoons are like their bones: to be kept forever and to be burned with me.

In my storage box are my first paintings, luminous and unguarded, innocent of the greedy and critical world I was about to enter, and my collection of bird houses: bird houses from France, in wooden sticks and metal bars, and copper bird houses from Charleston. I have a bird nest collection, wrapped and kept in bowls, and the flower press that Greta gave me as a child, with still inside the tremulous flowers I picked as a little girl.

There are framed photographs of the violins from the museum in Cremona, where my father learned to make violins, and in a little box somewhere is a set of delicate midnight-blue china horses, in glazed porcelain, given to me by my Zia when I was a kid. Once, when I was a teenager, I set out to dust them all, and when I sat on the bed to pay them greater care, they all piled up on top of each other, their ankles breaking as do live horses in races. I salvaged half of them, perhaps, and my father, who cared so much not about things but, now I understand, about treasures of our childhood given to us by people we love, he chastised me harshly.

I have among my treasures tealeaf tins from London, from our family friend Greta, a small manual sewing machine from Moscow that she brought back for me on the train across the tundra, and fossils of shells I found in our fields in Cetona, that amazed me when I found them and that still amaze me for demonstrating so clearly that what once were oceans are now mountains and fields, deposited through millions of years which make my stuff seem all really silly, in truth.

But then I also have dishes from my Oma’s kitchen, on which she, tall, with long fingers and a tender smile, served our family dinners—kartoffelkloessen, spaetzle, apfelkucken—on our visits to their home and on our rare returns to the States, when she was so happy to see us and already so sad to see us go, always self-denying the way she was, the salt missing, the food not enough, nothing she did ever good enough, like my mother and then myself. And I have her linens too, brilliant white and beautiful, the likes of which I will never be able to afford in case you recommend I throw them out.

There is, too, a set of old portraits painted by Aram, my lover of ten years when we broke up a few years ago, that he left in my storage unit while I was in Italy, as a gift before he moved to California. There is a quizzical man, and another still, puzzled, and a woman, too, all wondering what is happening to them. They are human and alive and they connect me to him every time I see them there, in storage, hidden and waiting.

And my wedding dishes are there, too, hand-painted in Deruta, a set of dozens and dozens bought by all my friends in Cetona, and a Revolutionary War medal won by a quadruple-great grandfather of my father who fought against the British somewhere in the South, the part of my family that I have been eager to deny and forget. I have a silver bowl given to me for my wedding by Annie, a friend now lost who could not understand my divorce, or forgive me for it, and linen towels from Antonella, embroidered by her with flowers, as a gift to me, and my many, many dish towels, collected from all over, which I love for their everyday company in the kitchen. There is my grandmother’s silver, on which my father’s family ate for decades, and candle sticks and silver bowls I brought back from Mexico, lush and shiny, and all my photographs—from childhood to wedding to graduations to every place I have been.

And there is also a half of a small onyx coin, with atop a painted woman, which I split with my friend Lucia as teenagers in Cetona, promising to be friends forever.

And so we are, thank god.

Just telling about all of these things that I have collected, kept, dusted, moved, packed and unpacked and moved again all so lovingly makes my heart glad, mostly because they represent and remind me of my love for people and places I have had in my life.

Indeed, they are reminders of layers of self and of moments of life and of feelings had and shared and of friendships and loves made and lost, layers of life exuberant and joyful and romantic and joyous. Things nothing short of joyous that contribute wonder and beauty to my surroundings—and unless you care nothing about your surroundings, those things matter.

Of course, all of those things have spaces carved in my memory, and my memory preserves them and their meaning, like people. Nonetheless, they themselves are not voiceless. Their presence itself speaks. They speak of where I have been and remind me of where I wish to go; of the beauty with which I wish my life to be surrounded; the books unread that I wish to read; the thoughts and history of people never seen in parts of the world I will never travel to. They fill me with wonder and curiosity and energy and beauty and mystery, small material manifestations of an interior world ineffable and uncontainable.

To some degree, being without my things has been strengthening. My life has become simpler. For four years I have slept on the same two sets of sheets, dried myself with the same handful of towels, eaten with the same two forks, cooked in the same few  pans, all borrowed and not mine (and for which I am very grateful). All I have with me are a few dozen books I have purchased, my clothes, my art supplies, paintings I have painted in these past few years, and a few boxes of my father’s things, given to me after his death this year. I have little to dust or guard, and I feel free to think, uncluttered.

And yet—and I began to try to articulate this feeling when I read about the man and his family in the shelter in NY—being without my things now going on five years is in some way emptying, what I would describe as stripping of my identity and contributing to a haunting feeling of having lost myself somewhere along the way. It’s the feeling of my life having gone wrong and being less whole and stable and good. Which it is. Which I am.

In a way, not having my things destabilizes me, makes me lesser; takes away my belief in who I was and who I could be. It takes away my wholeness and deprives me of subtlety of being, my layers rolled into me silently and without footing. Even writing about it is hurtful and shameful. I wonder if I should say this at all.

I continue to hope—hope, our foolhardy crutch—that this will change, and I await the day when I will be in a place that is mine again, and when I can open my boxes and see my things again, and dust them and hold them and remember all that they mean to me.

And that, for me, will be Christmas again.

(This is an unedited and unpublished cut from The Girl from Borgo.)

One of the first violinmakers Dad met in Cremona was Piergiuseppe, a handsome twenty-something-year-old from Cremona with curly black hair and a relaxed, friendly demeanor. He lived down the street from us on Vicolo Pertusio with his wife, Luisella, and their baby daughter, Eva.

One day, when Piergiuseppe and Dad walked back from school together, Dad asked if he and Luisella knew of any children in the neighborhood Paul and I could play with. Of course, they said: Luisella had a young sister, Cinzia, and a little brother, Mauro, seven and nine respectively, and they lived in our same building, as a matter of fact. Our apartments faced each other over a common inner courtyard, and from our balcony, I later understood, I could see into their kitchen and hear their voices.

On Cinzia and Mauro’s first visit we stood and looked at each other speechless. Paul and I spoke no Italian, and Mauro and Cinzia no English. We stared at each other for a while, and Cinzia and I giggled a little, but shortly thereafter they left, without exchanging a word. A few days later my dad saw Cinzia again and he invited her to come back. She did, by herself. I was not feeling well, and my mom had spread a blanket on the floor in front of the French doors where I could read and play in the warmth of the sunlight. I had my six stuffed animals and dolls with me, and Cinzia came and sat by me, on the colorful plaid blanket. Somehow, we developed a wordless understanding, a code, and we took to each other immediately and simply.

Cinzia—dubbed Ciccio by her family, and henceforth by me—had thick, straight jet-black hair that reached the bottom of her back. Her mother insisted she keep it pulled back from her eyes with a fascia, a headband, which she wore at all times, in a rainbow of colors. She had dark-chocolate eyes and pale, cream-colored, flawless skin. She was skinny like me, about my height, and we had almost identical noses with a bump on the bridge.

Ciccio and I developed an epic friendship. In the span of weeks, we moved from not speaking at all to an intuitive form of communicating to being indivisible and like-minded collaborators up to no good. We did not go to the same school—her family had moved recently to Vicolo Pertusio, fortuitously for me!—so we spent our mornings apart, but we spent every other possible minute together starting right after lunch, downstairs in the vicolo, in my room, or at her house.

Ciccio’s mom, Grazia, was a full-time mother and a homemaker in her mid-forties. She was dark-haired and pale-skinned like Ciccio, with a fiery and nervous temperament. Ciccio’s dad, Carlo, in his early fifties, was the director of a bank; he was short and wiry, like a fighter, with a long rectangular face and square jaw, steel-rimmed glasses, and a severe disposition. In addition to Ciccio and Mauro, Carlo and Grazia had had two grown daughters, Pia and Luisella, then nineteen and twenty, who no longer lived at home.

Since Pia and Luisella had moved out to live with their respective boyfriends, Grazia’s mom had come to live with them. The nonna was an elegant old lady with bejeweled fingers and snow-white hair; she had a loud cackling laugh that showed off her long teeth, and she told a constant string of funny stories in Cremonese, a language all of its own and unintelligible to the non-local. Because nonna was old and had swollen legs, she walked slowly and with a shuffle, but she was vivacious, she dressed nicely, and she went out and about the city, meeting her friends in the park for ice cream.

The balcony of our apartment looked down into the Sartori’s kitchen, where every evening the family gathered like clockwork for dinner. The sounds of the daily ministrations in anticipation of dinner traveled through the courtyard and up to our apartment: Grazia cooking, the dishes clanking; Grazia yelling for Ciccio to come set the table; Carlo coming home from his job at the bank; Grazia yelling for Ciccio to summon her grandmother; then Carlo walking into the kitchen after having changed out of his business suit; nonna shuffling through the apartment and into the kitchen; then Grazia serving dinner and Grazia yelling for Mauro to get up from the couch and come to the table; and finally Pia coming in late from her job as a hairdresser and sitting down at the table with a breezy air. At last they would begin to eat and I could hear the clanking of the silverware and the sounds of people eating.

Sometimes dinner was quiet, but more often there was some kind of commotion over something–anything from Mauro’s poor table manners to Ciccio’s bird-like eating habits—and before dinner was halfway through, Carlo and Grazia were bickering back and forth in their unintelligible Cremonese. Finally, Carlo would rap his knuckles on the table and say his last word, and silence would fall as everyone finished eating. Then Grazia cleared the table with Ciccio’s help, sometimes still mumbling under her breath, and Carlo went back into their bedroom to smoke at the window.

I loved eating at Ciccio’s, which I did several times a week. Ciccio and I hated to part at the end of a play day, and dinner together was a simple and delicious way to stay longer. I loved the commotion of her household, and I loved Grazia and her food. Ciccio and I begged for her minestra in brodo, her riso in bianco, her passato di verdure, and the irreplaceable cotoletta alla Milanese, a staple in the house. The riso was creamy and delicious and sat just so in the plate, shiny and unmovable but soft; the cotoletta came slightly browned with lemon juice squeezed on top, and then, finally, always delicious potatoes.

After lunch Grazia pulled the shutters in the bedroom and Carlo rested before returning to his job at the bank. Ciccio and I played in her bedroom in the semi-darkness, quietly, the shutters pulled down against the sunlight and the heat, trying to not make noise. When the stores opened back up in the afternoon, and the clanking of the store’s rolling metal shutters shook the alleyway, Carlo went back to work and Grazia got ready to grocery-shop for dinner. I loved to stand behind her as she put on her makeup, watching her reflection in the folding mirror set on the kitchen table, as she pulled her hair back with a headband, opened her powder case, and powdered her nose and her cheeks, the powder rising and itching my nose. She applied her red lipstick with three soft strokes and then dabbed, then looked at me in the mirror and smiled.

After Grazia left to shop, Ciccio and I would go outside onto Vicolo Pertusio and out into the surrounding streets and alleyways to play. Piazza del Duomo, Via Solferino, the giardino pubblico—it was all our territory to roam. At the ages of six and seven or so we thought we owned this big city, though it was all within a few small blocks, and there we ran and hid and chased each other; we looked at our reflections in the store windows and made fun of each other and danced, sometimes dressed like twins. We roamed through the Galleria—a building erected during Fascism on the ground of Stradivari’s home and a row of violinmakers’ workshops—and looked in the storefronts on the corso. If we had 50 lire we got candy at the Sperlari store or a gelato at the Duomo, then we walked to the park to sit on a bench and watch the pigeons. Often we found Ciccio’s nonna there sitting with other old ladies feeding bread and corn to the birds. When we did not have 50 lire, we went to Nizzotti’s deli/grocery store at the end of the vicolo and got rosette with prosciutto cotto and chewing gum on credit.

—Dopo passa mia mamma a pagare, eh!—Ciccio would tell the lady at the counter, speaking with her melodious Cremonese inflection. My mom will come by later to pay!

At the time, shop owners let regular costumers do that, and soon I learned to do that, too, though my mom did not like it. Then we would sit on the step to the calzolaio’s store, Armando, the shoemaker, and eat our merenda—every Italian child’s sacrosanct snack—surrounded by the sweet smell of shoe polish and leather.

Sometimes, though, especially in winter, we stayed in and found mischief somewhere in the house. If the nonna was out and she forgot to lock her bedroom door, we dug through her room and her armoire looking for secret trinkets and jewels. La nonna lived in a back bedroom, off of Ciccio and Mauro’s room. She had an armoire full of furs and beautiful lacy dresses and a bathroom full of powders, potions, and perfumes in pretty dark bottles. Ciccio would gift me her grandmother’s things, and until recently I had several of her pilfered items. When we heard the front door open we’d quickly put everything back the way we found it and retreat quietly just as she shuffled slowly by and to her room, mumbling to herself.

Ciccio reminded me recently of her nonna’s sweet tooth and her habit of buying pastries and chocolates and hoarding them under her bed. She pulled her stash out at night, when the house was asleep, and the rustling of the wrapping paper would wake Ciccio, asleep in the next room. Every now and then Grazia would go clean under the bed and find piles of chocolates and trays of sweets.

—Te set ingurda, ma qualvolta te fet n’imbaras che te crepet!—Grazia warned her mother in Cremonese. You are gluttonous, but you’ll see that sooner or later you’ll get indigestion that will kill you! And it did, finally, some years later.

Ciccio and I played in my room, too, whose windows opened to one of Cremona’s main streets, Corso Mazzini. It was lined with elegant storefronts and businesses, and in the evening before dinnertime it bustled with people shopping, going to dinner or returning home from work.

One day Ciccio and I decided it would be fun to throw some water on the people walking below. From three floors up, who would possibly find us?

The first few times we bought balloons, filled them with water, and threw them out my bedroom window, diving to the floor in hysterical peels of laughter every time we hit a target. Then we escalated to a bucket. We went to the kitchen and filled it with water, then rising onto our tiptoes with all our strength we inched the bucket to the edge of the sill and tilted it outward. A river of water gushed on the heads below, soaking them.

Our building had no entrance on Corso Mazzini, so initially our victims could not understand where the water was coming from. But after we did this for several days in a row, a man armed with an umbrella found his way to Vicolo Pertusio and the front door of our building. He rang all the doorbells, including ours, but when my father answered the doorbell speaker he couldn’t understand what the man was saying and he went away.

In winter Cremona was cold and all windows were shut against the dampness of the Po. But in spring and summer Carlo and Grazia opened their large bedroom windows onto Vicolo Pertusio and Carlo would stand at the window, his elbows leaning against the window sill, smoking and looking out. When we played outside in the evening we could look up and see Carlo’s cigarette burning in the dark, and we knew to be vigilant.

Once, on a lazy summer afternoon when we were nine or ten—we were already living in Cetona and I was visiting for a few weeks—Ciccio and I went to the Upim, a department store just down the street from our house, and we decided to shoplift some candy. Taking turns playing guard, we stuffed our pants with so much candy that even the unobservant would have noticed. As we went to leave the store a woman stopped us.

—Dove pensate di andare voi due? —she said. Where do you two think you’re going?

—Venite con me!—she said sternly, guiding us by the shoulders into an elevator.  Come with me!

She took us to the store director’s office and there we were ruthlessly interrogated until we were both whimpering and crying and blaming one another.

—È stata idea sua! — It was her idea!

—No, è colpa sua! — No, it is her fault!

The director wanted our personal information but when I gave him mine he wouldn’t believe me.

—Dove sei nata?—he demanded. Where were you born?

—Chicago,—I said in Italian, of course. In Italian ci cago means I poop on it. That is what the man thought I was saying to him.

—Dove abiti?—he asked me. A Cetona, I said.

—Smettila di prendermi in giro! Smettila!—he screamed. Stop making fun of me! Stop it!

Finally Ciccio surrendered her home phone number—my parents fortunately did not have one—and Grazia came to get us at the store. After paying for the candy we had stolen, she walked us home in dead silence and warned us to be ready for when Carlo came home. That evening Ciccio got a solemn whipping with her father, but after I implored pitifully Carlo agreed to not tell my dad. I remain grateful to him to this day, though I have since confessed.

Ciccio and I looked forward to a lifetime together. It seemed possible then, even likely, right there in Vicolo Pertusio, playing in our skinny jeans. But it was not meant to be. It wasn’t long before Cetona had taken me in, and it would be thirty-three years before I saw Ciccio again.

Today at sundown I buried the remains of our father in an olive grove looking out onto Cetona.

I chose the place because I thought he would have liked to look out here, across the way to our old house and the town he so loved. It is the place he brought me as a child, and my brother, and my mother, our family, to be with him in the pursuit of his passions and sensibilities.

I have read in his notes, recently, since he died, about what moved him about architecture and building and music and landscape, and it makes sense thoroughly and deeply that part of him be here in this place where all of that came together into a single strand of his being.

Where materials and proportions, color and texture merge to form what he thought to be utter perfection to be lived individually and socially with much care.

Before our father died we talked at length as a family about what he wanted done of him. When we asked about the scattering or burying of his ashes he was puzzled as if it absolutely made no sense to him. He would be gone, he said. It did not matter.

And yet … it mattered to me, to all of us, and I think, in the end, to him, too.

Since he died in Eugene, Oregon, as a family we decided that part of him—the chapter of his second family and third child—would remain in the States, on the West Coast, maybe in the Pacific Ocean that he visited so happily. And so that is.

For our part, I transported the ashes of our father to Charleston, and now, here, to Cetona, where my brother Paul and I thought his other part should be.

It’s not about dividing a corpse; it’s about the observance of death reflecting the life and loves and passions one has lived, and our father certainly had many.

I like to think that he would approve of this, this very special place I chose for him, an olive grove—symbol of peace and unity—belonging to a dear friend where one day I also hope to rest. It sits almost exactly at the height of Gert’s house, Dad, and from here you can look down and to the right almost to our old house.

Behind and above you sits Monte Cetona, looking over you at night with its tiny solitary lights and its quiet, comforting presence. At sunrise and sunset, the light in this olive grove is pastel and soft and soothing, as you knew it, and at midday you rest sheltered in the shade of an olive tree, just feet away from a glorious fig tree you would like, whose handlike leaves you would like to draw. Before you are the arches and doorways and terraces and porticos and towers—the harmony—you so admired, and around you people will till and live in the landscape you so loved.

In leaving you there today I sat in the grasses beneath the olive trees and ran your ashes through my hands, Dad. I felt your thick black hair run through my fingers, your nails with the ridges I have, from Grandma; your hands so handsome, your intense brown eyes, your footsteps, your heartbeat, your brain, so alive. I held you in my palm, the gravel of the bones that supported you, your broad jaw, the bump in your nose, which all of us children of yours took from you, and your teeth, framed in your smile always full when honestly happy and not so much when not.

As I let your ashes fall under the olive tree I imagined your cheekbones rising in laughter, your head tilting back in happiness and marvel, and your spirit rising above and looking out.

Today, Dad, you are here, across the way from the place you chose to be at one time, and the place you chose for me, for us, and here I will visit you again, for sure, always.

Godspeed, Dad. May you have a good martini with Leonardo, shaken, dirty, with onions, as you liked it.

Always with love.

I imagine us sitting at our simple wooden table in our little kitchen with the window open to the view of Citta` della Pieve, or outside on the terrace, surrounded by the geraniums that my mother so lovingly planted, eating together. The good times were many, and some bad times too. It was life in its fullness with my father and my family.

Looking back today at pictures and images I have stored in my mind, I remember funny and fun things of my dad. He would stall our Renault 4  in the piazza waving at people — the Cetonesi looking at him like he was from Mars — and I would be so humiliated I would run for cover behind my friends … When I was a kid I was slightly and foolishly embarrassed that he did not speak Italian properly — how silly children are — while he worked to find his place in a new world.

My friends, conversely, and his, never minded, and they all put forth their best to understand my father, with affection and good humor. Everyone seemed to love him, and in fact, were always enriched by him.

And now he is gone, and I wish I could take his heart in my hand, or his hand, now, as an equal person, an adult, more or less of the same age, and thank him.

The truth is, I didn’t know how to be with him anymore. I had lost the habit of intimacy with my father.

When I saw Dad for Christmas, just a few weeks before he died, he was not feeling great. His cancer had begun to make itself felt, finally surging after a 15-month silent death sentence, and I didn’t know how to cope with it, the sickness that I knew would break his body down.

Anyway, one morning he was sitting at the head of the table where he usually sat, in the kitchen of his house in Oregon, looking out onto the woods and the city of Eugene, and after placing himself into his spot and me getting my coffee, he said, “Bird, would you sit with me for a while? I would like to tell you a story.”

His eyes searched mine and asked for something they never had, with a tenderness or vulnerability I had never known in him.

I sat facing him, full-haired and strong, though sallow in the face now, and he told me about his first time at the symphony with his parents — my grandparents — to hear Die Moldau of Smetana, and how that piece of music had forever changed his life. It was a beautiful story of his childhood that I had never known, and while he told it his eyes flashed and his smile blossomed. I listened to him with a smile on my face because the child in me related to the child in him, and simultaneously tears streaked my face because I understood that he was going to die and he understood it, too, most importantly, and that was part of why he was telling me all this. He wanted me to understand something about him that, in fact, I had not understood or even known.

In the following days after he told me that story I played the Smetana on my computer while sitting near him, while he wrote and kept his diary and grappled with his illness seeping in, and he looked at me and smiled. “Die Moldau,” he said, and he winked — to beauty, that is, and perhaps to childhood, too. Or maybe to understanding something about the child in him.

I replay in my mind the final stories of moments I had with my father, and the words ring strong and true, but the thing — one thing — that hurts me now is that I didn’t hold your hand, Dad. I looked at your hands, old and full of veins, and I didn’t know how to take them in mine anymore, as I once had without fear or barriers, the way we did on the streets in Cremona when you walked me to school. I had lost the ability to hold your hand somewhere along the years and the paths that took me away from you in my heart, the way life does with time and distance and adulthood.

I didn’t know how to touch you anymore but for the shortest of moments, though I caressed your face one day and rested the palm of my hand on your cheek, stubbly and gray, by then. I wanted my hand to stay there, and I wanted to feel your hair, and I wanted to put my hand over your hand and feel your heartbeat, but you would have been uncomfortable and I would not have wanted to be rejected by you.

I didn’t know how to manage the shallow struggle of your breath and the panic the sound created in me that caused me to run from the room in fear.

Then one day in the kitchen you said, Birdkins. would you give me a massage?

The request surprised me but pleased me more than anything could have. Dad sat on this stool in the kitchen and he was wearing a black sweatshirt, and I massaged his whole back and shoulders, broad and strong in spite of his illness. Dad moaned and groaned in relief and comfort, I think, releasing the sense of being old and untouched and also being in pain from cancer and sciatica and all sorts of things that happen to us when we are 85.

Dad closed his eyes and moaned and my step-mom laughed and said, ‘I want what he is having,’ and we all laughed, and I laughed and tears streaked my face because I knew that I was privileged to touch my father’s body one last time.

I knew inside of me that I would never see you again, yet I didn’t know how to be in your space anymore. I was skittish and shy and I did not extend of myself. I didn’t know how to look deeply in your eyes and to stay, to stay there in trust and openness. When I said goodbye I looked away, and I wonder now if you followed me with your eyes as I walked away, knowing it would be the last time you saw me.

Before you died I wrote you a letter which I never sent. I wanted you to be at peace, and me with you. If I had written you a letter just saying how wonderful you had been it would have been unfair to me, and if I had sent the one I wanted to send, it would have been unfair to you. So I sent nothing.

I wish I had understood how to strike the balance that was fair to me and to you and that honored us both in our love for each other.

Now, I cry not for the bad, but for the good that was not. For all that was not made of what existed. For all the happiness that was not lived, for the closeness that was not released, for the acknowledgments not made, the thanks not given, the tributes not paid, the compliments not proffered, the kindness not extended. The love withheld.

Mostly, I cry now for you being gone, exactly as you were.

The light has gone out. The candle is extinguished. And the darkness is silent.

Shortly after we arrived in Cetona and finished restoring our house, Dad settled part of the bill with the geometra—the draftsman of record—with a violin, one of the first he had built.

This geometra, Fabio Angiolini, famous in Cetona, a great and authentic Senese of generations, became a family friend and kept the violin through the years.

After I got married here in Cetona, and my parents had split, and my father had left violinmaking and returned to architecture, Fabio promised to give me this violin—because I had no instruments of my father’s—if and when I brought him my first-born child.

When the years went by and I did not have children, some years back Fabio modified the promise: He would give me Dad’s violin if and when I brought him my first book, published.

Then, a few months ago Dad died and the promise became more solemn for me and its fulfillment more urgent. Retrieving this instrument that Dad made some forty years ago was part of my mission on this trip.

Today I drove out into the glorious countryside of Siena to see Fabio and his wife, Laura, at their agriturismo, Miscianello. As promised, I took my book, The Girl from Borgo, now published, and in exchange Fabio gave me my father’s violin.

Thank you, Fabio, for this gift of infinite value.