23 Days...

Four guests, three times to Rome, two times each to Capri, Positano, and the Cuma ruins, one trip to Venice...and now, a lonely house. My aunt and uncle flew home yesterday, so we now resume our everyday life, which is much like our everyday life back in the States - except for things like the driving, food, language, house, hot water, electricity, shopping, and scenery. Our time with our friends, then family, was as busy as we'd anticipated, but so very fun. Even small things, such as walking down to the piazza for a gelato, became adventures.

I'm once again sitting in the Glass House, and the scent of lemon blossoms fills the air in here. Our tiny, four season lemon tree is thriving. The smell soon dissipates as we open the windows to let in the cooling breeze, but I look forward to those first few moments of entry, when nature's perfume reminds me of all that I love about living here. The Glass House has come into its own at last, and thankfully, since it's the thing that sold us on the house. We took one step on the roof terrace almost seven months ago, looked at each other for a beat, looked back out at Capri in the distance, then looked at the realtor and said, "We'll take it." The Glass House languished, unloved and unattended, for months. I keep hearing tales of the hot, miserable summer, so now I'm in a race against the weather to enjoy this little retreat while I can. Now that our time, too, has changed (a week or two after the U.S. time change), we'll begin eating dinner up here, perhaps reviving our Key West tradition of a cocktail hour, then reading until the sun sets. We do not have a west view, so for us, the light slowly fades to dark rather than one final, gorgeous, blaze of glory. I am looking forward to a few days of inertia, where my movements will consist only of trips downstairs to refill my teacup.

Next week begins my long slog through over a 1000 photographs. No matter how many times I promised myself that I would organize the photos daily, regardless of how late it was or how tired I was, I still let them build up. Some lessons are never learned.