...it never leaves you. I was eleven when I came back to the states where everyone called home, but where I'd only lived for around a year when I was a newborn. And then I read these travel books when I can't travel, and even about places I've never been--this is from Frances Mayes's Every Day in Tuscany--I find these little nuggets of wisdom that still apply.
I miss it, and by now, it's been so long I feel like it was something I read about, something dear to me a long time ago, like Narnia. But I also know that it's a real place, where countries are smaller and have so much history, and aren't all burning hot all the time.
There's a paragraph before this passage about this idea that if you live "inside te sound of the bells", you belong to the place. There aren't any bells here, and part of why I wanted to live in St Augustine in Florida was because it did have bells--it was as close to something European as I could find. But St Augustine was drowning in tourists and the summers were killing me. Up here, in the winter, I can see why so many Scots and Irish and Germans moved up here, and my sense of self matches the sense of place better, but the city is shaped wrong and the culture is wrong. I'm still looking for my way back to that balance little towns in Europe and UK have.
I know I'm romanticising--but I'm also yearning, wanting to go back.
Where do you ache for?
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