Family. Home. What is left after parents are gone and you set out to find your life in the terrain that opens around you?

I have returned for my annual writing retreat at The Big Six Country Club, our family cabin in the Sandhills of Nebraska. The book I write unfolds before me. Writing memoir is the act of making sense of your life, and I am in the heart of making sense of the last years as my mother became ill and then died, and the choices I made in those months surrounding that loss. Once again I am reminded, as I craft sentences and jockey events into scenes, that it is through storytelling that we invent our understanding of what it all meant.

Here I am with brother Billy who has come up to the cabin for a weekend visit, to do what we had been putting off for over a year, the spreading of my mother’s ashes. In a divine moment of surprise, a neighbor friend showed up as we were returning to the yard of the cabin. We had just walked back from The Point, a piece of land with a view of the north end of the lake and the marsh, a place our mother loved. The neighbor walked into the yard hoisting a camera. She’d had a notion, she said, to walk over to The Big Six and capture an image of the brother and sister who own it.

Life at this old place of memory is full of such divine moments.

Five hours via train and express bus operated by Deutsche Bahn Railways and I was in Prague. A quick weekend dash to the East from the Village of Schwaebisch Hall where I have been submerged in German. Sometimes I can not keep my sentences straight in my journal. A perfectly fine English thought comes out half German. My professors would be pleased . . . . But in Prague all that study was useless. It was like falling into a fairy tale and discovering everyone speaks some fantastic language the key to which is just beyond reach. And then, as if in dream, I awoke again in Deutschland less than twenty-four hours later jostling along on a train, raindrops trailing down a darkened window.

Photos posted November 13, 2010

April 17, 2010

I am sitting in a wifi cafe in Florence. These are not nearly as common in Italy as in America.

I am freezing.

I had forgotten how cold cities constructed of ancient stone can be. They retain the cold, reflect the cold. I am wearing layers and still chilled to the core.

I’m supposed to rave about the sites of Europe, right? But the fact is traveling is full of minor inconveniences that often become so big they don’t seem minor—like I’m so cold I can’t get warm even under four blankets and a quilt at the hotel, i.e. a convent turned hotel. That translates into centuries of old stone, cold old stone.

A high point though is the garden, a square of pristine quietude in the heart of the city, wisteria vines tangled above walks, trunks the size of trees, blooms hanging low perfuming the gentle green of an early Florentine spring . . .