A memorable purchase

Yesterday I went to the Vatican. I can barely believe it’s true. In fifty years from now I am sure I will still be in shock. Due to the shock of so many sights in one day, I think it might take me a few days to compose what I want to write about my experiences in St. Peter’s Basilica, the Sistine Chapel, the museum, etc. So for now I thought I would share a short piece I wrote today in my travel writing course. The assignment was to choose and object and describe it for the first part. Next we were to use that object to lead our writing into a narrative or story that in the end somehow was a visible connection to the original object. Make sense? Well here is the piece I ended up writing in the ten minute period we were allotted. I hope you enjoy it and I will try to post about the Vatican as soon as I can begin to wrap my mind around it. Ciao!

[Last Saturday when we did not go to Bamarzo to the Monster Gardens, I ended up spending the day exploring in Viterbo. One of the exciting discoveries I found was the local flea market that apparently shows its face every Saturday in the town center. I could not resist from a bit of shopping and the object mentioned below is one such object I bought.]

Shouting in my ear a woman pushes around me, flattening my body against the table overflowing with winter coats: leather, fleece, wool, fur. The three Euros sign swings like a hypnotizing pendulum as my gaze drops on a caramelized cloth swimming in a sea of black. The coat’s soft material stretches toward my knees with matching buttons running across the chest. The wide “Made in Italy” collar will protect my neck from the Italian chill. Reaching into the front pockets IO find a stack of train tickets, used, from the year 2003. With these tickets in my hand and the coat’s molasses scent which reaches my nose every time I move, I am transported on the train of time to a kitchen of my childhood.

In my great grandmother’s kitchen the sweet smell of dessert wafted into the den where my sisters, my cousin and I sat, trying our hardest to behave. Mixed with the sweet baking smells was an unknown smells to the young in the room: age. The leather chairs groaned underneath us as we watched a recorded football game on the fuzzy television. The adults knew none us wanted to crowd around the television but what else were they to do with four rowdy adolescents in such a place, delicate with the passing of time. Every intake of breath was felt as a disturbance to the balance of my great grandmother’s home where everything is marked with the stamp of time. The time before my great grandfather passed, the time before she would move away from this home in the sunny valley to her summer home in the mountains, and lastly with the time before she passed. In those hushed afternoons at G.G.’s house, I never thought to have a conversation with her in the warm kitchen about the days she spent in this old house. Would she have listened to my five year old questions? What were your favorite memories? Your worst? What’s your favorite color? Do you like frogs?

Train tickets in hand, I wish I had been the one to use them in 2003 to ask my great grandmother everything that had been shushed, out of respect, from me. A million opportunities drowned in the rapids of time. I pay the man behind the mountain of coats three Euros and move on. With the tickets clutched tightly in my hand and the smell of molasses keeping me company in my chilly Italy town, I find myself far away, unreachable by train, from those I still have time to ask my questions.