Why Sicily?

It's early morning here. I've just hung out a load of laundry in the sunny, slightly cool morning air - there's a breeze, so it will dry fairly quickly, in time for us to pack it up and move on.

Everyone else is still asleep despite the fact that the early morning heat from the rising sun is streaming through the windows. I'll open the door quietly to let air in, hoping the animals won't hear it and come running. The dogs won't come in - they'll just stand at the door expectantly - but the cats will.

(And to answer the question posed below - there are two dogs and many cats here, living in harmony, it seems, except for one black and white cat that doesn't like anyone, and hisses at any creature that comes too close.)

I awoke this morning after a short dream about Michael - one of the few that I have had - and remembered with no effort, since I think about it all the time still, that today is five months.

I was reading TMZ yesterday (oh be quiet. Got to keep up with the news...) and they had a photo of Ryan O'Neal, noting what he said to the paps  about how he was feeling in the wake of Farrah Fawcett's death - "It's hard to believe."

Five months on, other things change. You are not ready to cry 100% of the time, you don't feel sick and frantic, but ...it is still hard to believe. I have no idea what it means. I still can't sort out Michael alive on earth, dead, and alive with God. It's still not computing. And I can't explain it any more than that.

For the first month after Michael died, I played word games of Facebook. Endlessly. Every time I sat down at the computer, I started a new one and just played and played, late into the night.

At some point in that, I started thinking about the summer. A summer with no plans for the boys and me, a summer in the apartment with no yard...a long summer. We don't have to stay here, I thought. So where could we go?

Since my first and only experiences with non-North American travel have been Italy, I naturally thought of that first, and just as naturally, thought of Tuscany and/or Umbria. But then just as quicky, I rebelled against that. Everyone goes to Tuscany and Umbria. They call one of them (I can't remember which - Tuscany, probably) the American Quarter.

What would be...different?

I have no idea how Sicily entered the picture, how it came into my head, but it did. And quickly the Facebook word games faded into the background - rather abruptly, actually, for I haven't touched Scramble or Word Twist since, and have no desire to  - and I started obsessively researching SIcily. Bought guidebooks even before I'd booked one ticket.

Some people drink, I played Facebook games and read about Sicily.

To be honest, part of it involved feeling the need to do something Michael would never do,and he wouldn't have. There were a lot of other places he would go first before he'd ever think about Sicily. He was not big on European travel, period, and I don't think there's any way I could have gotten him here. Of course, I would not have had a desire or even thought about coming here myself if I weren't in this situation.

 A need to force myself into another room of existence in this world, one in which there were no souvenirs of our life together, in which I would not constantly, every minute, be saying "Oh, if only Michael could be here and see this."  I thought that if I could go somewhere that he would have resisted tooth and nail, that reflex might be tempered and not every experience I had during the course of a day would be framed by sadness and regret.

(It hasn't exactly worked that way, incidentally.   But that's another chapter.)

And, I learned, Sicily has beaches, and castles and a volcano. And puppets.

The next question involved getting here. Rome was the natural first thought, but tickets from the US to Rome are always more expensive than other European destinations, and even more so in the summer. So I started my devotion to AirfareWatchdog and happened upon this $450 fare from Charlotte to Barcelona. Throw in our tix from BHM-CLT and then BCN-PMO, and we're in Europe in the summer for about 650 apiece.

(You might ask about my son in Rome. At the time I was planning this, he was in flux about whether or not he was going to be staying in Rome or returning to the US this summer, so I didn't build in time with him on this trip - and he was in the US for part of the time anyway, so I saw him a bit then. As it turns out, he's staying for a few more months. With a falling dollar, staying here and making money in Euros for a while longer actually makes more economic sense as he saves and gets ready for his next step)

So I booked the BCN tickets, and then sat back and attempted to make myself stop obsessing about Sicily. You don't have to go to Sicily, I said. You can stay in Spain. Provence. You could go to Portugal. Sardinia. You could go to Venice for a bit. Majorca. I had a friend in high school whose father was an opthamologist and whose family spent a month in  Majorca every summer. It struck me at the time as the most exotic, exciting thing ever, and it still resonates in my head as a faint object of desire: Go to Majorca!) We could ride trains into Germany or something. That would excite some people in this family.

But...I eventually came back to Sicily. I had invested a great deal of time in researching things, and didn't want to have to turn my sights elsewhere. I figured there was a reason God had planted the notion of SIcily in my head and heart, and I was going to trust that and see what happens.

Which, as I keep saying, is about all you can do in life.

Some people have casually said, as we comment back and forth about this, "I'm jealous. I envy you." I warned my Facebook friends way back when not to say anything like that or else they would be on the receiving end of a quick comment like, "Don't be. Your husband's alive. I'd trade situations." And that would be awkward.

Such are the complicated situations that bring us to other situations in life, positive and negative, hopeful and painful. They all bring us to where we are.

So far, it has proven to be a good decision. It has been good, interesting, pleasant. I honestly cannot call it "fantastic" or "great" because those levels of emotion or engagement have not yet re-entered my experience. They just haven't. But "good" and "glad to be here" and "grateful to God for this" have.

Prego.