You're Gonna Miss This

“You’re gonna miss this. You’re gonna want this back. You’re gonna wish these days hadn’t gone by so fast,” the voice on the radio croons. I look around on the floorboard of the passenger seat for the crushed box of Kleenex that usually floats around down there, but it is nowhere in sight.

“Clayton, is there a box of Kleenex back there?” I say, my voice cracking.

He pulls his hand in from the open window, pausing whatever game he was playing with his fingers in the wind.

“Mom, why are you crying?”

“Just this song,” I manage.

“But why are you crying?” he persists, laughing at me a little.

“Because you kids are growing up so fast. Because life just passes you by...” I choke out one cliche after another. “Because,” I manage finally. “Because I really enjoyed doing this with you. Having this time together.”

We are listening to Kiss Country because Clayton has asked for music, and almost every other station came in buzzing with static or not at all. And also because country music just seems right, since we are rattling down a potholed road, with the windows down and the trees flashing by.

We are driving home after Clayton’s first overnight backpacking trip. I wanted to take him last year, but somehow the summer passed us by. And as this year’s summer days dwindled, I was determined to make it happen, even if it meant squeezing it in between my Tuesday morning class and my Wednesday evening one.

Really, the timing is perfect; the woods couldn’t feel emptier. With three people a day moving to the Asheville area, most of whom share an enthusiasm for the natural world, this in itself is something to appreciate. I have pulled the car onto the shoulder of the road, not willing to risk getting us stuck in the large puddle that has formed at the entry to the small parking area. I have not backpacked since the kids were born, and already I can tell that my risk threshold has plummeted. I used to spend night after night alone in the wilderness, never once contemplating danger of any kind. Now, with Clayton in my care, worries whittle away at my brain. What if he has an allergic reaction to iodine? What if he falls off a log and breaks his leg and I have to carry him out? What if the backpacking stove explodes and I get hideously burned and he is scared?

But the empty parking area is comforting in its way; at least I can rule out the worrying scenarios involving other humans. And Clayton’s excitement is contagious.

“Are we backpacking?” he asks as soon as we pull on our packs.

“Yes!”

The weight on my hips feels wonderfully familiar. Clayton’s Spiderman backpack bobs along in front of me. His backpack holds the following: a change of clothes; his robot pajamas; a stuffed dragon with an LED flashlight in its belly; a few plastic zombies; a mystery novel; his favorite stuffed animal, Pooh Bear; a mini Where’s Waldo book; and a small waterbottle.

I have already jettisoned from his load his treasured purple blanket, a pillow pet, three hardcover picture books, and a couple of other stuffed animals.

“Dee Dee gave me her cat,” he tells me now as we walk along. “So tonight I can hold it and remember her.”

I hesitate before admitting that I have taken it out. “I”m sorry. I didn’t want your pack to be too heavy,” I apologize.

“It’s okay,” he says. “I put it back in.”

It rained heavily as we drove in, despite the dry spell that has left much of the county thirsty for a summer storm. But blue sky is peeking through the trees as we start out, and I am relieved to have missed the storm. Still, the woods drip with moisture.

“I guess they don’t call this a rainforest for nothing,” I say.

“Is it really?” he asks. 

“I’m pretty sure.”

“Where are the monkeys?”

“It’s not that kind of rainforest.”
“Is this a wetland?”

I laugh. “No. Although it is wet.”

“Aw. I want it to be a wetland.” Clayton is taken with anything Floridian. He likes the wetlands, and the palm trees, and of course his Baba and Mimi. He’s going to move there when he’s big, he says.

The woods seem particularly misty and magical this afternoon. Wisps of steam rise from the trunks of trees and fallen logs, and the ferns along the sides of the trail are a vibrant green. Clayton looks around appreciatively.

“I think leprechauns must live here,” he says. “Don’t you think?”

It feels like a gift to experience the woods as he does, their mystery and magic so intact. I have forgotten that I used to see the forest like that, too, imagining each secret hollow as the home of some enchanted creature. It is another cliche, I know, but it is one of the joys of having children, to be reminded of that.

Clayton hardly stops talking as we hike. He tells me about the Goosebumps book he is reading with his dad, and of the Goosebumps book he wants to write when we get back. He is disappointed that we haven’t brought along any paper, or we could begin work on it tonight.

“I go backpacking with my stuffed animals,” he tells me after a while.

“Pooh is in your backpack right now,” I say, misunderstanding. “So he’s backpacking, too.”
No, he explains, that’s not what he meant. He tells me how he takes his stuffed animals backpacking, feeding them blueberries and grapes from the plants in the garden, making them little beds in the grass when they are tired. It is so sweet my throat aches.

“Is the backpacking I do with my stuffed animals just pretend?” he asks after a pause, sounding worried.

“No!” I say, sounding more vehement than I meant to.

“Why did you say it like that?” he wants to know.

“Like what?”

“So seriously.”

“Because it isn’t. It’s just another kind of backpacking.”

When we come to the first stream we must cross, I am all nerves.

“Careful! The rocks are slippery! Hold my hand!” But he springs from rock to rock effortlessly.

The next creek is bigger. There’s a two-log bridge, but the railing has fallen off and the logs look treacherously slick. We cross on the rocks, instead.

“Wow,” I say, watching him bound across. “You’re really good at that!”

He regards me seriously. “It’s easy, Mom,” he says, bending down to point the rocks out to me. “Just put your foot there, then there...”

After a while, he starts to get tired, so I take the water bottle from his pack and carry it for him. Then we stop for a snack.

“I sort of wish I was a poor person,” he says seriously, picking the cereal pieces out of a bag of trail mix. We talk about that for a while. I try to explain what poverty really means.

“I mean,” he explains. “I just like this.”

He means the simplicity of it, and I nod, understanding. There is something so refreshing about the lack of things. Everything we need is on our backs, even Where’s Waldo and a handful of zombie toys.

Clayton is very concerned with the semantics of things. When, at last, we stop to set up camp, he is worried.

“Is this a campsite?” he asks. “I thought when you were backpacking, you didn’t stay in a campsite.”

The spot is perfect. It’s an open area off the trail and next to a creek, with a little gravelly beach. Just upstream, the water deepens under a tunnel of mountain laurel. But we are clearly not the only people to have stayed here. A fallen log has been rolled in for a bench, and there’s a small fire circle.

“It’s not a campsite,” I say carefully. “It’s just a place to camp.”

A few minutes later, coming back from refilling my bottle in the creek, I gush, “This is such a great campsite!”

“You said campsite!” he says, catching me out. “Is this a campsite?”

We have some version of the same conversation at least another five times. Finally, I lose my patience. 
“Should we take down the tent and go somewhere else?” I say.

“I want to stay here,” he admits. “I just don’t want it to be a campsite.”

We wade up the creek together, and Clayton swims briefly in the “swimming hole.” But the evening is not warm, and the water under the mountain laurel is cold and very black.

“Are there snakes in here?” he asks.

“Oh no,” I say, although I am relieved when he gets out.

We find a perfect leprechaun home under a tree, and again he laments the lack of paper. He would have written him a note.

The forest feels cool and damp, and Clayton huddles in the camp chair, eating his broccoli and quesadilla.

“Can we make a fire?” he asks.

I am dubious. There is plenty of firewood, but every stick is sopping wet. I have one small piece of fire starter. But my Girl Scout training has stood me well; I wasn’t the best firebuilder in three states for nothing. 

“Were you really?” Clayton asks me, impressed.

“Well, I won a fire-building competition at a tri-state encampment once.” 

Miraculously, I coax the fire to life. It is small and steamy; I teach Clayton how to blow into it from down low, and together we nurse it, feeding it tiny wet twigs until it is big enough for s’mores. Clayton eats three, farts, and announces, “I have to poop.”

We head off into the forest, shovel in hand. I had been relatively sure this would not happen; surely he would wait for the conveniences of home.

When I judge we’ve gone far enough, I start to dig a hole for him.

“I’m going to poop in a hole?” he asks. He is enthralled, joyous. “This is so fun!”

Only this afternoon he has complained about pooping: “I just want to get out of the bathroom and I have to keep wiping!”

Here, there is no bathroom caging us in, only the gorgeous green woods all around us, no other human being for miles.

A memory washes over me. I am camping by a river in northern California. It is my day off from the camp where I worked for a few summers, and I am alone. I remember scrambling up the steep hillsides, trying to get the requisite distance from the water. It is exhilarating. To be so young, yet to feel so grown-up and alone, with life reduced to such a wondrous simplicity. I’m sure I wrote a poem about it once.

“I’ve always liked pooping outside, too,” I say. We are both grinning.

“I hope I have to poop again!”

Afterwards, we return to our game of war, both groaning at how endless it is. Finally, we give up and switch to Crazy Eights.

The first card on the discard pile is a Jack. “Now, you have to put a jack,” I explain. “Or an eight.”

He discards a jack, and, with no jack of my own, I start to draw cards.

“I don’t think this is right,” he says. “Like this it would just be jack, jack, jack...”

We are both laughing. Finally I remember how to play. I can’t remember the last time I played cards. Don is so much better at this part of parenting. He is always playing games with them: Candy Land, Spider Eights, Don’t Break the Ice. He has even taught Clayton how to play chess. It’s difficult for me to be so focused on the kids, unless we are reading or out of the house. Too often, it is “Just let me finish this, and I’ll...” But there is always something else to do. Now, with our small bag of food dangling from a tree and our teeth already brushed, there is nothing else to do. It is a wonderful feeling just to sit and play cards with my son.

The light is dimming, and we tell ghost stories with Clayton’s dragon flashlight shining up from our chins. When my story ends, I ask him if he has another. He has bragged to his sisters that he’s going to stay up really late, and I have resolved not to enforce a bedtime tonight.

“Actually, I’m sort of tired,” he says.

We climb into our sleeping bags, and I make Clayton a pillow out of his clothes.

“You do strange things when you’re backpacking,” he says. “You poop in holes, you use dirt for soap, you make pillows out of clothes.”

I tell him a story about Dee Dee, how last night she was crying from her bed that her pillow wasn’t fluffy. So Don fluffed it up and turned it over, and she said, “Ahhh, as fluffy as a mouse’s bottom!”

When we finally stop giggling, we read a little of A Spy in the White House. But we are both tired, and it is ridiculously cozy inside that tent.

As we hike out the next day, we leave the trail to clamber down to a swimming hole at the base of a waterfall. It is cool, and we have not yet shaken the chill of the morning. But Clayton swims all the same. Like his Dad, he has his mental checklist: tell ghost stories with a flashlight shining on our faces, check. Roast marshmallows, check. Swim in the creek, check.

Afterwards, he is daunted by the steep climb back up to the trail.

“Just grab this tree,” I tell him. “It’s like a jungle gym. And you’re an ape.”

“I’m an ape!” he says, as if suddenly remembering, and in another second he is up.

“Climb up a cliff, check,” he says.

The best part is how Clayton points things out to me as we hike.

“Mom, look over there!” he says again and again, pointing to a particularly lovely spot of woods or stretch of creek. As I look at whatever he has seen, I am overcome with gratitude. He is like my personal coach for mindfulness.

“Pooh’s from this forest,” he tells me, seriously. “I’ll show you his house when we get to it.”

And soon enough, there it is, a little patch of grass on the side of the trail, with a tiny little log for a bench and a miniature sapling for a tree. Clayton sets him down in it for a moment, and then makes him walk along the trail.

“Look, Mom! Pooh’s hiking!” he says.

Maybe it is because Clayton seems so big now that this tugs at my heart the way it does. He is just so unself-conscious in his love for his little boy things, so serious in his understanding that they live in a world of their own, a world he has the privilege of taking part in. It is so sweet it makes my heart ache.

And so, I am well primed for You’re Gonna Miss This as we drive the gravel road towards home.

“Mom, why are you crying?” he asks again, grinning at me.

“Because I’m nuts,” I say, laughing at myself, too. But still, I think he understands.

Signora?

The first time I went to Italy I was just a few months past my nineteenth birthday. A college friend and I took the overnight train from Barcelona to Rome, arriving at the station bleary-eyed and minus my friend’s camera bag, which had been stolen from her lap while she slept. (Incredibly, she had found the camera itself dumped in a tiny bathroom a few cars down.) Outside, we tried to take the bus to the hostel that we’d read about in our tattered copy of Let’s Go, Italy!, but the driver shook his head fiercely at the liras we held out to him. That’s great, we thought, clamoring aboard with our enormous packs. Italian buses must be free! We cheerfully rode the buses without paying for two days before some fellow tourists informed us of our mistake: you had to buy the ticket before you got on the bus.

Travelling in Italy opened my eyes in a way I had never experienced before. It was not my first time out of United States; I’d been to England, where my brother and sister and I laughed that our British cousins said “tea” for “dinner” and “pudding” when they meant “dessert.” But to set foot in a country where I understood nothing but grazie and bellissima, where the landscape seemed something out of a fairytale, where simply walking down the street made me feel more beautiful than I had in my entire life... Italy was a different sort of awakening. Surely, then, too, hundreds of foreign tourists must have milled around me, but they were not what I saw. The rustic looking pizzeria near the Fontana di Trevi was not an over-priced tourist trap; it was the real Italian deal. I climbed clock tower after clock tower, the red-roofed panoramas nearly pushing my heart out through my chest. This was Italy, and I was in love. I left ten days later determined to make her mine.

And I did. A year and a half later, I arrived again in Siena in February, with three semesters of Italian under my belt and my suitcase lost somewhere between New York and Florence. I spent three nights shivering in the frigid medieval apartment I shared with three other American students before the suitcase finally arrived and I piled my warmest clothes on top of the thin blanket that covered my bed.

Every morning when I left the apartment for the university, stepping out onto the narrow, stone-paved street, my heart rose into my throat. Was this really my life? I felt half-choked by the excitement of what the day would hold. A short semester later, I was just beginning to feel at home. Encouraged by my parents, I took a leave of absence from college and found an apartment just outside the city walls with three Italian students.

It was there I learned how to enjoy Italian coffee, how to use a bidet, how to appreciate the almost-crunch of pasta cooked al dente. We cleaned the bathroom thoroughly at least four times a week and set the table for our breakfast of hot milk and cookies before we went to bed. I made lists of new words only to find that a few weeks later I knew them without having once glanced at the list. I became best friends with Andrea, a quiet, intelligent boy who cared enough about what I had to say that my Italian blossomed, my journals filling with the beautiful rhythm of my second tongue. I borrowed a bicycle from another friend-- a beautiful gay boy from Sardinia who wouldn’t come out of the closet until years later-- and spent long afternoons riding around Tuscany’s rolling hills. I played hours of chess with Andrea in our favorite cafe, kissed a smooth-skinned soldier under an olive tree, walked home more than once in the pre-dawn, the air outside the bakery already sweet with the smell of baking bread.

* * *

A year ago, when Don took all three kids to visit his family in Alabama and Georgia, and I was left with a quiet house and some time on my hands, I finally wrote a long over-due email to Chiara, the one Italian roommate with whom I’d forged a lasting friendship. When are you coming to Italy, she wanted to know. It was seven years since I’d last seen her, when Don and I had travelled through Milan on our way to our honeymoon in Slovenia. And although I had truly meant only to reach out to an old friend, the seed was planted... When was I going to Italy? I ordered a collection of Italian short stories to brush up on my Italian and started scheming.

Still, I couldn’t even think of going without feeling selfish. When the twins were little and still nursing, I had often fantasized about a weekend-- even a day-- to myself. I needed it. I deserved it. But the children were so much easier now. My desperation gone, the thought of a week to myself felt extravagant and self-indulgent. And even though I had my own money saved, I balked at the idea of spending so much on a ticket when we were economizing all we could at home.

And then, of course, there was the obvious: whatever time I spent in Italy would mean Don flying solo at home. True, I had solo-parented for equally long stretches of time, but it had always been when we were travelling and my parents or my sister were there to lend a hand. But my rock-star husband insisted that he “wasn’t scared.” In fact, he hardly seemed daunted. When a friend reminded me over dinner one night, “You can’t take it with you,” I made up my mind. I was going to Italy.

* * *

Chiara and her husband live in Rome now, with their two-year-old son Mattia and a baby girl on the way. They live near the center of the city in a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment with a narrow balcony and marble floors. It is spotless. Everything is white-- the walls, the floor, the kitchen cabinets-- and there is not a mark or a fingerprint anywhere. I can’t help but think of my own home, with its muddy floors and sticky cabinets, and feel ashamed.

I have arrived with two guide books checked out from the library at the last minute and no plans. At home, everyone kept asking me this:“What are your plans?” To speak Italian, to eat Italian, to pretend to be Italian... this was all I had in mind. I haven’t come to sight-see. And yet, how can I be in Rome and not sight-see? On Monday, Attilio gives me a ride to the Fontana di Trevi on his scooter on his way to work at the bank. We squeeze past cars, speed around round-a-bouts, weave through creeping traffic. He points out monuments and buildings; I take in all the suit-clad men lined up on their motolinos as they make their way to work. With my helmet on no one can see my face, so my fantasy of being Italian is holding up just fine. I’m just another girl on the back of a bike, zooming through the streets of Rome.

Ten minutes later, after Attilio has dropped me off and I’ve wandered over to see what I can of the famous fountain, now almost totally under reconstruction, I know I have to let go of the fantasy, at least for now. I think of Don saying, “What’s wrong with looking like a tourist if I am one?” I sit down in a piazza and study my map.

An hour later, I enter a cafe and order my favorite Italian coffee drink, a latte macchiato, the only one that I have yet to see in an American coffee shop. While I’m waiting, I overhear one of the baristas say, “What is the signora having?” and that first time, it catches me by surprise, to hear that I am signora now, not ragazza or signorina. I think of my eighty-year-old grandmother saying to me once, “You feel just the same on the inside.” I look at my face in the bathroom mirror as I leave and wonder when I became signora. Because Gran was right; I feel just the same on the inside.

Except, of course, that now there are three pieces of my heart walking around on their own two feet, more than four thousand miles away. When I think of them, my heart aches, so mostly, I don’t. My time here is like a latte macchiato, mostly the sweet milk of utter freedom, marked just a little by how much I miss my children.

Near the end of my trip we go to Tivoli one evening, a small hill town near Rome. We eat panini in a piazza and then go inside Villa d’Este, a grand Renaissance villa with a spectacular garden filled with fountains. The sun sets over the countryside below, and golden lights illuminate the fountains. It is Attilio’s first time here, and he fairly bursts with pride. “Italy should be able to live on places like this!” he says. Chiara’s eighteen year old cousin declares she’s found the place where she wants to get married; now she just has to find a boyfriend. I nod in agreement. This place is magically beautiful, quintessentially romantic. I long for Donald and for my family.

Before I left Asheville, when I told an older lady who takes my gym class that I was going to Italy to celebrate my fortieth birthday, she said, “What a great idea! You should do that every decade!” As my days in Italy dwindle, I latch onto this idea. I’ll be back when I’m fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty. Divvied up like that, into just four remaining visits to Italy, the rest of my life suddenly seems frighteningly short. I have to remind myself that I’m still-- hopefully-- in the first half.  I mention as much to my friends, and Attilio sighs. He is a bit melancholy at times these days, worn down by the daily routine of work and parenting and maintaining a spotless house.  Yes, he admits, but the second half will be the harder half, since our bodies will inevitably begin to fail. I know he’s right, but somehow I don’t see it that way. Sure, it’s hard for me to look in the mirror these days without cringing a little at the lines on my face. Still, at every race or triathlon I do, there are scores of older men and women, often finishing ahead of me. I choose to believe that my own body won’t hold up any differently. And when I think of my first years in Italy, with all the youthful folly and self-searching that they held, I’m sure I’d rather be forty than twenty, rather signora than signorina after all.

Spending the week in Rome alone reminds me how little my pleasures in life have changed. My best times are spent on Attilio’s twenty-five year old mountain bike, riding alone down an ancient Roman road one day, risking my life in the city traffic the next. When I reach my destination on the bike or make it home again, I am jubilant. I look at churches and mosaics, monuments and fountains, and I appreciate them as I always have. But my favorite moments in Italy are spent meandering down the green paths of secluded villas and exploring the lonely remains of Ostia’s fallen city. You always liked the green places, says Chiara over dinner, remembering me on Carlo’s bike. 
We are both struck by how little we have changed. “Sei proprio uguale,” were Chiara’s first words to me when I got off the plane. You’re exactly the same. In the eight years since I’ve seen her, I have experienced the most drastic transformation of my life: I am now a mother. I feel changed. Still, I know what she means. Chiara has a huge baby belly, strands of gray in her thick black hair, and a lovely, high voice she uses only when talking to her son. But she is still my Chiara-- still patient, clear-hearted, generous, and kind. On my last morning in Rome we drink our hot milk together at the small kitchen table, both in our pajamas. The pan of brownies I made for her yesterday are almost gone, and I smile as she cuts herself another piece. We could almost be in our little apartment on Via delle Luglie in Siena, so many years ago. I smile again, thinking how this evening I can I tell my children that in Italy you can eat brownies for breakfast. Then Mattia calls to Chiara from the bedroom. “I’m coming!” she calls, and she goes to him.