Works - Coins in the fountain: a memoir of Rome

THE CELEBRATIONS TO MARK the new millennium were over and it was time to leave Rome.

My husband, Glenn, and I sat on the sofa while the movers carefully packed our last purchases and remaining clothes in layer upon layer of white paper. It was the final act at the end of our second tour in Italy, one that lasted six short years. The rest of our material goods were already in a shipping container waiting to be transported home, a concept that after so many years in Italy had taken on a somewhat uncertain meaning. Geographically it was to be a small town near Seattle, but in my heart I knew home would always remain Rome. We now favored pasta over potatoes, stylish clothes and strappy sandals (for me, anyway) instead of gray fleece and tennis shoes, and Vino Nobile di Montepulciano rather than beer. Our conversation was peppered with Italian words when we couldnt recall the English equivalent, and visits to our once and future Pacific Northwest home were remembered for the dreary weather and excruciatingly slow drivers.

My contract as a human resource manager for the United Nations World Food Programme was completed and family beckoned. Glenn was content to give up the charms and challenges of Italy for a more settled life, but I was anxious. Losing my friends, work, and country, however temporary it had all been, was a large dose of change to manage at one time. Already starting the transition, we moved out of our home for the last six years when the rental contract expired a month earlier. We were now perched in an apartment on the Aventine Hill, house-sitting while the regular renters were on leave in Quebec.

When the movers departed they presented us with a bottle of prosecco in thanks for the business. While we sipped we tried to look into a cloudy crystal ball (in reality our smudged wine glasses) in a vain attempt to see the future. We soon gave up, turning back instead to thoughts of the events that had shaped our lives. Immediately coming to mind were those of the first months in the Eternal City on our initial Italian sojourn. It began on the same Aventine Hill.

Do you remember? Glenn asked.

How could I forget? I answered.

* * *

Hey! What are you doing? STOP that!!

I sprang up from the floor where I was lounging on a deflated air mattress and rushed into what was supposed to be our dining room in the echoing, still-empty apartment. Why was Glenn shouting? I found the answer when I saw my normally mild-mannered husband hanging out the window yelling at a group of nuns in their crisp black-and-white habits as they dumped wheelbarrows filled with garbage into the open space behind our building. They looked up briefly. Then, paying no further attention to the outraged foreigner, they finished their work and swished off toward an unseen convent.

It was Saturday morning, a month after Id started with the UN on a four-year contract. We stayed in a hotel on the Aventine Hill for the first two weeks after our arrival in Rome and then in a new colleagues apartment for another two weeks while he was back in California. Now, at the unsettled beginning of our second month, we were tired and cranky. Wed been sleeping on the living room floor on a bed of flattened cardboard cartons that originally held an air mattress, a few dishes, pots and pans, two folding chairs, an old card table, and some clothes. These items comprised our air shipment, meant to tide us over until the shipping container arrived by sea a couple of months later. The air mattress we hoped to use over the cardboard had slowly and irreparably deflated, paralleling our nave enthusiasm for the whole adventure of a move to romantic Italy.