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Coming Home

11/17/2013

1 Comment

 
Returning is such sweet sorrow.... 

Each time I go to Italy it feels more like home. This has both good and bad elements, and the most confusing is that moment when I step off the plane onto my actual home soil. I have in my heart and in my Facebook photo albums images and memories - proof, if you will - that I actually was far from my everyday life. And yet, somehow, it feels as if I've not quite left here, not quite returned, not quite - yet - begun to separate myself from either there or here.

Along with jet-lag, this sense of returning/always been here/always there is rough to navigate. It lasts a week or more: fitful sleep; strange dreams in which I am drinking coffee on Borgo Pio, strolling along Via Vicenza to one of my favorite restaurants;  boarding a vaporetto in Venice to be carried toward Hotel Centuaro. Coffee slowly begins to taste normal again, and hearing English everyday and translating it into my broken Italian becomes less and less frequent.

Finally I wake at the right hour, and don't drift off to sleep at 3:00 in the afternoon. It is the first night's full sleep when I come fully to the realization that it is only in my dreams that I walk the cobblestone streets of Pitgliano or sail on Lago Bolsena, and that I am here, in this home instead.

Both call to my heart, and for now I will talk and think and dream of Italy while I fill my days with the joys of walking the dogs and talking with my husband and coffee and dinners with friends. That way when I next go to Italy I can dream of these things, and keep the balance in this world in which I live, always, in two places at once.
1 Comment
Teresa Cutler-Broyles
11/16/2013 09:56:17 pm

Buongiorno!
I'm offering a free copy of my little book of essays about Italy, and a 5% discount off the next TLC Tour of Italy in May, 2014, to the first person to write with his or her top five things to do - or that you'd like to do - in Italy. The next five people also receive a 5% discount, and then I'll enjoy reading the others for new ideas and exciting places to go!

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    Teresa Cutler-Broyles
    Traveler / Writer / Educator

    I've been writing since I was 8 years old, traveling since I was 18, and teaching since age 30. Fell in love with Italy in 2000, and began combining my four passions in 2008 with TLC Writing Tours. Enjoy my musings about Travel, Writing, Teaching, and Italy - in no particular order.

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