Today's Reading
Our twenty-year-old daughter, Izzy, has left the nest, but when she hears of our lists she adds to the list of requirements for when she's back visiting: Number one, a shower that works better than the dribbling thing we currently have with its two options, scalding-hot dribble or ice-cold dribble. With either option you get a complimentary soggy shower curtain stuck to your backside. Number two on her list is a kitchen big enough for a dishwasher. The kitchen in our current rental is a typical Italian kitchen—tiny.
How the hell they became the masters of the cooking world in these shoebox spaces is beyond me. There's nowhere to stack dishes other than the marble pasta-making table that acts as a worktop, storage space, and coffee machine counter. Nearly every day, Ronan, with his clumsy limbs, knocks over and breaks something by simply walking into the kitchen to make a coffee. If both of us are in the kitchen at the same time, then the whole room is full and there is literally no room to swing either of our cats, never mind have a dishwasher.
Izzy's number-three "Must Have" is a sofa big enough that we can all fit on it, like in the old days, and it needs to be blue velvet. We currently have a red faux-leather two-seater sofa bed that flakes and sticks to our skin, causing us to say casually to each other, "Hang on. Let me dust off your back; you have some sofa on you."
It's an improvement to the initial reactions of: "Jezuz Christ, let me look at your back; you have some hideous rash or disease starting."
So a decent sofa like we used to have when we had a home, which we could all fit and cozy up on in winter to watch TV together with a family-size box of chocolates, gets a thumbs-up. She has not taken into account, however, that Luca now equals Ronan's six foot two rather than being his previous three feet, when we could fit him into a gap. She is the same height as me at five foot two, rather than her previous little four during the halcyon chocolate days, so even with a big sofa it will be squashy with us all on it at the same time.
A cinema room and a pool are also on Izzy's list and are quickly added to everyone else's "must haves," but we were getting off track. A working shower, a dishwasher, and a non-shedding sofa were good starting points to aim for.
The main nonnegotiable all four of us agreed on was that it has to be "turnkey ready" to move into, with no work to be done other than changing the color of the wall paint perhaps, but absolutely no DIY other than that. The kids spent their childhoods growing up in dilapidated renovation projects—the last house was nicknamed the "Money Pit"—so we've been there and done that and absolutely had our fill of renovation. We just want to walk in, unpack our bags, and be there from day one.
The Sighing House sits in front of Lake Trasimeno, and, yes, it is in walking distance of one of our favorite towns and a train station, but the villa looks derelict and like a big renovation project. It will have to be someone else's dream.
CHAPTER TWO
My sister Eileen had a dollhouse. My earliest memory is of crawling down the hallway, stopping at Eileen's open bedroom door, and staring at her dollhouse, perched high on top of a bookshelf. She sees me, smiles her big smile, follows my line of vision, takes it down, and puts it in front of me.
It was all white, three stories high, with a central staircase, a red satin- ribbon runner glued into place, two rooms off to each side on each floor, and a secret attic space under the orangey-red roof. I didn't know the words for white or orangey red, but they were there in front of me. By the time I was old enough to play with the house, Jim, the nature-loving brother in between me and Eileen—number two of three—had turned it into a home for his pet mice, which had no hygiene manners and chewed through its walls. I watched it burn on a Halloween bonfire and I didn't have the words to say, "Give that to me. I can fix it."
I wanted a dollhouse just like Eileen's but never got one—probably because I never told anyone I wanted one—the same way I never got a rocking horse so I could be like Zorro. If I'd told Eileen, she would have gotten me one. She was the ultimate big sister through my teens, buying me my first bra, taking me to get my ears pierced with my first and only ever pieces of gold jewelry—fourteen-carat ear studs for my thirteenth birthday. She took me to get my legs waxed and told me never to shave. She tried to teach me how to walk in high heels in order to be like the elegant business woman and master of running in seven-inch stilettos, accompanied by tight velvet pants and a satin boob-tube, that she had already become by the time I was six and she was eighteen.
She gave me my first alcoholic drink—peach schnapps, an exotic drink in the eighties, which she brought back from a bus tour around Europe for "guys and girls in their twenties." In our shared bedroom I had no option but to listen to David Cassidy, Johnny Logan, the Bay City Rollers, and Richard Clayderman.
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