December 2021

It’s not the dumbest thing you can give someone for Christmas this year, but surely close: a suitcase. This one is huge, and canary yellow and says right on there: ITALIA. Little enamel flag affixed to the side, green white and red: Italy or bust. I don’t know if she’ll go for it. It sure is big. It sure is yellow. My plan is to put it under the tree on Christmas Eve, hoping she’ll read into it Santa’s endorsement and affirmation. Not his sick sense of humor on a reality that is as fragile as fresh capellini. After 20 long months, half of her college career, Ellie’s long wait to study abroad is over. Maybe. All last fall it went like this: Yes…. More yes… then: Register… Register NOW. In between, like ellipses of our life, we held our breath. We hoped, prayed, pleaded with the world to simmer down and for this chance of a lifetime to happen. Right before Thanksgiving break it went to green light go: BOOK FLIGHTS. Just like that. Book flights! I am giddy with excitement but terrified. Feel like I am spinning our bank account into flight vouchers at Delta. We still have five fat ones, leftover from Sophie’s 2020 graduation trip of a lifetime to nowhere. When Ellie texts me last fall from school it is all caps: “I’M GOING TO ITALY!!!!!!” Our whooping and hollering drowns out the other big announcement the same week: Omicron. Oh yeah, Omicron. Green light…yellow.

January 2022: Week One

Today I get the “Spring ebill” notification that GMU wants its money. Only, they have her in two places at once: dutifully finishing her senior year, here, doin’ the face mask shuffle, and there: at the College of Fine Arts in Florence. She will leave February the 13 to arrive NO LATER (“No later Mumma, my coordinator says no later!”) than 2 pm on the 14th to spend the semester in Italy. Side note: It’s pretty funny. What does a Psych and Criminal Justice major w/ a philosophy minor register for on a study abroad in Italy?? “History of the Mafia/Anti-mafia”…”Seminar in Organized Crime… that sort of thing. She does have a three-hour class in Italian every Monday and cultural intro class on Thursdays—just the routine kind of stuff, you know, meeting outside on a little stone patio at the heart of the student apartments she shows me online. Tin tables and and metal furniture dotting the sunny flagstones patched in moss and green. “That’s my classroom??!” she gasps, leaning into the laptop screen we’re both viewing. A “Walking course” on Dante Allegheri (did I even know the man had two names?) which meets out on the street and walks all over the city, visiting his various sites. A kind of pedestrian annotation. It’s too much. Heaping promise upon promise on this wasteland of what-ifs. Syllabi and course descriptions that make the student in her giddy with excitement and also wary. I don’t know how wary till we get closer to departure date. Wary…only one letter away—hers—from weary.

Yet this spectacularly large and hopefully inaccurate tuition bill—it is not far off from how she really is, caught between two realities: one, the semester of her dreams, and the other, dutifully attending her courses here, finishing her senior year and side stepping the giant door as it swings closed. The reality? It can all shut down faster than we can say omicron. All through Christmas break I peppered her with “what ifs” to pass on to the coordinator, trying to gauge the probability the trip would go forward. Wanting to pin down the machine. I thought, surely they’re just waiting till the holidays are over to pull the plug on this thing. “Oh no, Mumma,” says she, “they wouldn’t wait. Dr. B told me I could receive the email any time. The whole country could shut down again, or ban international travel and they have no control over that.” [Big-eyed alarm emoji here]. I put that big yellow box o’ hope in the attic the day I brought it home and didn’t look at it again till Christmas Eve.

Ellie was told to register for her semester here, casually as they could, “just in case.” Wouldn’t want the unthinkable to happen—a student without a semester at all, should the one abroad go belly up. So she did. She dutifully sat down and registered for that other semester. The one where she graduates and goes on her way. “It wouldn’t be the worst thing,” says my carry-on girl. What? What??! says my pandemic-hating heart. What the %$#@! are they teaching you up at that school? Humanity? Humility? Adaptability? Why, these are the very things you need to thrive at study abroad. Italy or bust. Like a book with two endings, we are caught mid-chapter and can’t read any further. Both of us read the skies. Looking for signs. All the current masking and vax wars out in the world don’t help, people keeping the air all stirred up and germy with their intolerance. She is on embassy and travel websites daily, looking for changes, developments, watching for the easing of life and the ability to travel. I lick my faith and lift it into the wind…into all that is so, so unknown.

January – Week Three

But there is hope. The days pass. The plans deepen, take shape. Like the rolling hillside in the photo above, the very first Ellie sends me through “WhatsAPP” of the view from her student apartment, what is distant grows closer and more beautiful by the day. Not only are they speaking Italian across the ocean, it appears they are speaking “get the heck over here, we got work to do” as well. Speaking “a course we going forward, manichino, whadja think?” Fluent in can-do. The date looms large on my calendar. We are seated at the kitchen table one of the many January days after Bill and Will and Sophie, too, went back to school leaving college senior here, regaling me all the lore and cultural tidbits she’s learning. We’re checking off lists, making calls, lining up cell phone, bank account, health insurance, travel insurance, ordering Euros, figuring out all the logistics. Would be quicker to swim the Atlantic than wade through all the must-dos for a semester abroad. And that doesn’t even touch the pandemic protocols. She studies my paper grid for February, only a few weeks away. “Why does it say ‘Thank God’ on February 14th?” Because on that day, my girl, I respond, thinking through all that has to change, occur, come down, improve and get out of the way for this to happen, I will. Except for the birth of Sophie this will be the best valentine I have ever received. Sii ancora il mio cuore. Be still my heart.

As the weeks wear on, we both find legs to stand on. She starts Italian lessons from the comforts of her bedroom—March 2020 all over again, only now the voice behind the door is filled with hope instead of despair. Ciao, come stai? After each Zoom lesson she comes bounding down the stairs for a debrief, dispensing travel tips and cultural curiosities. “Mom! MOM. The reason I need to arrive by two o’clock on the 14th? Well, it’s because we are going on a three-day farm stay for our orientation. And mom MOM! ! It’s not just a farm stay (what the heck is a farm stay? I think, my insides leaping with instant and vicarious joy) “it’s a farm stay in a medieval castle in Tuscany! Like, a real medieval castle, mom! And we’ll have the whole place to ourselves!!” For a moment I indulge in her excitement, mainly because “Mom Mom!” is so wore out with all the amazing opportunities flying out her mouth like a done deal and falling at our feet. I just hope it’s not some cruel trick from university planners who haven’t read up on the latest Covid trends and travel bans. I hope somebody doesn’t yank the invisible thread and rip it all away. According to Ellie, now engaged in virtual culture class and trip prep going on weekly, apparently Italians drink their coffee standing up. My kind of country. Why sit down, relax and enjoy when any one of a number of disasters could strike at any moment and catch you indulging in a cappuccino? Stay ready, my girl of the go-bag college years. Be ready for anything. And most especially if it’s no-thing. My investment in this has cost me dearly already. She is being acclimated to life in Florence, and I, I am being acclimated to the idea that a dream is not the very first thing life conspires against to destroy. I will not sit down on hope.

January: End

I’m sad to report the big yellow suitcase went back to the store, but not for reasons that were so real when I bought it last November. “Too big, Mumma,” says my minimalist, planning to slide into the country undetected, couple outfits and a second pair of shoes. “What can I possibly need?” Good answer, Ellie my girl. It’s true, she travels light. She was in the air two years ago when the world shut down, landed in Richmond and came home for sixteen weeks instead of three days in the longest spring “break” on record to finish that semester in her bathrobe out of a carry-on. All her books, clothes, and campus-life comforts stayed at school, which was locked and inaccessible like a tomb. She made one quick and illegal trip to bring home the botanic garden and her books but left the clothes. Oh well. Everybody knows how far a Zoom wardrobe can go. That look of helpless, hopeless sadness pulling on its determination to finish out her college semester in her childhood bedroom haunts me still. I have no doubt it helped fuel the resolve that kept up this two and half year wait on her program. Here’s all the wonder, fun, course offerings, walking tours, field trips and on-fire life awaiting you, but, but, but it could all go down in an instant. Watch the skies. Surely this big yellow lifeboat/traveling bag could get you someplace, anyway?

February 2022: Week One

Each day we add a piece. The trip I didn’t relish planning three years ago becomes my new life’s work. Italy??! Why Italy? Why not France? She’s a 6-year IB-certificate holding student of French and I a closet Francophile. It’s no easy, travel planning in a pandemic. We are supposed to follow. Right? We are. Send a kid to another country, you get on a plane and go visit. Hanover County Spring Break. Now those were some hard tickets to buy, I tell you what. There’s not a proverbial limb long enough for what I climbed out on. It’s one thing to subscribe to your child’s life-dream, to embrace and then bankroll it in the face of some pretty steep odds; my way of thinking that’s just another word for parenting. But to decide the rest of us are going to throw caution and Covid, school and jobs and everything known to the wind and join her, staking our claim on unviability with four more flight tickets?—well, it was a stretch to say the least. Got the notification on my Hopper that fares were at their 6-month lowest last month. January must be international ticket-buying month. That’s when I scored those flights to Paris for $511 in peak season 2018. But now, standing knee deep in snow, my worrier at full tilt and I am, like I say, spinning our bank account into vouchers, I swallow a reckless “che diamine” as I score round trip Richmond to Rome for $137. And just like that we are five, making a trip of a lifetime, IFF daughter 1 gets on that plane in two weeks. (Do you remember that old iff from Philosophy class? It is a state of being made for Covid times.)

I almost forgot this part of the story: last fall, before she came home for the semester—er, year (Yes, please move out your senior three days before Christmas for what we hope will be a capital “G” good. But might not be. You might actually end up with no classes and no place to live. If this all goes down…) So last fall, finding herself with apparently some spare time, a rather large stack of cash and what can only be described as ZERO inhibition on the matter, Ellie jumped out of a plane. She did. The friends she wanted to book with couldn’t fit cardiac arrest on their busy exam schedule, and she was running out of time (sound familiar??) so she borrowed a car, booked a one-way ticket up and jumped out, strapped to some pro who apparently does this for a living. The photos her dad and I paid extra for show this girl of mine in full-on free fall—helmet, goggles, flight suit, parachute, the whole deal. But look again: there she is miles, above the earth, white wisps of cloud all around and a faint, distant (very hard) ground miles below, with her arms stretched wide, head thrown back, laughing in sheer joy. The abandon. The expression on her face. I’ll bet the people on the ground could heard her. “MomIwasSCREAMING I was screaming I was so happy!” I’m hearing this over the phone, and I’m screaming too, on the inside. Kinda, but for a different reason. She said she has never felt more alive. Gosh Ellie, I think you got ripped off. All I had to do was drive my little empty kid-mobile home after dropping you at the airport and I got the same high.

February 13th

Day of Departure. The ride home from Dulles is filled with this: VICTORY. It’s a Sunday morning and I am quietly making my mom-ly way home alone, the beltway and the world oblivious to my inner celebrazione. I am crazy with joy and triumph and relief. Kind of funny I never bothered to worry about launching a kid into a world gone mad. Yep, bound for Amsterdam and a two-hour layover and on to Florence. Alone. I’ve been much too much focused on rifling my 40-year-old mental rolodex for connections in Holland and the near-impossibility of securing a negative Covid test no more than 72-hours from touch down in Florence (Yay, farm stay!) but no less than the current turnaround time of 1-3 days. Once you do the math it’s like they shoulda been handing out Covid tests with the peanuts in flight. Our back-up plan, thanks to Ellie? “Swing by” the CVS near Dulles for a rapid antigen test and print out the results at GMU honors library prior to beating feet to the airport. How are other people doing this? may as well be stamped on my forehead from running continuously through my mind. Because we’ve padded our time ridiculously, and because at Dulles there is not really handy place to hang out prior to going through security, the obviousness of my job, and hers, is practically marked out with tape on the airport tiled floor: You: stand here. She: single unit, so carefully packed, so well prepared, head for “international departures” around a corner and then down an escalator. You: stand rooted to the last spot from which you can see, waving goodbye for all you’re worth as she turns around before stepping on that escalator to wave one last time before disappearing from sight.

My drive home will be uneventful. Not the blizzard some ass threw down a week ago while we were busy sweating the Covid test logistics and scarcely daring to breathe for so many reasons, free from the Armageddon which quite frankly could have arrived undetected—and been told to take a number. Nothing like that. Just the most prepared travellin’ girl the world gonna greet this morning, making her careful and deliberate way into the stream of life. She takes her two undersized roll-y suitcases in muted euro-blend colors and she separates from me as gracefully and smoothly as if we’ve been on this track all along, the moving floor of the terminal only underscoring the speed with which possibility has greeted and embraced reality. They run alongside each other, faster and freer, until they are intertwined and indistinguishable from each other. And just like that, she is gone. “All my love,” I wrote in a card hidden in one of her bags, “all my joy, all my hope, all my love go with you.” It’s true, muses the shell of me standing there waving until the last. It’s true. I am wrung out…and eternally grateful.

February 14

Grazie a Dio...