Right away, Ellie sends texts, chats, videos and long exposés of her first days in Florence. Actually, she is not yet in Florence. She is at a three-day “farm stay,” having her study abroad orientation. The Borgo Battai, a mountain-top villa in—I gather from her over-ebullient messages—a “REAL Medieval village!!” (As opposed to all those fake ones out there). Picture this: rolling Tuscan hills, cypress trees silhouetted against the purple skies, ancient stone castle turned resort with fresh linens and feather pillows, spa rooms and sculptured gardens, and this: my jet-lagged college girl unpacking her things before her first meal. Meeting and making her new friends and travelling partners. Hurrying off to her first pasta making class. But what else? Could life really be this good?

Of course, the texts and messages come in at all hours. Europe is six hours ahead and will shrink to five when our daylight savings time ends. When you live on the side of a hill in Tuscany, who needs to save daylight? Let it flow like warm butter or shimmering oil in a pan. Daylight??! She’s got plenty of it, spread thick over the days. Still, she appears to be burning the midnight oil—off kilter a bit, no doubt (“reverse jet lag,” she explains. Is that a thing??)—chatting for hours with one of her new roommates named—How do you say, “I kid you not” in Italian?—”Gabby.” Bill and I are watching TV one night as the messages come rolling in. I glance at the clock; it’s after 9:00 our time. Child, what are you doing awake at 3 am?!

They will taper off, I know, once she gets busy, but for now, the text and photo blintz—er, blitz is welcome. We start with the view from her window: wall-sized panels of glass open screen-less onto a small courtyard and beyond that, the escalloped—er, scalloped hills of Italy. Photo after photo of plated food: handmade gnocchi and ratatouille, followed by the dramatic main course Porschetta, a specialty of the region composed of bacon-wrapped pork tenderloin nestled into sautéed vegetables and “fancy mashed potatoes” followed up with Tiramisu. “I was already feeling unwell,” she admits, “and then out comes the chef with another course.” And a little later: “I am SO full… but better after the walk and a shower. i really hope I don’t have to eat like that again!” Lunch is a cheese tasting followed by risotto and ice cream with fresh fruit. Apparently they have their own private chef at this Borgo. He is teaching them as well. “We made our own dinner tonight,” she texts. “Rolling the dough was so fun! Apparently I’m really good at tagliatelle… It made me proud.” She exudes enamorement. Her excitement is contagious and for a few days we feast off it. After all the famine of no-go it has been so heartening—no indeed, soul-filling to see one delicacy paraded out after the other.

I don’t realize until now, how much I was steeled against it all going down. Little by little, my senses awake to the solid truth: she made it. Now that it’s really, finally, actually here I am catapulted back across the years to the ones who fueled my own flight. The ones who powered me there, to my year in France, little pot a’ hope cooking along, who for the absence of technology would have been on WhatsApp daily, but for the times relied on osmosis, telepathy, airmail (a whopping 50 cents an ounce!!), and a single phone call on Christmas Day. As I come alive to the reality, these old school channels do, too. Good will: weightless. Hope: halfway round the world the minute I release a mother’s fear and these months of despair. Prayer: travels faster than first light, lighter than air, permeates everywhere…

When I think about the ones who—how do you say, wind beneath my wings?—the ones who thought study abroad was the greatest thing since sliced panini, it was my own mother and hers before her, the one I lived with as a teenager. The one Ellie is named for. She was the mother of all home bases, seated in the corner of a sunny farmhouse kitchen, reading the NYT and plotting one of our many trips on a Rand McNally map, folded and refolded so often it was like flannel in your hands. (Don’t get me started, Google, on the advantages of a paper map…). It was she I left to go away to college, and then study abroad; it was she who wrote the letters. Who sent care packages at my 20th birthday celebrated en France and the (in)famous rainbow wig. Yes. Because why not? Why did my grandmother send me a rainbow wig (think clown, only it was made of Mylar) for my 20th birthday, most likely from Lillian Vernon, the proto-type of online shopping in the 80s. These are the mysteries of life, but until recently I had it still. In my family they flew kids like kites, letting go the string higher and further away until for all your gazing and gasping upward, you realize the tether has let go completely and the kite…is gone.

“You know what you have to do, don’t you?” asked my mother of me. It was last fall, and I was up to my eyeballs in French 1 and 2, masked, tasked, tied down and thinking, “There’s no way…” After three semesters of no-go Ellie’s long awaited study abroad program opened like a door. A small door, but she stepped through it into the country that, after China, had seen the worst of a world pandemic. She set up squatter’s space in the land of hope and from there she would not stray. Grandma joined her before I’d even packed a bag, all good, all go, all get there. You know what you have to do, don’t you? What she meant is, if you launch a kid across the sea for a study abroad, you pack your bag and follow. So on the heels of booking one “Iff” ticket for daughter we rounded the new year with four more, thinking “There’s no way…”

When Ellie first laid this idea down three years ago and said that’s what she was going to do, my heart sank. “ITALY!” cried I. Why Italy? Can anything good ever come out of Italy? Why not my first love, France? What an ignoramus. Now that I am planning our trip over to visit her, I too am innamorato. There’s not a person I’ve messaged or emailed about lodging, or tickets, or travel stuff who hasn’t responded with genuine kindness, hospitality, tips, advice, piles of YouTube travelogue compositions on various sites and a few stirring music videos of Andrea Bocelli. My continuous soundtrack of greatest epic movie soundtrack dips heavily into Italian opera. My out of element feeling and the futility of planning a family trip in Omicron land subsides a little and I grow hungry on the dream: Little by little, I get my groove on. I may not be making pasta, but I’m making plans.

“You know what you have to do, don’t you?” The question contained her clear instructions and a nod to our past, when she did what she had to do as my study abroad year was ending. She sent my brother back to Denmark to meet up with me on his way to visiting his host family from two years before so she could finish out the teaching year, and then she booked herself and my sister on Pakistani airlines, figuring they wouldn’t bomb their own plane and flew to Paris for two weeks, renting a car and dutifully driving us to all the places I had written home about: the Loire Valley, the Norman beaches, the winding narrow roads between Paris and Rouen, where I had eventually spent the year. Nowadays when she moans about the helicopter parent (implicating me) I just want to laugh: For a little while, you crazy woman, my life was your itinerary, just as theirs is mine now. For in the great turning of life and its seasons, a child makes a fine map, indeed. She wanted to see with her own eyes, to breathe in and experience all that I had been telling her about for a year. Not a question or a contest or a moment’s hesitation. She did what in her world view had to be done.

And so have I. I couldn’t shake these ancient thoughts and memories driving up to Dulles in the non-snow last Sunday, couldn’t shake the feeling that I am one more in the line of lovers of travel who stay behind to launch them—literally, into the world. Of course she, my mom, is beside herself with a grandmother’s singular joy. Suddenly the world which has seemed so hideously hostile and—well, dumb (these days, I am glad I don’t have the eyes or wisdom of an octogenarian or I, too, would be in despair) grows soft on her again. I can hear it in her voice. There is still some good to be had in the world. I put through a call on the way home from the airport, feeling the line synch from one world traveler and the one I just dispatched. “She all set? She gone?” Yes, I relay, thinking back through the last 48 hours, the last week of pins and needles, final plans, preparations, euro-ordering, Covid testing, passenger locators and preflight screening, all the stuff that stood in her way. Yes, mamma. She gone.

Most days I wake to a message from Italy on my WhatsApp. It is so much better than the alarm buzzing me out of bed. She’s going about her day just as I begin mine. She’s had her classes already and is going in search of gelato or a café, she’s exploring the hill behind the villa, she’s holed up in her 5-bed room in the student apartment at the Florence University of the Arts, gabbing her head off with roommates or the two nice Swedish girls who live next door, she’s on a train bound for Viareggo and the carnivale. A couple photos of masked friends on an intercity rail, and then the telltale canals of Venice. It’s obvious she got the memo on study-abroad weekends: GO. Go as fast and far as you can, every little window you get: open it wide. At one point in my study abroad year, having taken this maxim to its limit, my journal confesses: “I did not see how anyone could be homesick in that city…but how I wished for someone from home to show it all to; I even looked forward to my mother arriving in the spring for there would be flowers then…” And this: “Class was a terrible failure for me, and a week before the exam I guess I realized that things would have to change or I would flunk out of France…” Ellie my one, my consummate college girl, will be more careful, more balanced, and her sincerity and passion will guide her well. And in the spring, her mother will come to see the flowers.

MummaIdon’tthinkI’mcominghome,” crows Ellie from her mountainside villa, three days into the country. Hush it, child. Back to pasta-making class for you. We’ll talk when the jet lag wears off.