My own private Memories of Things Past

As I languished at home last night, while the rain beat against the windows and the clouds of viruses swirled about the house, I distracted myself by reading a couple of old journals kept during family vacations long past.  

The first was of a two-week family stay in Umbria (Italy) in 2001.  We lived in a large stone farmhouse at the top of a hill, about half-way between Perugia and Cortona.  We had 14 participants, coming and going at various times.  After the end of our rental, six of us took the train south and spent a third week in Sicily.  The other vacation was a canoeing tour in 2006, limited to our family group, in the Dordogne region of France.  Our group of eight met organizers and began and ended the tour at the train station in Brive-la-Gaillarde.  We spent days on our own before and after the tour in Paris.  (On my own, I left Paris by train for a few days in Madrid, after the others had returned home, but that feels like almost a separate vacation.)

Both trips included a few family friends in addition to relatives, but the sort of friends who had long been used to our family dynamics and peculiarities and to our odd, collective sense of humor.  The sort of friends who don't expect you to be polite at 7 in the morning (although we almost always were).

Nostalgia waxed as I read page by page.  First, because they reminded me of a pre-pandemic world in which one's ability to travel was limited only by his free time and budget -- not by the fear of contagion and death.  And I was just as nostalgic for the days when the younger members of my family were still unmarried and unburdened by kids and family obligations of their own.  

Not that I regret their marriages and children, which provide me new satisfactions, but their new responsibilities do greatly limit spontaneity.  In Umbria, my nephews and nieces ranged in age from 17 to 35, only one of whom was married and none of whom had children.  The youngest member of our group was Pascal, the son of family friends, who was 14.  It was on that trip that Pascal and I bonded to the extent that we took six overseas mountain treks together over the following ten years.  I still think of him as a kid, but he's now married with a two-year-old son.

On the canoe trip, only two of my nephews were with us, ages 30 and 22, both unmarried.  We also were joined by Pascal's older sister and their mother, and by a friend who one of my nephews and I had met ten years earlier on a trek in Peru.   

I live alone in Seattle.  I love the city, and can't imagine living elsewhere, but I live alone.  Family members occasionally visit, but the Northwest Corner is a somewhat isolated corner, and I more commonly visit others where they live.  On these two vacations, I loved spending weeks with family and close friends, seeing them daily, all day, from bleary-eyed breakfasts to exuberant restaurant dinners.  Family closeness made up half the appeal of these two trips.

The other half was the locales themselves.  In Umbria, the two-mile gravel road up the hill to our villa from the village below, through fields and woods, our car often chased by a farmer's friendly dog.  Looking out from our veranda at the fields of sunflowers, their yellow faces turned toward us with apparent curiosity.  Home-cooked dinners at a long, outdoor table, watching darkness fall and the fireflies emerge.  Our day trips by train to Rome and Florence, and by car to Perugia and other smaller Umbrian towns.  

In France, the easy paddling of canoes down quietly flowing rivers -- the Vézère, the Célé, and the Dordogne.  The castles and chateaux lining the rivers, looming  up ahead at each bend.  The French people out boating and swimming as we canoed past.  The caves we toured, with their beautiful paleolithic cave paintings.  The dinners and lunches: the French food and wine.  The hikes, at times when we weren't canoeing.  The small French towns, with winding streets, in which we stayed at night.  The place names:  I would have loved St-Cirq Lapopie just for its name, even if it hadn't been the ideal French town.  The Marcilhac hemp festival: what can I say?

I greatly regret my present inability -- I hope temporary -- to meet with family, and to meet with them in foreign countries.  I am incredibly grateful for the memories of past years when such gatherings were possible.

Vive le vaccin!  And let's hope the menace of the South African mutation can be soon overcome..