Important life event- day(s) of wine and roses

We get off the bus less than half a mile from the apartment we are renting. Half a mile walk is nothing compared to the miles we have covered today, but it is taken at a crawling pace. We are tired but more importantly, we are hungry and we are shopping to eat. On our way outbound this morning, we passed a grocery store just opening. The shopkeeper was loading chickens into a large, glass rotisserie case and my sister had said, ‘we should remember that, it might be dinner tonight, I’m thinking’. Prophetic, is what I am thinking now. We smell the chickens from down the road and the pace picks up just a fraction.

We enter the store. Like the American corner store in our older cities, this store offers a bevy of goods in the tiniest of spaces. There are the chickens, golden and brown, dripping juices and smelling heavenly. There are fruits and vegetables in crates out front and bread and rolls inside the door. There is a canned and jarred goods section and a refrigerator with dairy products. And a jaw-dropping wine selection. At least a quarter of the surface area of the store is devoted to wine. My sister’s husband’s family is Italian. His mother speaks better Italian than English. My sister speaks a few sentences of American Italian but it is wasted on Italian Italians. We give up on words and rely on the shopkeeper’s version of English. We get a plump, fragrant bird in a bag. We pick pieces of fruit to cut up and share out. We choose bread from a basket and pull a stick of butter from the fridge. We add more bottled lemonade, sharp and tart and not at all like American lemonade, to the counter. We shop for wine. We are overwhelmed by the choices and are taken by the realization that we are limited by the utensils in the apartment and have no idea how to explain ‘cork puller’ in Italian. So we buy the wine in the box.

The people in the store are smiling. I think they would like to laugh, but not in a mean way. They have watched us stand and stare at the shelves of bottles and finally reach for the box wine. This is a kindergarten box of wine, really. It has the foil tab that gets pulled back and what looks like a tiny straw hole, like a juice pouch full of wine. We do not care; we just want to get home and eat. We cram all our purchases into the tiny basket below the baby in the stroller, into my green and black nylon messenger bag, my son’s gray nylon messenger bag, my sister’s red and black nylon messenger bag and my niece’s pink backpack. We are loaded down with dinner and drinks.

We get to the apartment a few minutes later. We dump our belongings and head back outside with children and food. The sun is going down, it has cooled off and it is going to be a beautiful night. We are going to sprawl out on the grass in the courtyard and eat a picnic dinner. We cut up fruit and chicken. We butter bread. We fill tumblers with lemonade. We pour- squirt- wine into glasses. The food is delicious. The wine is dreadful. We laugh uproariously. We are still going to drink the wine. After food, we are more sensible. We are now sure that just by pointing to the top of any wine bottle, turning our hand with the palm upright and looking sad, we could have communicated our lack of means of wine egress. This makes us laugh harder.

We are staying in an apartment complex. There are eight apartment buildings on a corner lot, each four enclosing a courtyard of grass and trees and flowers. It is beautiful here. Our laughter, and the laughter of the children with us, has attracted residents to stop and speak. There do not appear to be many children here and the residents are taken with the baby. Her face is greasy with chicken and pink around the lips from plums, she is sticky with lemonade, and she has bread crumbs in her hair. She is crowing with laughter because we are laughing. The residents fall in love.

When we left this morning, we were an attractive group. The little girls wore matching outfits, the baby in a swingy, ruffled top and panties, the six-year old in a skirt of the same yellow and pink cabbage rose-flowered fabric. The teenage boy relaxed in khaki cargo shorts and a blue plaid linen shirt while my sister and I strode out in linen capris and brightly colored tee shirts, sandals and sunglasses, REI catalog worthy. Now, we are more attractive in our happiness than in our attire. We are grass stained and gelato smeared, tacky with the residue of sugary drinks and dropped melon. We have drooping ruffles and wilted linen but we are blooming with good cheer. With children, there is no time for souvenir shopping but who needs another shirt? We will have great memories of chasing brilliantly colored moths in the grass alongside the Coliseum and the grass stains to prove it.

Our repast complete, we sprawl out on the grass beneath Italian stars. The air is cool after the heat of the day and smells of courtyard flowers, bushy roses and irises, snapdragons and geraniums, are carried on the light breeze. We are glad of take-out dinner since cleanup is limited to scavenging for paper scraps and wiping hands and faces with a damp tea towel. The baby will need a long soak in the sink after the glasses are washed but the rest of us can wait until morning for a major scrub.  We are exhausted and exhilarated; we plan for tomorrow.