Heart of Miracles by Karen Henson Jones

Author:Karen Henson Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hay House
Published: 2015-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

LOVE

IN

ITALY

I was still in Virginia pondering my next move when an invitation to attend the wedding of my friends Dima and Alisa arrived in the mail. I hadn’t seen them in a while, and I was so pleased that I had not drifted off their radar. When I opened the invitation and saw that the wedding was to be held in Arezzo, Italy (in a castle!), I got very excited.

Dima and Alisa were friends I had met in London. Dima was originally from Ukraine, and Alisa from Estonia. They met at a student party at Oxford, and they made a beautiful couple. While Dima and Alisa were good friends, Italy did seem a bit extravagant for me at this point. I was still living at home with no income, trying to figure out my life. But when I told my father about it and that I really wanted to go, he said okay without even hesitating. Maybe getting me out of his house for a few weeks was worth the money; I don’t know. But it turned out to be exactly what both of us needed. I was supposed to be finding something responsible and productive to do with myself. But if I could think in Virginia, I could think in Italy!

MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH ITALY BEGAN in my early 20s when I was hired by Frommer’s to work on a guidebook. Yes, this was a real job that paid actual money to go to Italy and eat and review restaurants for 12 delirious weeks. My friend Carolyn, a journalist, had applied for this assignment months in advance and was given a position writing the central Italy beat. The woman who was assigned to southern Italy dropped out at the last minute, and Carolyn passed on some of my writing samples to the editor. She wrote me saying, “You are manna from heaven. Can you leave in two weeks?” Si puo scommettere!

It was my first trip to Italy, and I was 24. I remember landing in Rome, taking a train to Naples, and spending one night there. In the morning, I left on a bus that traveled along the Amalfi Coast. The coast is so beautiful that no words are sufficient to capture it, although many writers (including André Gide, Graham Greene, and Gore Vidal) have made attempts. André Gide said that Ravello, the crown of the coast, was “nearer to the sky than the sea,” a description that implies to me that it is as close to heaven as humans can reach. To gaze over the azure sea from the coast’s serpentine cliffs evokes a feeling that starts physically in your eyes and travels down to your heart, making you go all soft inside.

To share in this experience with me was the most unlikely of companions, an American priest named Terry. We were seated next to each other on the bus, and we started talking as soon we sat down. He told me that he had been the

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