Scene of Struggle + Picture

I’m not one for walking. I never have been, much to the dismay of my mother. For Judy, walking is spiritual. We walk in the neighborhood, on vacation, through the woods, during the winter, the list goes on and on. Sometimes it’s peaceful; sometimes I can endure it in silence.

Not this time.

It was our last year living overseas. My father was still active duty in the Air Force and we were stationed at a NATO base in Germany. To thank him for his service and the opportunity it gave us to travel, we left him at home to work and embarked on a girls’ trip to Italy. Just me, my sisters, and our mom; my best friend, her sister, and their mom. 

“A ladies’ getaway,” my elementary BFF Kylie and I said. “What could possibly go wrong?” And for the first few days, nothing did.

We ate pizza in Pisa, terrified as we stood on the Leaning Tower and even more so by the thin, un-American crust of the pie. We ran down hills in the countryside singing “The Sound of Music”, no one bothering to tell us the iconic musical actually takes place in Austria. We practiced dancing for our upcoming recital back home--occasionally getting applause and a “Magnifico!” from young, slightly tipsy Italian passerby. We stopped ran across the damp sand of the beaches with our capris rolled up, looking mournfully out at the Mediterranean--too cold for a swim in the mid-February weather. We pretended to melodramatically fall off cliffs of golden rock, eliciting troubled laughs from our mothers. My oldest sister Shelby scoffed at us, turning back to her book; ever the sixteen-year-old-too-cool-to-associate-with-hooligan-tweens.

One warm, wonderful evening in Florence, after we had filled our bellies with penne and macaroni and rigatoni, Kylie and I stumbled upon a tilted staircase. The steps were carved into the side of a steep hill, and I looked at the rest of our crew with questioning eyes. “Challenge accepted,” they seemed to say.

When we finally reached the top--sweaty and breathing hard--we took a moment to ooh and ahh at the city lights. Just as we were about to make our way back down the stairs, my mom identified the trail behind us as the city wall that would lead right back to the gate where our rental van was parked. It made sense to just go from there.

“It made sense,” is what my mom repeated, nearly four miles later. We continued to walk--now trapped between the two, tall, brick walls of the city with nowhere to go but forward. She continued to shepherd us ahead, bribing us with the thought of our welcoming beds at the hotel and more water. I strained my eyes, willing the end of our trek to appear.

It came, none too quickly, and with it our rental car, just as my mom had predicted. Despite our earlier cries for the car and home, us kids just collapsed on the pavement in exhaustion. We sat shoulder to shoulder, staring at the city, now far in the distance.

SNAP. I heard the click of my mother’s camera.

We laugh now. Laugh that the lack of people between the city walls should have been a warning. Laugh that my father nor Kylie’s very much envied our girls’ trip after hearing about the infamous walk. Laugh at my mom’s surety that the parking lot was near, so many miles off.

Judy certainly made a mistake in leading us down that trail. But I owe her most of my memory of that trip, through the photographs she took almost absent-mindedly. And better than any illegal picture of us in front of Michelangelo's David (that’s a whole other story), is that picture from Florence. That single moment, when we ceased bickering and forgot our fatigue. That single moment when we simply sat in comfortable silence, entranced by the lights and livelihood of the city we had been in just hours before. How comforting it was to know that no amount of distance or number of miles had changed its beauty. And none would.