The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Spring by Megan Weiler

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I: Summer 1996
1

(excerpt)

I finish unloading the car, carry my suitcase and my satchel filled with books and notebooks upstairs. Sealed up in one of the steamer trunks I find clean sheets, pillows, and a blanket smelling of mothballs. I make up the bed in the largest bedroom, with its sloping roof beams that are like the ribbing of an enormous wing.

As a child, I had mixed feelings about this place. We used to come several times a year, driving down from Germany. I didn’t share my parents’ enthusiasm for working on the house, for stripping wood and painting and digging drainage ditches. I sometimes wished that we could have spent our vacations on a beach or in the mountains like other people.

But now an emotion fills me as I move through the rooms—like coming home. Or rather, it’s as though I’d never left; as if, throughout all the changes in my life, in some part of my brain I have always been here.

I go back down to the kitchen and make strong coffee using bottled water. I heat milk on the gas burner, frothing it with a whisk. I cut slices of bread from the big loaf I’ve bought and spread them with jam. I eat my meal outside on the terrace, a rectangle of lichen-covered stones facing west. In the stillness, I hear a mockingbird and a woodpecker on the hill above the house, and then a human cry somewhere in the distance below. Probably Renato shouting to his son Lorenzo, as they work together on a field.

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