Per Via Aerea: Letters from a Young Woman 6.19.1990 (Memoir)

Correspondence sent to the United States from Italy in the 1980s-1990s

[Handwritten. Posted from Florence, Italy. Letter transcribed maintaining original spelling and punctuation.]

June 19, 1990

Hello!

Well, F— and F— left yesterday for Venice, Vienna, Budapest, Prague, East Berlin, Amsterdaam and London. Even though they freaked me out because all they did was sit in the living room and talk about leaving in July, I was still sorry to see them go.

We also picked up our invitations yesterday. They’re really pretty, but now we have to figure out a way of attaching the photos. We also bought sealing wax to seal the envelopes but can’t figure out how that works either. I still haven’t received your list of people, but it doesn’t seem like anybody in this building has received mail lately. We’ll send you an invitation soon so that you can see what they look like.

I bought a book by Garrison Keilor the other day called “We’re Still Married.” It’s full of short stories and poetry. The best one is about shy people and letter writing. I also liked his Intro in which he says that although he writes humor, he sometimes wishes he could write irritation. : ) (Don’t we all!)

As of yesterday the weather has turned miserably hot. Even the marble floors that I was counting on to be cool are not. The petunias are drooping, the laundry dries quickly, and the backs of my knees are always damp.

Yesterday, instead of giving J— a lesson at his house, his mother wanted me to take him to a Ferrari exhibit. It was closed because it was Monday. His dad dropped us off at the Pitti instead. All the museums were obviously closed there too. I remembered that the Stibert and Bardini Museums were open. One was too far away and the other he had seen three times. We went downtown to look for English books that he needed for school only to discover that even though all the rest of the stores were open, the book store was not. He did not want an ice cream. So for the last half hour we shopped for fishing tackle.

Yesterday after seeing F— and F— off I walked back to the shop to say ‘hello’ and get a ride home with N—. Ten minutes later we left - N— was pissed off and I went home and cried for half an hour. After N— graduates we’re moving back to the US to grow corn organically — so buy a big house. This time we screwed up the invitations. I didn’t quite follow exactly how but part of it seems to be that we didn’t have enough made up. We’ve asked her over the past two months to please make up a list or give us a rough number of people which she has never had the time to do and now that we’ve ordered, received, and paid for them she seems to be coming up with quite a few. Anyhow, sometimes I wish marriage wasn’t a package deal.

Well, that’s the news from Via P— — where the house is dirty, the man is studying and the woman is…well, she just is right now and that seems to be trouble enough.

I love you and miss you more than you know.

Love,

N—

XOXO