House in Amalfi

Chapter One Lamour Harrington For two years I have lived alone, not allowing even a dog or a cat to intrude on my solitude. My friend Jammy Mortimer, who I've known since we were little kids, says I'm getting creepy. "All this loneliness is not good for you," she says in her usual forthright manner. "You'll end up a fat, eccentric recluse, refusing to open the door even to me." Of course that's not truemy door's always open to Jammy. But as far as the weight is concerned, I have to admit I've gotten even skinnier over the past few months. I have a busy lifeby day, that isand eating is a habit I seem to be forgetting. I work as a landscape architect, bringing beauty to other people's homes, creating outdoor "rooms" for them, some small and fragrant, others rambling and wild, but always enhanced by the drift of water, the ripple of a pebbled stream, a simple fountain. I love transforming barren lots with living things: grasses, shrubs, flowers, trees. But most of all I love the trees. Sometimes I ask myself what would life be without them? Now I think about it, it would be like my own life, barren and empty since I lost Alex, my husband, in a car crash two years ago. It was the second time in my life that I'd lost a man I loved to a tragic accident. The first was when my father died in a mysterious boating mishap when I was just seventeen. It's my belief that you can never recover from the agony of being rent apart from your loved one within the space of just a few seconds and then having to face the sheer terror of going on without him. My husband was my love, my best friend, my companion. "You just have to pick yourself up and get on with living," friends advised me, after a few months. And I tried. I went back to work all right, but somehow I've never learned to "play" again. Sitting here now, twenty floors up in my urban Chicago aerie overlooking the blustery windblown gray lake, a cooling mug of coffee clutched, half-forgotten, in my hand, I'm thinking about happiness and trying to remember what it felt like. My dwarf ficus trees out on the small terrace tremble in the chill breeze, reminding me of the pampered lemon trees on Italy's Amalfi coast, sequestered for winter in their cozy greenhouses, emerging again in the spring with a burst of blossoms so fragrant it takes your breath away. And quite suddenly, because I haven't consciously thought of this in ages, I'm thinking of my father, Jonathon Harrington, who'd named me Lamour after his beautiful but flighty New Orleans great-grandmother, and about the time he took me with him to live in Rome while he wrote his novel. It was sure to be a success, he told mehow could it not be when he was writing it in a city filled with history, culture, and sex? He didn't actually say the word sex; after all, I was only seven years old. I believe he used the word sensuality instead, though I wasn't sure what sensuality meant, either. And later, to my surprise, because to me he was just my father, his novel did become a huge success, which he said went a long way to blotting out the pain of the whole writing experience. Again, I didn't know what he meant, since he seemed to spend most of his time happily in the bar in the piazza near our apartment. Not for us one of those beautiful Renaissance palazzos whose chiseled facades decorate Rome's better streets and whose parquet and paneled, gilded, and mirrored interiors have sheltered wealthy Romans for centuries. Ours was just the top floor of an ancient peeling stucco buildAdler, Elizabeth A. is the author of 'House in Amalfi', published 2006 under ISBN 9780312936464 and ISBN 031293646X.