A bright Sunday morning, still early enough to be quiet – no lawnmowers or blowers, no cheering from the baseball field. There is even an occasional lull of quiet between the usually relentless highway whoosh of cars and louder, barreling truck noises. But looking out at the evidence of M’s 16th birthday celebration I can still hear the laughter, singing and whooping of more than a dozen teenagers who gathered on our lawn last night. A few napkins and cups litter the the grass and on the table there are empty ice-tea jugs, wooden sticks used to melt marshmallows. Good kids, (no beer bottles, no cigarettes) they brought in the (junk) food and blankets last night – the remaining mess will take only minutes to clean up. Maybe I’ll need to whip up breakfast for the three that slept over but more likely, they’ll slip out early to go home to celebrate Father’s Day – a holiday we are exempt from in this house.
I was dreading ‘the gathering of teens’ at our house — too many horror stories of crashed parties and trashed houses. So the little bit of mess outside is benign. Sixteen years ago, although M was already a week old – she remained in an open incubator in a Brindisi hospital. Born almost 2 months early in the wrong country, she spent her first three weeks being swaddled and sung to by loving Italian nurses. That stint in an Italian neonatology ward was a frightening, crash-course in motherhood: the worry never really goes away. But at least for now, my beautiful, Italian baby is just fine.