Emails from Verona-Italy

A few years ago I met a man from Verona-Italy. We met while he was on vacation in a small town in Mexico, where I had just moved to from New York City. He had planned a month long vacation but stayed for three. It wasn’t that he did not have a job or a house to go back to, “It is important to take one’s time to appreciate the good things in life, slowly and as often as possible”, he once said. I remember being envious of his carefree spirit and wondered if I could ever be that way again. My friend from Verona did make the most of his 3 months but his vacation eventually ended and he returned to Verona in the spring of that year, just in time to harvest grapes. A week after he left I received an email from Verona. The town where I live is relatively small, so we ran into each other at least once or twice a week but we never got to know each other very well. I was a bit surprised although excited to receive news from him so soon. From that email, came another email and another and another. Twice a day, once in the morning and once in the late afternoon, I would receive news from Verona. My time zone was 7 hours behind his in Verona so our emails made me feel little like we were old friends catching up. I guess that we could have coordinated a time to chat online but in a way I was enjoying our new friendship, slowly through emails, one day at a time. We kept in touch this way for about 6 months, and then I decided to visit him in Verona.

It was a tough year for me. I was going through several major changes in my life, emotional, geographical and financial. For several years during my late 20’s I focused only on my career and family obligations and hardly had any time or budget for travel. But before all of that, I used to travel on a whim and without much planning ahead of time. Somehow, over the years, certain routines made me become more and more of a planner and I missed the old spontaneous me. Hearing about Verona every day reminded me of the courage I used to have and the freedom that I used to feel, especially through travel. I decided to throw caution to the wind, along with all the travel guidebooks, and bought my ticket to Verona. Of course, there were practical voices inside my head that said that it was not a good idea to take a vacation with so many unsettled issues in my life, but then I thought of all the years that I have been listening to that same voice and instead of feeling more secure, I felt less and less sure of myself and who I was. I remembered what my friend from Verona said to me and decided that it was time for me to enjoy the good things in life again, and “slowly” as well. I did nothing to plan for my visit to Verona. I read nothing about its history and never once looked for any kind of information about Verona online or from any guidebook. All I really knew from those emails, was that my friend lived about 40 minutes outside of the city of Verona, in the same house where he was born somewhere up on the hillside in an area where most of the grapes from this region are grown. His family farms their own fruits and fresh vegetables and they make 100% virgin olive oil from their own olives and drink wine made from their own grapes. I knew that this was not going to be the kind of vacation I would read about in popular travel guidebooks. Other than that, I knew nothing more about my destination and for the first time in a long time I did not make a list of things to do, which felt incredibly liberating. I was really ready to treat myself to those simple things in life and slowly.

JS