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warmth. He arrives with a wicker hamper of smoked salmon, Stilton, oat biscuits, honeys, and jams. He spent his last two days in London buying beautifully wrapped gifts for everyone. Best of all, we don’t seem like capital P parents to him but potential friends. Relieved that this will be effortless, I’m bouyed, too, by that expansion I feel when someone new is admitted into my life.

My Iranian friend maintains that attractions among people are based on smell, which seems logical enough to me. Most of those most important to me I’ve liked instantaneously and have known I wanted a permanent friendship. (The times the connection has not lasted still sting.) Jess knows all the words to every rock song.

Ashley is laughing. We’re already singing in the car. What luck.

It’s midday and too warm for ribollita. We stop in town and have sandwiches at a bar and Jess tells us about the wedding he was just in at Westminster Abbey. Ashley has had the longer trip and wants to fade. Ed and I take a walk, then, because the day is warm and the force of habit strong, we start to work in the garden. I pull weeds away from herbs and lift geraniums out of pots, shake off dirt from the roots and wrap them in newspaper to store over the winter. Ed mows the long grass and rakes. Everything is drenched, sweet, lush; even the weeds are beautiful. I decorate the shrine with boughs of spruce and its nuts, olive branches and a gold star over Mary’s head. Ed tries to burn a pile of leaves we never were able to burn last summer because of the dryness.

They’re so wet now that they just smoke. When Ashley and Jess reappear, we drive to the nursery and buy a living tree and a big pot to plant it in. Small as it is, it dominates the living room. Since we have nothing for decoration except a string of white lights, we decide to go to Florence tomorrow and buy a few ornaments. I’ve brought over some candles shaped like stars and some distinctly non-Tuscan farolitos, a Santa Fe custom I’ve kept since spending a Christmas there once and loving the candles in paper bags outlin-ing the adobe houses. These are glazed bags with cut-out stars.

We line the front stone wall with a dozen of them and they look F L O A T I N G W O R L D : A W I N T E R

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magical with their glowing stars. We fill the fireplace overhang with pinecones and branches of cypress Ed cut this afternoon.

How easy everything seems and what a pleasure to recover the fun of Christmas. The bowls of ribollita and a fire act as knock-out drops. In the big armchairs, we’re wrapped in mohair blankets, listening to Elvis singing blue, blue, blue Christmas on the CD.

a t t h e o u t d o o r m a r k e t i n f l o r e n c e , w e f i n d p a p i e r -

mâché balls and bells with decoupage angels. A wagon off to the side serves bowls of trippa, tripe, a special love of the Florentines.

Business looks brisk. If I thought yesterday that I was falling in love with winter, today it’s certain. Florence is redeemed and magnificent on a cold December morning. As in all the towns, the decorations are sweet—lights strung across the narrow streets at short intervals, necklaces of light with dangling pendants. Obviously the women of this city have not heard of cruelty to wildlife; I never have seen so many long, lavish fur coats. We look in vain for fake fur. The men are dressed in fine wool overcoats and elegant scarves. Gilli, one of my favorite bars, is crowded with noisy voices and clinks of cups and constant rushes of steam from the espresso machine. In the middle of the street, Ed pauses and holds up his hands. ‘‘Listen!’’

‘‘What is it?’’ We all stop.

‘‘Nothing! How could we not have noticed? No motorcycles.