Vines. Now a friend with a backhoe has dug a deep trench along a terrace. Beppe will tell us when we can plant.

Living here, I’ve intensely reconnected with nature. The land, we’ve learned, is always in a state of lively evolution. The lane of cypresses and lavender we planted is beginning to look as though it has always been there. The slender cypresses, just my height when we planted them, now look like those exclamation points we see punctuating the Tuscan landscape. Between them, the lavender’s amethystine radiance lights the path. Roses, margue-rites, lavender, pale yellow petunias, and lilies on our front terraces have made the ivy and blackberry jungles just a memory.

The biggest change is grass. Grass is not Tuscan. We lived with a mown and watered weed lawn for several years. Lovely in spring and early summer, it looked forlorn in August. No amount of precious water kept it alive. One September week, with the help of three neighbors, we unrolled miles of sod trucked from Rome.

The irrigation system looks like the Chicago Fire Department’s command central. Neither of us understands it completely. Now, a few years later, the clovers and tiny flowers have staged a come-back—grass giving over to weed again.

When we had to disguise a large gas tank for our heating system, we nudged it against a hillside and had a stone wall built in front of it. I asked the masons to incorporate an old window from the house and to build a shrine at one end. They made the top of the wall irregular, and now it looks like a remnant of an old house. The top is planted with lavender, which draws thousands of white butterflies. We were all amused at this little folly. While the workers finished, I slapped cerulean-blue paint inside the shrine, the traditional background for all the shrines in this area. I already had a della Robbia–type ceramic Mary and Jesus ready to hang, but as the paint dried, the workmen began exclaiming, half ironically, half seriously, over the ‘‘miracle’’ in the shrine. ‘‘Don’t tell the pope,’’ they advised, ‘‘or the pellegrini [pilgrims] will arrive B E N T O R N A T I ( W E L C O M E B A C K ) 293

by the hundreds.’’ I had no idea what they were talking about.

‘‘Look what has happened.’’ I looked.

Faintly, but surely, I saw the white wings, face, and flowing robes of a hovering angel. An accident of the thin paint. I quietly propped my ceramic Mary in the corner and left the ‘‘miracle’’ to preside over the pomegranate and hawthorn.

A few weeks later, at the height of red-poppy season, a dozen white poppies sprang into bloom beneath the shrine. In all the fields rampant with bloom in Tuscany, I’d never seen a white poppy, nor had the workmen, who’d moved on to another project. We joked and stared.

Many local people believe that this area is hot in spiritual spots.

‘‘Can’t you feel something on the steps of San Francesco’s church?’’ I’ve been asked. Well, no. Nothing. But I consider the rogue white poppies and the cloudy angel, and I venture a small belief in that direction.

Now we are having a new stone wall built so that I can plant a cutting garden. Above that level, at the end of the vegetable garden, we sow hundreds of girasole seeds every year. The sunflowers, just the height of a friend’s nine-year-old girl, fill my house with their sunny presence.