Did you get the memo?

You've done enough.

23 luglio 2025

The incense is called Villa Medicis. I’ve been using it every day for long enough to forget when I started. But I fell in love with the idea of it because I visited Villa Medici in Fiesole a few times and I couldn’t stop thinking about the three things. The views of Florence, the geraniums, and the teak chairs in the garden. I wanted at least two of the three, I decided. I have the chairs. I had the geraniums earlier this summer, but the Tuscan sun burned right through them, turning them almost black. I have a view even if it’s not Florence. Who is going to split straws over views of Florence or views of the beautiful Tuscan Vinci Valley? Not me.

My body pulses with a low grade ache after hauling myself around this big old casa for the last five weeks in a wheelchair, then scooting around on my seat and sometimes crawling on hands and knees. I broke my ankle and had an old-fashioned plaster cast and not a single person doodled on it. That is how sequestered I have been. I was a hermit crab, pulled into my shell, my home, my weariness, my sadness about not being able to do things with any sense of ease. Like move a vase. Or fill the vase with flowers from the garden. Or make a bed. Or iron linens for the Guest Room. Or take a shower. And the thought of how these simple things make a life. After eating and sleeping and being safe in the world. I repeat, or taking a shower.

Thirty days after breaking my ankle, the cast was cut away, a ghost of grief released from the chalky plaster, buried there until I invited it into my shower with me. A stripping off my clothes, Lee’s steady hand nearby, I took my seat in the shower and let it rain down on me and I don’t know what the shower is and what are my tears of great joy and relief and grace and the grief. Of the body, the body that has served me for all these years. Healing itself with such loyalty and tenderness.

Then the lotion. The lotion is Santa Maria Novella. I rub it onto the tired shrunken skin hidden beneath the plaster for the last thirty days. But I couldn’t stop there. I rubbed those ancient oils into my bones and with it, I remembered who I am.

“Aphrodite needs new roses” Lee tells me. I can get to the garden on my crutches, so I go to cut the freshest blooms of something that is white but sheer, with peach shimmering from within the petals. Snip, snip, snip then a thorn scrapes my arm to bleeding. Snow White, the thorns show us where there is danger, even though the beauty is too much and I can’t turn away. I will bleed for beauty.

Lee prepares the glass vase, cloudy like cataracts, but still beautiful because only beautiful will do for Aphrodite, a plaster model holding court on the sacrestia, the 16^th Century cabinet that held the vestments of priests and sacred vessels for the wine, the blood, of Christ. I see now Christ bled for beauty, too. He could see how beautiful human beings could be. With ritualistic reverence, like the chalice of wine, the vase with the new blooms is placed on the silver tray at her feet. The marble bowl holds shells, born from the sea was she and born from the paintbrush of Botticelli. I place a stick of Villa Medicis in the dirt of the avocado plant that decorates her corner of the room.

I thought I could be reborn these past five weeks. This Renaissance life. Born again. Betrayed by the body, I thought I would become a Human Being, not a Human doing. I would write and sketch and maybe cover paper with paint and water. But I did almost nothing. I could not let go of the striving, even if the striving was to be creative now that I had the time, a nagging list of things I could have done, I could have been, I could have been born into again, and none of which included the insanity of managing Italian health insurance and an ID card, yet another Italian number and buying a car in this country, all of which was like bleeding to death by a thousand paper cuts. Bleeding not for beauty. I couldn’t even write a sad poem. I was that hung out to dry.

I never got the memo that I have done enough for three lifetimes.

Until Lee said it one day. “Stop, Alecia. Stop. Rest now.”

Buona notte from Pistoia. Sogni d’oro. (Have dreams of gold.) Thank you for being here, friends.

Alecia