That Time of Day

A pandemic survivor walks the trails of the Cinque Terre and looks back on a friend’s battle with AIDS decades ago. A daughter returns to her mother’s beloved Florence as a final goodbye, only to rediscover herself inside the curtailed reincarnations of Florence’s past. A frazzled mother misreads her young son’s struggles with identity and self-preservation; another mother and her daughter fall under the enchantment of a mysterious woman in Venice offering a phantom bird of flight and possibility. And three daughters escort their mother back to their family vineyard in Abruzzo for one last confrontation with the past and the pursuit of something, if anything, that can be salvaged from a time when women were told to follow men.

Each woman in these stories faces her own time of day, a reckoning. The old choices no longer hold. We cannot continue as we always have. So, what now? Where to flee for answers? We find them embedded in three places: in the arts, in the landscapes of our earth, and in connections. These, and sometimes these alone, keep us questing for love, for purpose, for who we are and where we are meant to be.