Sailing Home from Rapallo

[Feburary 1954] Your nurse could only speak Italian, but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week, and tears ran down my cheeks. . . . When I embarked from Italy with my Mother's body, the whole shoreline of the Golfo di Genova was breaking into fiery flower. The crazy yellow and azure sea-sleds blasting like jack-hammers across the spumante-bubbling wake of our line, recalled the clashing colors of my Ford. Mother traveled first-class in the hold; her Risorgimento black and gold casket was like Napoleon's at the Invalides. . . . While the passengers were tanning on the Mediterranean in deck-chairs, our family cemetery in Dunbarton lay under the White Mountains in the sub-zero weather. The graveyard's soil was changing to stone--- so many of its deaths had been midwinter. Dour and dark against the blinding snowdrifts, its black brook and fir trunks were as smooth as masts. A fence of iron spear-hafts black-bordered its mostly Colonial grave-slates. The only "unhistoric" soul to come here was Father, now buried beneath his recent unweathered pink-veined slice of marble. Even the Latin of his Lowell motto: Occasionem cognosce, seemed too businesslike and pushing here, where the burning cold illuminated the hewn inscriptions of Mother's relatives: twenty or thirty Winslows and Starks. Frost had given their names a diamond edge. . . . In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother's coffin, Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL. The corpse was wrapped like panettone in Italian tinfoil.