"Look, a Byzantine model, white with blue dome."

"We are not hauling one of those through two airports. Who would be the one to carry it?"

"I could set it in front of our house in California. We could keep a votive lighted and photographs of our own dead inside. Maybe a poem by Ritsos."

"The homeowners' a.s.sociation would be on you in a heartbeat."

Hotel Byron in Nafplio, not easy to find, hides behind a boarded-up, domed Arab building and across from the church where the Mavromihalis clan a.s.sa.s.sinated the first president of Greece. I'm looking forward to meeting Steven's Greek family, but the bullet hole in the church wall is disconcerting. We hoist our bags up several flights of stairs to get to the hotel, then hoist again up to the third floor above that. No elevator. Nafplio shows everywhere the inheritance of the Venetian taskmasters. They ruled capriciously and often heartlessly, but wherever their Machiavellian hard hand was felt, the legacy is efficacious-the mellow colors along the water, the genteel houses, the piazzas; the Venetians knew how to set up a city for living pleasantly. We came to Nafplio on the previous trip and now stop by to see George Couveris at his shop Preludio, where Ed bought gold earrings with sapphires to remind me of the Aegean. His is the prettiest jewelry I've seen in Greece. I'm tempted again by a heavy gold cross with other sea-colored stones, but under the influence of Cretan simplicity, I don't even try it on. He remembers us and shows us all the latest designs, then sends us off to eat at Basilis, tables on the street, because they make the spiciest eggplant imam in town.

Because Ed likes hardware stores, we stop in to admire those triangular-handled aluminum trays for delivering coffee from the bar to a shop-how Italian that is. We buy skewers topped with bra.s.s owls, hares, and fish for our neighbor Placido, the master griller. What a throwback-they stock a number of frosted aluminum gla.s.ses and pitchers-those redolent of the 1960s colors, fuchsia, magenta, lime, blue, all sheened with the glow of moonlight. I'll take Fiorella a few handmade bells, though she has no sheep or goats.

The road gnarls through the hard mountains of the Peloponnese, and every kilometer subtracts something else from the landscape until only stark rock and determined shrub trees remain. Occasionally a lone monastery, a muscular little donkey, a scrawny mimosa. Finally we arrive in Monemva.s.sia, the poet Yannis Ritsos's hometown, which he called "the rocky ship, my ship of stone, which carries me across the world." I love his poems and quote to Ed, "I've always wanted to tell you about this miracle," and "I am totally inside myself like a person returning home after an exhausting journey." The great heap of a rock island joins the mainland by a causeway. Mostly abandoned, the town carved into the unforgiving rock broods alone, now that the only marauders approaching the islet are tourists. Taken by the Turks, the Venetians, then the Turks again, the history and geography conspire together to emphasize a besieged stance in the world. Ritsos, too, was always in trouble with politics, a resister, exiled to various islands. Monemva.s.sia, built facing sea, turns its back on the mainland. But they had to get their wheat somewhere; perhaps they were vulnerable after all. They had to go to the mainland to farm. A few houses have been restored; most lie empty and often roofless. Everywhere the sea reminds you of its beauty. Every house knew the beauty of the sea at all hours, and now the town's remaining restaurants occupy terraces that offer to visitors the three-hundred-degree views.

After climbing up and down the streets, we walk back to the modern town on the other side of the stone causeway. I sit down with an ice cream cone, while I wait for Ed to have coffee. Practically at my feet a man falls off his bicycle and lies unconscious in the street. People swarm out of their shops, someone slaps him, someone throws a pitcher of cold water in his face. I'm horrified-he's had a heart attack or a brain aneurysm. But no, he rouses, shakes his head, and soon pushes on. They must be used to heat prostration around here. "It happened to my nephew," a waitress tells me. "He fell off the tractor, and the tractor just kept going until it hit a stone wall." We spend a quiet night at a hotel right at the entrance to the secretive town.

Before we leave, I pay a visit to Yannis Ritsos, buried among his townspeople in a simple grave.

By noon we are in Sparta. Mother, imagine, I went to Sparta! A clean and modern city that has long since lost its legendary warrior rigor. We drive on in the afternoon to Mystras, another abandoned city, on the precipitous slopes of Mount Taigetos. According to Nature Guides: Europe/Greece by Bob Gibbons, there are blooming on this mountain three types of white saxifrage, golden drop, figwort, peac.o.c.k anemones, giant orchids, spurge, white irises, Judas trees, vetches-blue and yellow-and a scattering of horseshoe, somber, and yellow bee orchids. He lists toadflax, starry clover, and on and on. In the summer heat we don't see anything except dried gra.s.ses and a few drifts of something that looks like Queen Anne's lace but isn't. I would like to come back and spot the Nottingham catchfly, asphodel, and cranesbill and, in the air, rock nuthatches, booted eagles, peregrines, and blue rock thrushes. But will we ever come back to Mystras? The places people have abandoned have the rub of loss, the erasure of the particulars of living and the remains of form only. Gibbons's description of wildflowers in the Mani and around Mystras creates images in my mind of olive groves lushly carpeted in spring with spotted orchids, milk thistles, bellflowers, and burnt candytuft. Just the names of the mostly unfamiliar flowers lure me: valerian, gra.s.s pea, furry-leaved woundwort, catchfly. Dreaming of wildflowers not in bloom, I scurry over the hills peering into the abandoned houses. In the main church, I see for the first time ex-votos of houses. Why should that be surprising? After the body, what do we want to protect? Our homes.

We're drowsy as bees in the heat. Cicadas rhythmically shake their bags of nails, they're chugging like a train, rattling a thousand tambourines. I want to pour a bottle of water over my head. When we get back to the car, the temperature is 44.5 degrees Celsius. That's a heat-stroke-zone 112 degrees in the other world.

Now we head deep into the Mani. The Peloponnese has three thumbs of land protruding at the bottom of the peninsula. Mani is the middle one, and surely the wildest and most individualistic part of Greece. We are meeting our friends at Limeni on the coast, where there is a new hotel. Exhilarating to travel early in the morning with the car packed with luggage, heading into the roaring sun. How forlorn the landscape. Mountains jut straight up, and any slope is littered with low stone walls-sheep folds-that look like archaeological remains of a village. The pastel scent of oleander flies through the window, and no sign of human life appears for mile after mile after mile. If your car broke down, you would be in limbo. As we go deeper, hour after hour-niente, only stone. Nary a posy, only the rare pitiful tree. The ultimate subtracted landscape. I can imagine a pterodactyl setting down a big foot on the windshield of the car with an ear-splitting shriek.

But finally we emerge from a pa.s.s and wind down to the village of Limeni on the sea. At the taverna suddenly, we are greeted. We must have arrived for the baptism. The owners are cousins of our friend-everyone must be cousins in the Mani-but for now we are taken into the kitchen, fish are pointed out, and we are seated right by the water where cheery fishing boats ride their reflections. The cousins point out the home of Petrobey Mavromihalis, Steven's ancestor, who led the revolt against the Ottomans, in a cla.s.sic bite-the-hand maneuver. He'd been appointed bey, ruler of the area, a move by the Ottomans to give the illusion of power back to local people. Instead he united the famously warring clans of the area and led an attack against the Ottomans that resulted in the liberation of Kalamata. The Mavromihalis family conducted themselves with the same fearless zeal on many fronts. Elias Mavromihalis is honored every July 20 in Styra for a famous battle at a windmill, in which he and six other Maniots lost their lives in a brave exit from the windmill with swords.

During the years Steven and Vicki have been friends of ours, we've heard stories of this intense family. The bullet that made the hole in the Nafplio church was fired at the new president of Greece by Petrobey's brothers because Petrobey and other relatives had been imprisoned in Nafplio when they opposed this first president of the new independent Greece. All it takes is a day's drive through the mountains to see how conquering the Mani would be impossible. Pirates and slave traders frequently raided this area, and the Maniots were not opposed to those activities from time to time themselves. The terrain speaks of isolation, individualism, privation, and xenophobia. Ferocious defenders of their freedom and dreamers of liberty, way in the Mani, they also must dream of green beans and peas.

Our Mavromihalis clan, most peaceful and charming of humans, we find by the pool at the hotel. Vicki's family lives an hour north, and they've come down from her home place this morning with their four children. Steven and Vicki live near us in Marin, where they have important lives and careers and hundreds of friends. But they pa.s.sionately love their Greek heritage, and they are giving their children the great gift of a home in this world. Already the three older children, eight, six, and three, speak Greek fluently. They think it's funny to teach us , , , enas, thio, tris, one, two, three. They talk to baby Constantine in Greek, and probably he already understands. Last year Steven and Vicki bought a grove over the sea and are planning to restore a house. Every year they travel to Greece at least twice. Steven is a car buff, and last year they flew to France, where he bought a cla.s.sic Deux Chevaux, one of those hump-backed vintage Renaults, and the entire family drove all across Europe to Greece. Some might consider that a journey into h.e.l.l, but they had fun. They always do. Their family life warms anyone who's around them because all the children enjoy each other. They joke and sing and hold hands when they walk. "How did you do this?" I've asked the parents so often. "Why aren't they whining and fighting?"

"They know the family is a team," Steve says. But really, they know they are cherished and appreciated, and the atmosphere of mutual respect in this family feels palpable. I once heard someone say that the best thing a man can do for his children is to love their mother. In Steven's case that must be easy. Vicki shines with intelligence as brightly as with beauty, a clear open face, black eyes, and a smile that makes you see what she looked like as a nine-year-old. Steven, too, remains the boy who studied fencing and went to the Olympics for Greece. His enthusiasm and simpatico personality will always keep him vibrant. A top real estate agent, he continues to study history and philology, often teaching courses at Stanford and Berkeley. Vicki has put aside her work as an attorney for a while and guards the time she spends with her children, Franco, Nikki, and Georgia, followed by Constantine, who is about to be baptized. Now "this girl's through," according to Vicki. What beauties. From one legend springs the source of the clan's beauty: an early Mavromihalis wed a mermaid. I have an Irish runaway priest and nun in my ancestry, but this pales in comparison to a mermaid in the bloodline.

Steven points over the wall to a few stark marble graves by the sea. "Old Petrobey's buried down there." We tell him we've seen the family home in the village. While the children read and rest, Ed and I drive down the coast road and find a place to scramble over the rocks for a dip in the sea.

We meet for dinner in Areopolis, named for Ares, G.o.d of war. Formerly the town was called Tsimova but was renamed to honor Petrobey Mavromihalis. This whole area was fighting mad. A male child was known as a "gun." The town has sunk into a summer torpor, the lanes deserted, a few cats asleep in the plateia, the town square. Steven takes us to a family friend's restaurant, and he's given a hero's welcome. We begin to understand how Steven's surname resonates in Mani. Dinner goes on and on. "Nikki, did anyone ever tell you that you look exactly how Jacqueline Kennedy must have looked at six? If they make a movie, we're recommending you for the part," Ed teases. She has been told, and it's true. She has a rare presence and elegance, odd words for a child. Franco, the oldest, makes jokes. He has a vulnerability about him, a goodness that shines, and Georgia just exudes some kind of golden-haired girlishness that calls up the Greek word archetype. Constantine, a baby still, observes all and somehow looks wise beyond his years. By all rights, this late he should be screaming, but instead paws his bread and looks at his siblings as though to say, Just wait, I'll join you in a moment.

We're looking over plans for the new house and trading stories about permits and workers. The waiter begins playing games with the children, who are unfazed by dinner beginning at ten P.M. He finally walks them over to the plateia and buys them ice cream. He's obviously having a fine time, and they are too. Are they just enchanted children, or could this happen to anyone? Kalinikhta, good night, they call.

The family is busy with arrangements in the morning, so we drive to Vathia and other villages around Areopolis to look at the characteristic Mani towers. We pa.s.s more jutting stone and p.r.i.c.kly pear, tiny roads, and villages of stone towers crawling up sheer walls and chopped out of rock. For miles we see no one. No car. Nothing. Ah, a baby donkey-sign of life. In a few places old men are playing the same cards they play all over Europe. Roads narrow to rough paths. May the tires hold up. Nowhere else on earth looks like this, so the mind must adjust to the tower mentality, what the tower meant to them, the duty of the male to build his family a tower, the life inside the tower. The tower reflects who they were-and to some extent still are. Steven says that among the two hundred arriving for the baptism, six or seven Mavromihalis families have not spoken to each other in three hundred years. I hope no vendetta erupts.

As a traveller devouring a place for only a short time, the impossibility of developing a profound view bothers me. But sometimes you find a book, a book that so thrills you by its scope and love that your own disappointment dissolves with each page. Such a book is Mani by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Published in 1958, Mani records a trip he made on foot, by bus, and by boat all around this area. He and his companion, Joan, camped and depended on the kindness of strangers. He does not hesitate to depart into discursive essays on whatever interested him. I think he would have a hard time publishing this brilliant book in this age of the short attention span. He tells all; he's a cataloguer, an ecstatic, and his prose style makes few compromises with the ignorance of his reader. This is one of my favorite books. I did not get to go inside a Mani tower, but through Fermor's description I know what it's like to have dinner on top, the table hauled up by rope, and to sleep there catching any breeze under the stars. He describes descending, floor by floor, by ladders, each lower floor cooled more by the one above.

Although I hope Steven someday will write his own book about his family, Fermor conveys vividly the Mavromihalis heritage. They reached the pinnacle of their power, riches, and influence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and part of the reason for their hold on the Mani was their base at Limeni, a considerable harbor and the feasible gateway into Laconia and the rest of the Mani. He describes Petrobey's fine looks, great dignity, and gracious manners, which were "outward signs of an upright and honorable nature, high intelligence, diplomatic skill, generosity, patriotism, unshakable courage and strength of will: qualities suitably leavened by ambition and family pride and occasionally marred by cruelty." Minus the last, these qualities perfectly describe Steven. Petrobey, Fermor writes, "soars far beyond the rocky limitations of these pages into those of modern European history."

Scattered about the landscape, sometimes with almost perfect camouflage, the Byzantine churches are exciting to come upon. In Nomia, in Kitta, in lanes, and half hidden in the hills, these organic, sublime little Byzantine churches dot the landscape. They're one room in size with a curved apse. Often they're locked. They look made of mud with bricks stuffed in, or they're made of square stones, each one outlined in brick. One has an evil eye on a stone, one a sh.e.l.l; many are decorated around the door with bits of carved leaves and vines from other structures. Through a tiny window or keyhole, we can see sections of frescoes of horses or cool icons of Mary inside. So different from the Italian Mary, she looks remote, as though she is exercising Olympian disdain. Religion must have felt as stony as everything else in the land. The architecture gives me joy. A goat munching gra.s.s outside the smallest church in the world just looks at us as if to say, What did you expect?

We drive to the bottom of the peninsula, a camel-saddle of land with the sea on either side. A powerful zone-in the ancient world, Cape Tainaron was the entrance to h.e.l.l. Pirates raged for centuries, not only raiding ships of their goods but taking crews and selling them for slaves all over the Mediterranean. My American education about slave trading was woefully inadequate. I thought there was a one-way route from Africa to the American South. Every southern soul carries memories of the slave ships. They're never bound for Italy or Turkey, always Savannah or Charleston. How naive. As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward. You would think the tension of that string that connects the two is such that I'd hear a strong snap, perhaps while taking a short nap on some slow Einsteinian bus over the mountains.

We gather at the church in Areopolis. In the courtyard Petrobey and his seven thousand allies had their weapons blessed at the beginning of their expedition to Kalamata. Now an American son has brought back his boy for a baptism in the ancestral font. Before the ceremony the children pa.s.s around gla.s.s dolphin favors for all the guests. We crowd into the church-my G.o.d the temperature, we're going to expire-and the priests in their beards and robes begin to chant. I'm woozy. A fresco above depicts an infant baptism in the same font. Constantine is joining a long line of babies who achieve new life in an ancient place. He looks confident, then perturbed as his neat suit is stripped away and he is lowered naked into a vat of olive oil. I mean lowered, not just dipped. He's submerged, and when lifted aloft flailing and dripping, he screams like one of the Turks his ancestors offed. We're swaying in the powerful incense and the scents of sweat that must arise mostly from the robes of the priests. We have travelled many miles to feel the life of this child surge forward into his heritage.

The feast begins. Tables are laid on the rooftop of the hotel, some glimmer of the experience of family occasions on top of a tower. Constantine, no longer dazed, is pa.s.sed from arm to arm. He seems to know this is all about him. I have never seen so many black mustaches, woolly beards, rampant eyebrows that run together. The dancing begins, and the music that will play all night serenades the grave below of Petrobey Mavromihalis. The full moon casts a marmoreal light on the sea. Vicki stars. She knows all the dances. I'm reminded of our Italian friends who say, "You're more Italian than we are." She's as lovely as a G.o.ddess in her green dress. She dances with Steven, who ends on his knees, leaning backward. He then dances with each of his girls. People perform solo dances such as "The Drunken Man." The departure from tradition comes when a woman performs this heretofore male prerogative. She staggers and lurches as everyone applauds wildly. Apparently the old warring factions are dining together. We jolt out of our seats when gunfire goes off. The relatives are packing heat. They blast off round after round into the sky. Children dance; the son of the former prime minister, more gorgeous than any of the G.o.ds he has replaced, dances with his girlfriend, who is dressed in a short beach wrap. We meet Mavromihalises from all over Mani. Few of the dances involve couples. Circles and conga lines form, and everyone, even the ancients, join in. Steven gives a welcome toast and speaks eloquently about his family's love of Greece and the importance in their lives of their Greek families. The band plays mostly Greek music but then launches into "What a Wonderful World," with the magnificent line "bright blessed days and dark sacred nights." Tomorrow we drive back to Athens and fly home to Italy. We always will remember this dark sacred night deep in the Mani.

Among Friends Scotland My friends are my estate.

-EMILY d.i.c.kINSON "Looks like the quintessential Scottish house." Ed pulls up to the forecourt of a square-cut gray stone house, two stories, with small-paned windows and wings jutting off to the sides. As we rounded the bend on the b.u.mpy dirt road, I glimpsed a terrace and sloping garden on the other side of the house. A Scottie dog looks placed by central casting beside the great white front door. Gigantic trees shade the grounds. From a stable across the driveway, a tiny donkey comes out to see what's up.

We're last to arrive. Two small cars already are parked. The dog barks, the donkey begins to hee-haw, and Kate opens the door. Robin and Susan are right behind her. My three oldest friends from my California life.

"Where have you been?"

"We thought you'd run into a firth."

"How was the flight?"

"Down, Trumpet. Isn't he adorable? He's staying with the caretaker." Robin points to a small house down a lane. The Scottie seems to be trying to embrace my leg.

"The house is amazing."

"Amazing good or amazing bad?" I ask. Having had a few weird house rentals, I'm wary.

"Oh, good, but still amazing. You'll see." Kate obviously is relishing some surprise in store for me.

"We landed at noon, so along the way we stopped at a pub," Ed explains. "The food was so-so. In the loo they sold Scotch-flavored condoms."

"What's this 'loo' already?" Robin's husband, John, emerges and helps hoist my bag with its heavy tag. "Are you bringing Italian groceries in here?"

"Only olive oil. And of course, coffee."

Susan's husband, Cole, comes to the door. Someone should photograph him on the threshold, his characteristic dark purple silk shirt, silver hair pulled back into a tiny ponytail, the gray stone framing him.

"Have you shopped yet?" I ask. Food first.

"Did you all arrive at the same time?" We're answering questions with questions.

"Want some tea?" Susan, a Londoner who has lived all her adult life in California, slips right back toward her roots.

Wellingtons line the flagged foyer. A flock of umbrellas, some with broken jutting spokes, fill a corner. "Come see the living room. What do you think?" Kate gestures around a generously proportioned room with long windows overlooking the garden. Flowered sofas flank the fireplace on either side of a large ha.s.sock table loaded with books. Cole and Robin will be happy: a grand piano fills one corner. Comfortable chairs upholstered in worn velvet, portraits, lamps-some with shades askew-and a venerable Oriental rug all confirm Ed's original word, quintessential.

The dining-room table would seat twenty. The owners have left the silver candlesticks and lovely silver trays and coffee service on the sideboard. Such a contrast to our English Scrooge rental.

"You'll love the kitchen," Robin says. "It's huge-fantastic for all of us to cook together." The high-ceilinged kitchen is anch.o.r.ed by the immense creamy yellow Aga stove.

"It's the size of our rental car."

"And much heavier." Ed opens the door to the simmering oven, then the hotter one. "Those little cars are made out of heavy-duty aluminum foil."

"I'm excited-I've always read about the Aga and never have used one. It's on all the time, isn't it?"

Susan points out which areas on the surface are hot and demonstrates how to make toast with a screened gadget that you put bread in and rest on the heat. "We have to slow-roast something."

"Seven-hour leg of lamb," Ed suggests. "So it just stays hot all the time? This wouldn't do in most climates, but it must be nice in this one."

"The kitchen's always cozy. Even in July the room feels nice and snug but not hot."

"What fuels it, Suze?"

"The old ones used wood. This one is oil-fired, but it looks old. I think it has been retrofitted. You can even get electric ones. I guess the cast iron distributes the heat well."

A grand island with chopping-block top, an ample kitchen table, and a long counter all invite us to start stirring and mincing. Behind the sink, the wall is capriciously tiled in many colors.

They have given us the master bedroom and will hear no protests. In the adjacent bath Queen Victoria should be standing in the shower. The tall half-circle bra.s.s contraption sprays you all over as you bask in a mammoth porcelain tub. I can't wait to bathe.

We get lost among the eight bedrooms, numerous other studies, a TV room, playroom, and larders. With seven of us-Kate's fiance didn't come-a rambling house feels just right. I begin to see what was behind Kate's enigmatic "good, but still amazing" as we explore.

"These figures of the Madonna are everywhere. Everywhere," I notice. They all know of my collection of ex-voto objects and paintings of Mary, Mary Magdalen, and Jesus.

"Yes-paintings, ceramic figures, etched bottles, drawings-super kitsch."

"Any needlepoint chair-bottoms?"

"I'm going to count the Marys," Kate says.

Then Ed notices the TV screen in the room off the kitchen. "Look at this."

An aquarium has been wedged behind the emptied picture opening.

"This house is seriously idiosyncratic," Cole says.

"Yeah, yeah," the four women call out together. The three men look a bit startled, then laugh. Ed and John open the white wine in the fridge and pour. We drift outside to look at the climbing roses. Robin and Susan identify them all.

"Oh, there's the walled garden." I point down a path.

"How huge. Let's go look."

"It's at least half the size of a football field. How would you like to have built those stone walls? They're-what-eight feet tall?" Ed always notices stonework. Our life in Italy consists of moving stone, looking for stone, hauling stone in trucks, and building with stone.

"Too high for a deer to leap over," John observes.

We pa.s.s a rustic cottage orne with broken panes, full of rakes and wheelbarrows.

The wooden door to the garden should be opened with a big iron key, but Kate turns the handle and we walk in. We have been told we can pick our vegetables and salads on the land. We did not expect this glorious garden. Inside, gra.s.s paths intersect large raised beds. Roses scramble up all the walls. The strawberry, gooseberry, and raspberry patches look mysterious under their net draperies over poles tall enough that you can walk as you gather. They are all banked with straw so the leaves do not touch the ground. I realized in England that the name strawberry came from this method. Our beds at Bramasole yielded twice their usual amount when we tried the thick straw this year. We also mowed our plants in March, and that also seemed to spur them to new production.

John has brought along the wine bottle, and we sit down on benches along the wall and try to reconstruct the plot of The Secret Garden.

The men head back to shower first-or maybe they're not riveted by The Secret Garden. The women drift back to the terrace. We're slightly sloshed from two gla.s.ses of wine. Along the low stone wall a group of cows has gathered, and we walk down to see them. "These are Highland cows," Kate says. They have s.h.a.ggy russet coats and long bangs. They regard us with interest.

We begin to sing "Don't Fence Me In" quite loudly, followed by "Home on the Range." They move closer to us and seem to long for something. We set our winegla.s.ses down and pull up handfuls of the gra.s.s they already are eating. They decline. But they do seem to like "Amazing Grace." Robin decides that they have the hungry look of her freshman composition students and begins to lecture them on recognizing comma splices and the correct use of lie and lay. "Only hens lay," she explains. "Just write this down: lay takes a direct object. Eggs would be the object." Suddenly the cows toss their bangs, look alarmed, turn into a herd, and stampede away. We think this is very funny. "It's the lie-lay dilemma. Does it every time," Robin says.

John becomes our guide. He brought the books with restaurant listings, all the maps, and has noted the sites and gardens he knows we will want to see. This first night we drive to Falkland, a storybook Scottish town, clean and peaceful, with tea shops and a fountain and a thousand hanging flower baskets. They have won best village awards, flowering Britain awards, and they deserve them. We've reserved at the Greenhouse Restaurant, a place of Quaker simplicity and fresh organic food. Carrot soup, salad, grilled trout. To avoid check scrambles, we've made a "kitty." John, formerly business manager of the San Francisco Symphony and hence quick with figuring everything, including tips, pays for us.

Back at the house, we settle into the downy sofas. The owners have left us a good bottle of Scotch as a welcome gift. Cole pours little shots, but no one drinks more than a few sips. Too much hit for this California Zen-and-chardonnay crowd. Even at ten, light lingers in the trees and out along the horizon, where the cows must be puzzling out the strange behavior of humans. One by one we slip upstairs. Our feather bed envelops us. I can't see any of Ed except for a shoulder. We roll into a heap in the middle and sleep like the newly dead. And then I wake up at three. Streaks of dawn are beginning to touch the east.

I have been out of touch with these friends. I have missed mothers' deaths, operations, dissolving and reforming marriages, children's weddings. The trice-weekly phone calls to exchange small news have not included me. So powerful a force in friendship is propinquity, and I have not been around to take yoga and walk the dog in the Stanford hills. Since they have given up their jobs, they study piano with Cole and partic.i.p.ate in book groups and gourmet groups. Susan teaches gardening to children, Kate has laid a labyrinth in her garden and started a new relationship with someone I barely know, and Robin has become a pa.s.sionate whitewater rafter. I have been travelling and living over half the year in Italy. When I am in the United States, I'm travelling for my speaking engagements and various business commitments. Our friendship was forged when I lived in Palo Alto. When I divorced my first husband, I moved to San Francisco, only thirty minutes north. But when I started spending longer times in Italy, I saw less of them. They've visited Bramasole, but often when we're not around. Susan and Cole married there. I'll never forget the wedding cake we baked in the small oven I had then. The shape came out lopsided, but smothered in cream and cherries, the basic 1-2-3-4 cake tasted worthy of the occasion.

Four years ago we moved to Marin County, an hour, often longer, away from the Palo Alto area. Italy's siren call lures us more and more. Although we exchange e-mails frequently, I found that when I came home and called, I began to feel an uncomfortable distance. I'd summarize what I'd been doing, they'd summarize, and we'd try to stake out a date for lunch, a walk, or dinner.

So I located this house in Fife and proposed a reunion.

"Sounds like a sneeze."

"Sounds like you're lifting your boot out of muck." They're talking about the nearest village, Auchtermuchty. In Gaelic this means "height of the swineherds." The grocery store where we go to stock the kitchen seems strangely bare. "Is this a time warp from postwar rationing?" I wonder. Spa.r.s.ely filled shelves hold scattered cans of this and that. The produce is sad, woody carrots and brown-around-the-edges cabbage.

"Probably some gross shopping mall has driven them out of business," Robin says. We buy what we can and decide to go back to Falkland, where we were last night. The supplies are only marginally better, but the town is enchanting. Last night we didn't explore the brownish-gray stone town of turrets, steeples, towers, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century upright houses.

The Stuart royalty kept a hunting retreat here, rebuilding an earlier castle that we are delighted to see was once owned by the Macduffs. A remnant of the older structure's tower stands within the walls. We're attuned to the area as a setting for Macbeth. Robin has brought paperbacks of the play for each of us and is planning to cast us for a performance one night. We roam through the castle gardens, imagining young Mary, Queen of Scots, playing in the park in the few years before events and her own nature brought her calamity. How marvelous for the town to have these grounds right near the center.

Falkland is downright obsessed with flowers. Wooden tubs and farm carts overflow with blooms, window boxes adorn even the humblest house, tumbling baskets hang along iron fences and from iron poles, all prolifically spilling with splendid yellow and orange begonias, trailing ivy, lobelia, and petunias. The baskets are started and nurtured in polytunnels, then in spring everyone rushes to a town plant sale.

Roughly cobbled wynds, streets barely wider than sidewalks, are lined with old weavers' cottages. One has the wonderful name Sharp's Close. A plain house named the Reading Room gives a sudden flavor of nineteenth-century winter evenings, when a literate stonemason used to read aloud to the weavers. Here they gathered for stories and news. Around town we spot "marriage lintels" over the doors. These insets, some dating to the early 1600s, are carved with the initials of the couple who lived there and their date of marriage. A violin shop adds a musical note of charm to the center, as does a fountain, called Bruce Fountain, with four eroding lions. In Falkland we find two statues of Bruces, one Professor John Bruce and another with the fabulous name Onesiphorus Tyndall-Bruce. I did not learn how he got the name but did find out that he was married to Margaret, niece of the other Bruce. Margaret's father died out in India, leaving an illegitimate daughter that he fathered with "a native lady." The uncle had Margaret brought back to the family mansion, Nuthill, on the castle grounds. She was called Margaret Stuart Hamilton Bruce. Her uncle raised her from age eight. Later he opposed her desire to marry Onesiphorus, who had a pile of debts and was a.s.sociated with a bank that traded in slavery. "I wish you would marry a man of business," he told her.

Her reply-"He will become a man of business when he marries me"-reveals a gritty determination. In 1828, when she was thirty-eight and her uncle safely dead, she married the risky Onesiphorus and paid off his debts. She must have quickly whipped him into shape because he became a community pillar and an ardent restorer of the royal palace, which the Bruce family owned. He took her surname onto his own. There's no statue of Margaret, but reading about her, I suspect there should be. I wonder what happened to her mother.

We manage to load the trunks of the two cars with supplies. Kate spots a tearoom that looks properly dowdy. We pause for tea and crumpets doused in thick cream. Susan is in heaven; we're not far behind.

After siestas, in the late afternoon, Kate, Robin, Susan, and I take baskets down to the garden. Lettuces, tiny radishes, zucchini, beets, and new onions shine in their beds. I want to come back alone later. The walled garden seems like the perfect metaphor for the solitude of the mind. I pick out the fruit tree I will sit under. All of us have vegetable gardens (though Kate only grows Cabernet grapes on her land), but none has a poetic garden like this, and we are enchanted. The air is sweet and cool, not hot or cold, just deeply fresh. Underfoot the loamy earth sinks. Robin finds dill, and I pick a handful of parsley and thyme. Last we gather ripe, ripe strawberries.

For dinner Cole grills salmon-Scottish, of course-on the terrace. Susan concocts a prawn sauce with fresh dill, and rice with diced peppers. I roast beets in the slower Aga oven and slice them right into the most heavenly salad imaginable. The crisp greens right out of the garden-incomparable. Susan, by now totally into her English mode, creates her mother's summer pudding. Candlelight, a pitcher full of blue hydrangeas and white roses, the table laid-we're living here.

"This seems like something you read about-house parties where people are tipping down the halls to other rooms in the middle of the night," Ed says.

"Or Upstairs, Downstairs-only there's no downstairs." Kate pushes back the draperies for more of the late light.

"There is Violet. She was here this morning. Didn't you notice all the winegla.s.ses got washed? She's the housekeeper and will come later in the week. John and I were the only ones up."

We retire after dinner into what we're calling the drawing room. Cole and Robin play a Brahms waltz for four hands. Then they launch into Methodist hymns and Scottish ballads from a book Cole brought over, Seventy Scottish Songs for Low Voices, printed in 1905. I'm hoping no one takes it upon themselves to read Robert Burns's "best-laid schemes o' mice' an' men gang aft agley," or, G.o.d forbid, sing "Auld Lang Syne." Robin, I realize, loves to work with her hands. She gardens, does needlepoint, plays the piano, hand-marbles paper, and sets type from dozens of boxes of minuscule lead letters. She started her own letterpress publishing house when I first met her. I marveled at her patience in setting every little comma and putting all those s.p.a.ce bars just so. Her first effort was to publish my first book of poetry, and she since has published several collections of Ed's poems and a fine edition of another book of mine, as well as Marbling at the Heyeck Press and many other books cherished by readers of poetry and collectors. Her books are in many rare book rooms in the great libraries. Right now she's banging out "I Come to the Garden Alone," and since I know all the words, I can't resist singing along.

Cole teaches piano at home and gives private concerts. In the past he used to play in jazz clubs in Paris and Southern California. "How many times have I been asked to play 'Misty,'" he muses, launching into it only for a moment.

"Can you play our song?" Ed asks. "'A Whiter Shade of Pale.'"

"That's your song? Procol Harum? I don't know-how does it go?"

"You don't pick your song, you all. It picks you. This was playing in all the romantic moments when we first met," I say.

Susan and I try to sing the melody. The words are hard to remember. What makes the song memorable is the quirky voice of Gary Brooker. I'm astounded as Cole gradually pieces it together from our wavery rendition. He tries chord after chord and then is playing as if he'd always known all the notes. "It's Bach," he says, "'Air on a G-string' and a bit of one of the cantatas, 'Sleepers Awake.'"

"Well, that redeems us," Ed, my bonny laddie, laughs.

Before we go to bed, I get out my notebook and copy Susan's recipe.