When Love Becomes an Instinct

Chapter Four

            Robyn immediately ran the short distance- five really HUGE steps to be exact- from the living room to the kitchen as she heard the loud Ting of the oven as it seeped through the walls of her small apartment tucked deep in the heart of Emilia-Romagna in Italy. She loved them- both the delicious cinnamon rolls of Auntie Carlota and the small apartment leased to her by Auntie Carlota and her husband, Uncle Carlos. She remembered desperately scribbling a note in her diary about having a private home in a very old and rural place in Italy where she could shut the window panes and curtains, turn the lights off, and hide herself inside the nook of her bedroom where she could cover herself with white bed blankets and romantic paperback novels. Of course when her father asked her to go live in Italy to look over Touche Italia, she wanted to jump up and down because, damn! This was Italia they were talking about! But then thinking of driving towards a place her father considered a task for her to do as his daughter, made her insides coil. Italy was a resting place for goodness’ sake! It was a romantic place to explore not a place to work like some twenty-four hour surveillance camera with.

        But when she drove the long, long distance from the airport to somewhere in Emilia-Romagna, she forgot about hiding from her work and wanted to explore the province more. And then she saw the house and Bam! She was in love!

        It was like a secret Hansel and Gretel house. A small house with flower patches, demure windows, and lace trimmed curtains. It was one of the several small houses of the same style among chestnuts, olive trees, and cherry trees. Below were meadows, the ones she saw on TV where flowers lay like blanket and trees scattered, its canopies like pillows adorning a yawning valley below. Inside, there was only one bedroom. Painted in clear pastel colors, the bedroom sported a variety of paintings and pictures of Mother Mary and Baby Jesus, little windows set in thick walls depicting a view of the magnificent valleys outside.

        Although the apartment she rented –technically owned considering her long residence there- was like a castle hidden in a fairy tale land, far from civilization, it was still a place to behold and to get lost in. It was a place she wanted to walk with bare-feet in and to dream of candle-lit dinners with-

            Hopeless. She was hopeless. And a romantic. But more of the former than the latter.

            After munching- No, Devouring- the cinnamon rolls and gulping on a huge serving of sweet, black, coffee, she quickly thanked Auntie Carlota, grabbed the keys of her 2013 Ford F-150 Pickup truck, and headed straight for Book Worms with the seven huge boxes as her passengers.

        Book Worms was not so far away, actually. She just needed to get her pickup up a hill, two bridges twenty kilometers from each other, a vineyard, a scare crow, and finally, a cottage style town house. Okay. It was slightly far away.

        Beside Book Worms was a lake where some of the children from The Cottage, the nearby orphanage,play their paper boats with. On her way, she saw some familiar faces of the young ladies of the book club she was supposed to be visiting, playing with some of the orphaned children.

        She could not help but smile. Partly because of the children, but more so because of the ladies of the club. Women ages eighteen to their late thirties residing at the same province of Emilia-Romagna, meeting all together every Saturdays and Sundays to get away from all the stresses at school, work, and their chores back at home.

       She paused to think that these women reminded her of herself. They shared a lot of similarities like their love for books, cups of coffee, almost the same dreams, and most especially, they all shared the same notion of taking a break from whatever it was that kept them busy.