The sunglasses

You might have to actually know my aunt to appreciate this, but here we go. Yesterday we were tooling around Montepulciano which has a lot of very steep streets. I'm talking 45 degree angles. By the time we left we were all a bit exhausted. As soon as we hit flat ground, my aunt discovered she had left her sunglasses at the place where we ate lunch - yep! at the top of the hill! Now these are pretty cool sunglasses. They fit snuggly over her regular glasses. But, rather than climb that dang hill again, she decided she could get by without them.

Not Ed. He quietly spirited away as we were getting a few groceries and ran up the hill himself to retrieve the lost glasses. Well, he ran the first 10 feet then decided to give his heart and lungs a break and walk the rest of the way. My aunt fell really bad that he went all the way back up there, but she was glad to have the sunglasses back.

Fast forward to today. We went to the hill city of Cortona - made famous by Under the Tuscan Sun. Bought some souveniers, had some gelato (of course) and had lunch. As soon as we sat down for lunch, my aunt started rooting around in her stuff like she was on a truffle hunt. She searched her souvenier bag, her coat, her purse. Then she searched them all again. We just watched her not having a clue what was going on. Finally she admitted that AGAIN she had lost her sunglasses! But this time we knew not where. So after lunch we went to the store where we had bought some scarves. The lady in the shop didn't speak a lick of English. So we tried to ask about the sunglasses using some rather odd hand gestures. She showed us some lovely cases for glasses. We tried to make her understand that we lost them. She finally got it, but didn't have the glasses and felt really bad about it!

Next we went to the shop where my aunt saw some beautiful dishes. No sunglasses there, but she did decide to buy one decorative dish. After that we ran out of ideas so decided to cut our losses and move on. As we were almost to the bottom of the hill, we saw another shop that we had visited, but forgot about. Again we tried to ask about the lost sunglasses. Again the shopkeeper showed us her glass cases and even some drinking glasses. A passerby translated for us and, lo and behold, that was she had left her sunglasses! 2 hours earlier!

I can hardly wait for tomorrow. We're going to visit an Abbey and hopefully won't have to roll any of those monks looking for my aunt's sunglasses. But, with my family, you never know...