Wonder

Big milestone: At the end of the month, I will have been married to my husband, Javier, for 30 years. To celebrate, we planned what we both consider a once-in-a-lifetime family trip to Croatia, Italy, and Greece. Thirty years. Holy moly.Here we are arriving in Croatia My eyes and my heart and still full of the beautiful sites I took in, particularly Santorini, with its wide marble streets, the domed churches, and Bougainvillea vines along the windows. And, of course, I'm still full in other ways, too -- mostly from my nearly constant visits to the pasticcerias and gelato stands. (I had NO IDEA that food could be this good.) Javier in Oia (Santorini)Marble sidewalks. The Mediterranean. Cave houses. Too beautiful for words. Here are three fun literary tidbits that happened along the way. When my kids were in elementary school, we read aloud The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke. (She is one of my favorite children's authors. Check out her website; it's amazing.) Every night, we'd let our imaginations take us to Venice where a band of masked orphans lived hidden in boarded-up opera houses along the Grand Canal. "I want to go to Venice one day," my son told me. I never forgot that moment when a book connected him to the larger world than he knew. So, here is a photo from Venice that I took last week. It's a perfect reminder of a place where I think those orphans might have lived. Probably deliciously spooky in there.…