In the Fall of 1999, my mother-in-law Mona took me shopping in Rome, Italy. We were visiting for the week to celebrate her wedding. It was a lavish affair. She and her husband-to-be—not our favorite person, but he seemed to make her happy—had booked a fancy hotel suite in the middle of the city. The kids had been flown in from America: my sister-in-law from Seattle, the fiancé’s son from New York. Some family friends had made their own way, from California and from Holland, where my husband and I were also traveling from.

The ceremony was at one of the oldest cathedrals in Rome. We had all met at the honeymoon suite for cocktails earlier and were now sitting in high-backed wooden chairs witnessing the joining of this middle-aged, albeit good-looking, couple. Mona looked dashing in her white Gucci pencil skirt and jacket, and we had to admit that her fiancé didn’t look half bad either. Not that we understood what she saw in him. All we ever saw was an abrasive, opinionated guy who took every opportunity to steer the conversation toward politics just to try to get a rise out of people.

We had gotten married just a few months earlier, in March of the same year. It was a desperately humble wedding compared to this one. No hotel suites and fancy dinners for us, just a 10 am wedding on a rainy Wednesday morning at the City Hall of my hometown. I wore a long Kookaï dress I had bought for a New Year’s Eve party. It had spaghetti straps and a bold autumnal floral design all over. My naturally blonde hair was dyed a dark brown, cut into a twenties-style short bob with bangs stopping just short of my plucked eyebrows. My fiancé wore a brown suit that vaguely matched my outfit. After the ceremony, the small wedding party walked to the local café for lunch. My parents picked up the tab, and that was that.

My mother-in-law had flown in from California to attend the wedding. She cried the night before during our visit at her hotel room. We were nineteen and twenty-two. I didn’t understand what she could possibly be so worried about.

I recently pulled the old wedding photo album from the back of the bookshelf (what to do with the wedding album of a failed marriage?) and flipped to the photos of the ceremony. In stark contrast to the rest of the wedding party, with heads cocked slightly, visibly touched by the young newlyweds, Mona’s shoulders are crunched up, her arms close to her body. Not unlike us at her ceremony that same year, her expression is deeply dubious.

It was early evening, surprisingly dark already. Walking arm in arm, Mona and I flipped the collars of our jackets up as we started our window shopping, eyeing beautiful silk scarves displayed just so, and women’s shoes in leather like the glistening skin of a beautiful stranger. We kept looking down at our feet, careful not to trip on the irregular 14th century cobblestones. The narrow streets were still wet from a recent rain shower, illuminated by the warm streetlights.

“Do you want to try this place?” Mona asked, reaching for the ornate doorhandle of one of the boutiques.

I shrugged and smiled uncomfortably. This stuff looked expensive. Mona smiled. The doorbell rang as she opened the heavy wooden door to let me through.

From the back of the shop we heard the shopkeeper call, “Buonasera!”

I had never been taken out shopping before, not like this. My mom has never been much of a shopper. Growing up, she took my three siblings and I out clothes shopping once a year. That is, until we turned sixteen, when she started giving us a monthly allowance, shrugging off the responsibility of buying our clothes with relief. The yearly shopping was the only time I remember spending any real one-on-one time with my mom. During the last one of these yearly outings, as always, we left home early on Saturday morning so we could get to the shops as soon as they opened. My mom doesn’t drive and so we rode our bikes to the city, a forty-five-minute ride. Since my home village has no amenities, bicycling is how all of us got around. It’s still how most Dutch people get around. Asking dad to give us a ride into the city wasn’t even a consideration. Our family car was used for my dad to get to work and for my parents to go grocery shopping. Other than that, the car sat in the garage.

Once my mom and I got to the city, we parked our bikes, and spent an hour or two dashing in and out of stores, until mom was satisfied that I had what I needed. I don’t remember us ever stopping for lunch, though I imagine we must have.

The longer Mona and I strolled those beautiful cobblestone streets, the more comfortable I became weaving in and out of boutiques, allowing myself to enjoy the beauty of the wares, fingering beautiful fabrics, eyeing jewelry in glass cases. Scanning one of the racks, my eyes were drawn to a beautifully knitted sweater, the color a gorgeous ombre, a deep wine-red fading into a pale pink as it approached the collar. It looked like a piece of art to me, the very essence of autumn transformed into a piece of clothing. I didn’t dare ask, but Tamara was already reaching to take the sweater from me.

Mom and I now carrying several plastic shopping bags each, I knew we had exhausted her budget as well as her energy. But I asked to go into one more store. Mac & Maggie was my favorite new shop, an impossibly cool Dutch fashion chain, now long extinct. I had been drooling over their catalog for months, artsy models wearing mauve crop tops, velvet pants and shiny black boots. Standing up on my toes, I reached for a cute black top. I immediately sensed my mom’s hesitation. Maybe it was too expensive?

“What’s wrong with it, mom?”

“Nothing, not really.”

The black top was in the new 1990s style: tightish around the bust, flared at the bottom, like a baby doll dress. It wasn’t going for trashy, but it was fitted. My mom seemed at a loss for words, something I wasn’t used to.

“I guess you really aren’t a little girl anymore.”

It was so rare for mom to be anything but unflappable, I didn’t quite know how to respond. I wonder now what she was feeling. Grief? Pride? An unnamable feeling in between the two?

The moment passed. “Okay, let’s go pay for this so we can head home.”

We carried the shopping bags to our parked bikes, and mom fit each of them snugly into the two well-worn sidesaddle bike bags hanging on either side of her back wheel. I was not looking forward to the long ride home. Slumped, I was careful not to complain. I knew the first part of the ride back wasn’t so bad, with plenty to look at passing through and out of the city and into the suburbs. But our village is a good twenty minutes past the last suburb, and as you get closer, the landscape turns to large, flat farm fields. With no shelter from buildings, the wind is able to move freely across the land. Somehow, no matter whether you’re coming or going, there always seems to be a headwind, often paired with cold rain. Ducking my head and pressing on, the bike petals felt twice as heavy.

When I was smaller, I usually started falling behind halfway down those fields. Mom would turn her head briefly and slow down to let me catch up to her. Without a word, she put her hand flat on the middle of my back to gently push me the rest of the way home.

When her son and I divorced, Mona was heartbroken. After ten years of being my mother-in-law, she assured me I would “always be her daughter.” Celebrating their twenty-third wedding anniversary, she and her husband recently traveled back to Italy for the first time since the wedding, taking the entire month of October to travel up and down the country revisiting their favorite places. Unbeknownst to me, and I think most of us, she put together a WhatsApp group, the recipients what appeared to be the original wedding party, plus a few additions, like our teenage son and Mona’s newish daughter-in-law. Every day for the month of October, she shared photos of the sites they visited. There were photos of piazzas, the Pantheon, Coliseum, the Vatican gardens, and the two of them looking overjoyed eating dinner at the restaurant where we all ate together twenty-three years ago.

Since the birth of a daughter with my second husband, most likely her last grandchild, my mom has been busy knitting baby sweaters. She started sending them before the baby was even born, and over the course of her four-month-old life, more sweaters keep showing up at our front door, in beat-up looking packages that travelled all the way from Holland. Every few weeks, a new package arrives in the mail. My favorite one so far is of a soft pink, a color reminiscent of somewhere between the deep red bottom hem and the pale pink collar of my favorite sweater from Florence. It’s the essence of Autumn.