When I was twenty I married a girl from my country who left behind all she knew to live with me on the other side of the world. She landed on a bleak spring day, and while we waited at the airport for the train home, she was dazed from the trip and couldn’t stop trembling. Sadly I had no coat to offer her. My mother had insisted on lining our doorway and the building’s stairs with vases full of flowers, to give my wife a traditional welcome, even though the other tenants had complained, regarding this auspicious gesture as a nuisance and even a potential hazard.
