Julia and the Art of Practical Travel Read online

  Belfry looked down at the postcards I’d sent him.

  Aren’t you going to be bored being back here after going to all of these places? he asked.

  Maybe someday, I told him. But it’s so different now that it’s kind of like being on another adventure. It’s a new home and an old home all at once.

  The wind blew through the house, and we could smell lilac on the breeze. That is what summer smelled like at Windy Ridge. Lilac and cut grass and thunderstorm rain and baked heat rising out of the terrace slate at sundown.

  I brought you a welcome-home present, said Belfry, and he gave me the cardboard box. Inside was the china teacup that we’d filled with dirt and tobacco seeds last summer, the day before Grandmother died. The dirt was still inside it.

  Did the tobacco ever grow? I asked him.

  Nope, he said. But maybe it will now that you’re back.

  We put the cup on a windowsill and walked outside to join Aunt Constance in the garden. The three of us sat there together, watching the bees in the grass and the leaves blowing in the river breeze—and I swear that not a single cloud crossed in front of the sun all day.

  The End

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author wishes to thank Erin Clarke, Molly Friedrich, Lucy Carson, Jay Mandel, Gregory Macek, Glynnis MacNicol, Sally Quinn, Sue Fry, Victoria Wasserman, Liesl Schillinger, and Stephan Wurth for their invaluable contributions to this book and the experiences that inspired it.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lesley M. M. Blume is an author and journalist. She lives in New York City but is a nomad at heart. When she travels the world, she always takes with her a trunk filled with glistening practical-travel things. She has written five previous novels for Knopf, including Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters and Tennyson, which the Chicago Tribune praised for its “brilliant, unusual writing.”