When I first saw our new living room floor upon our return to Rome three months ago, I blanched. My face turned the color of the pavement in front of me.

In place of the living room’s original wooden floorboards was a sea of shiny, white marble tiles. What used to be a cozy room now looks like an indoor ice-skating rink. I could already imagine Brian Boitano twirling pirouettes around our couches with his Olympic Gold medal dangling from his neck. It’s a cross between the waiting room of a doctor’s office and a nail salon. A friend took one look at it in a photograph and declared it Cesar’s Palace, as in the one in Las Vegas.

Whenever I receive a package slip from the Italian post office, it may as well be a notice for a root canal. All Italians join me in the misery as hours upon hours are lost waiting in line at the post office, and often not everything is resolved in one trip.

In late August, the clock tower chimed five o’clock at the Ferry Building in downtown San Francisco, and its traditional bells dueled with competing foghorns of cargo ships on the Bay.

It smelled like smoke, and my clothes reeked of a campfire simply from walking my dog around the block. The sky was blanketed with a hazy, beige film that had drifted in from the wildfires raging nearby. As of that day, hundreds of inhabitants had been forced to evacuate and, nearly 400,000 acres of ranches, farms, and villages had been destroyed. (n.b. This was just the start of the 2.5 million acres razed by wildfires about a month later, crowned with an eerie orange sky one day and a snowstorm of ashes the days thereafter.)

Stuck in a pandemic with blazing wildfires ripping up our surrounding landscapes, I felt more trapped than ever.

In running socks, yoga pants, and a black hoodie with dog hair all over it, I stand in front of my closet of cocktail dresses, silk blazers and palazzo pants, and run my hand through my greasy hair. My closet smells faintly of Jo Malone, a lingering scent of lime-basil perfume left over from pre-pandemic evenings out with my husband.

I dust off the faux-suede black purse with a gold-plated-link chain that was my nightly briefcase until a month ago. Inside it is my leftover ammunition: a lipstick, a pen, a place card setting with my husband’s last name calligraphed next to mine, and my business card with the icon of a typewriter at its center underneath my blog name.

Visiting my closet now during our shelter-at-home in San Francisco is like opening a door to a museum whose art display was abruptly shut down overnight. For the most part, I have worn close to nothing in this closet over the past month. It has become a shrine to my former life. The outfits inside it are costumes from the past.

They sat down to rest on a wooden bench at the bottom tip of the botanical gardens of Hawaii’s Big Island. Surrounded by pink orchids, yellow Hibiscus and verdant ferns, they settled into each other as a tired foot in an old slipper, my daughter nestled into the crook of my husband’s arm. He crossed his legs; she stretched out hers.

His white shins were rid of the office socks that were normally pulled up to his knees underneath a suit and tie. Sun-kissed, he sat comfortably slouched in running shoes, Bermuda shorts, a Hawaiian-print short-sleeved shirt, a Panama Jack hat and sunglasses.

This past Sunday night, I received a text from “AlertSF,” a mass blast of emergency messages to residents of San Francisco. Instead of reporting the usual urban happening like “fire activity cleared in the Mission” or “power restored on Treasure Island,” it offered some clinical advice: “Reach out & talk to someone. Call/text a relative/friend neighbor who may be socially isolated.”

I thought about that AlertSF team, likely on a brainstorming Zoom call out of their respective living rooms. What struck me most about their message was that it was extremely human. Maybe the text had been constructed by Artificial Intelligence – but it must have been from a robot with a heart.

Last night, just after sunset, after our comfort-food-coma had settled into our expanding, self-quarantined waistlines, we piled into the family Fiat and drove to San Francisco’s City Hall. My husband and I stood before a building in which we have spent many hours attending numerous events for the Italian-American community in San Francisco. But, before us, the municipal building looked different in a movingly familiar way: Mayor London Breed had lit up her office with the colors of the Italian flag to offer solidarity to our suffering country.

Early this morning, the San Francisco Bay was empty of its usual nautical traffic. No sailboats glided across choppy waters. One tugboat chugged behind a Costco barge. A foghorn barreled out a low E-minor sounding like a tenor warming up. The Bay glimmered like a millpond calling for ducks instead of whales. Seagulls flew overhead and cried among puffy clouds in a blue sky void of airplanes. Two trucks hot-rodded across the Golden Gate Bridge like Ferraris. There was no bumper-to-bumper traffic congesting the Robin Williams rainbow tunnel that leads to Sausalito. From our living room window, I was looking at our New Abnormal Normal.

After my previous post about the tyranny of apps, concerned readers suggested I chill out.

It’s easier said than done in a city booming with technology. But, when I’m feeling app-ed out, there is one place in San Francisco where I go app-less and unplug: The Presidio.

It only takes twenty minutes by car to reach the Presidio from Southern San Francisco as it’s located at the city’s Northern tip, right next to the Golden Gate Bridge. But it feels as if you’ve crossed a bridge, stamped your passport, and been transported to the countryside once you land on this magic carpet of 1,500 acres of escape holes from city life.

You know you live in San Francisco when you have a thousand apps to organize your life, and you’ve never felt more harried and electrified by technology.

Here’s how it works on a typical day for me in San Francisco.

You know you’re in San Francisco when you do a downward dog at your local gym with two other dogs stretching their paws next to your hands and feet.

That was me this morning, and the best workout I’ve ever had. There are certain things that happen in my daily life here, and I can’t help but think: only in San Francisco.

Yesterday was Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, the time to recall the atrocity of the six million Jews killed in one of history’s worst chapters. As Rabbi Serena Eisenberg said yesterday at San Francisco City Hall, we can remember but it is still hard to imagine.

Yet Luigi Toscano, an Italian-German photographer and film-maker, helps us recall the horror of the history through an outdoor exhibition titled “Lest We Forget” of 78 up-close portraits of weathered, wrinkled, and wise faces of Holocaust survivors. All of the photographs are displayed outside in between the trees of San Francisco’s City Hall’s main square, in two rows facing each other. Sixteen of the portraits were shot in San Francisco.

I never realized how important a Christmas tree was to me until I considered not having one.

I first experienced this when we lived in Israel where it was easier to buy a menorah than a Balsam fir. We ended up buying a fake Christmas tree in Nazareth. We were reluctant to give into a plastic evergreen that opened up like a Technicolor umbrella. But, we figured that, if it came from the birthplace of Baby Jesus, then God would forgive us.

Today I was reminded, while walking my dog, that making space for the little things in life can restore my faith in the big things.

I’m standing in front of an entire aisle of bouillon cubes. Dark green boxes covered with the drawing of a lady in a Fifties’ bob and puffy sleeves rolled up over her apron. The ingredients listed on the small, rectangular boxes are all in Hebrew.

It was the late nineties and the sales’ season beckoned me to Filene’s Basement on my lunch hour. I spotted an emerald, satin jacket on the Super Sales’ Rack. It was collarless, fitted, short-waisted, with shoulder pads, and opened up into a chic upside-down V when all buttoned up. With matching cigarette pants, it screamed Lady Diana. It was designed in Italy, a country I’d dreamed of living in one day. If I couldn’t be in Italy, why not wear it?