Life grew quiet after my friends left Rome. My days and then years fell into a routine. After setting tobacco and birdseed out on the window ledge each morning, I attended early mass at Santa Maria della Vittoria. Work occupied only a few hours. Afternoons were reserved for walking, and it became my practice to extend my rambles when the weather was fine. 

           I equated the seven hills of Rome with the hills that make up an Ojibwe lifetime. The first hill was childhood, and the second was adolescence, when I went through my makedekwein. The third hill, womanhood, seemed to me to be a series of hill...

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