Thursday was the highlight of the visit. That was the day we set aside to take our guests to the wine country in the car Michael had rented.

It wasn’t as nice a day as we’d hoped, being a bit on the gray side, but it wasn’t cold. Just kind of colorless, and because the sun wasn’t out, the countryside didn’t look quite as pretty as usual, especially when we got caught on a Sonoma county road jammed with one of those mysterious California backups, a long line of motionless cars on the two lane rural road. That held us up for about forty-five minutes while we sat and looked out over a predominantly gray and off-green landscape of scraped-looking hills.

By the time we got to the Sattui Winery, we were all hungry. Sattui is a favorite wine country stop because of its deli. You go in, taste some wine in the shop and wine-tasting room, select and buy a bottle, then go into its aromatic, richly-lit deli and look over the selection of domestic and imported cheeses, pates, sausages, breads, mustards, olives, etc. I picked out some wonderfully creay-tasting brie, sharp, pale cheddar, a Cotswold. My sister-in-law picked out a Zinfandel. We ended up with peppered slaami, prosciutto, duck pate, all of which we carried out to one of the picnic tables outside.

Wonderful food, good wine, good company. The perfect picnic, in spite of the tables being set on cedar shavings, the gray sky, the sound of the highway nearby. A family walked past carrying an infant who watched us with a steady and mysterious delight, a little spider the color of burnt gold skittered across the table, we had as much to eat as we wanted, and no place we had to be afterwards. When we finally gathered up what was left and cleaned up the rest, it was slowly, with a lazy, contented ease.