This year I would have celebrated twenty years of Kenya and instead I will have to "jump".
I remember it like it was yesterday. It was the 22nd October 2000.
Since then, every season, winter in Kenya until Easter or not, I go to Palm Sunday.
Only one year, when my mother died, I arrived in the middle of November.
I almost don't remember what winter is like in Italy anymore but I am afraid that this year I will rediscover it.
With everything that happened, the stories I saw and told, the relatives who are no longer there (a cousin with heart disease but always cheerful, full of life taken away at 53, aunt Ernestina, my father's sister, 88 years old with the normal pains of that age) I feel a bit selfish to say that I am living an injustice. But I will miss my spare world very much.
I will miss waking up at dawn, which is a real dawn because with you the colours of nature wake up, the clouds in the sky, the birds singing, the warmth of life.
I will miss the walk on the beach early in the morning, with the low tide and the young people running past you and saying "jambo!".
I will miss the cup of "chai", the tea with milk and that kind of krapfen they make.
Then I'll stop by the mama who sells fruit in a kiosk near the market and have the usual chat, in my terrible English. But she understands me, and if she doesn't, she smiles and teaches me a word in Swahili.
I almost always eat her fruit for lunch. Banana, mango and papaya.
If it's so hot, even a slice of watermelon. For half a euro I made lunch and I also know that I paid more than they pay.
There are days when I have too many things to do, even if what I prefer, in the afternoon, is to relax on the pilipili on the veranda, in my cottage near the sea (do you want to know how much I spend? 450 euros per month all inclusive. Practically like heating, electricity and petrol in Italy.
In the evening I am often invited by other Italian friends who have beautiful villas with a cook and service staff...on the one hand I say "blessed them", on the other hand I know that I would not be able to live that life.
Sometimes you go to eat a pizza...maybe the only thing I miss because I am lucky enough to like their food too! Two years ago I discovered a little Muslim restaurant that makes chicken, fish and many other delicious things and if I spend 5 euros it's a lot.
Of course, I'm not rich and the question of money is important to me. But for Kenya I would also make some extra sacrifices. I don't take a lot of pension, but in summer I do some gardening and lawn mower repair work and I put away for my six months in Africa.
I will miss my friends who come to visit me in the hope that I fall in love with them and marry one. Some of them ask me what Italy is like and if I can bring them up.
They are nice and full of life, naive and winking.
But I would feel ridiculous to be with one of them and I have never paid a woman to sleep with me, even though here it might seem normal, like a charity.
But it's curious to have twenty-year-old "friends", isn't it?
What I will miss most of all is to be taken to their house, to meet their family, their little brothers and neighbours. To sit on their dangerous stools and eat polenta and spinach with them, to understand how lucky we are and how simple and patient they are.
All this helps me to bear the burden of being an ordinary mortal who sooner or later will have to deal with fate. It helps me to erase the mistakes of my youth, the loneliness I suffered in too many years in Italy and above all to see so many people go crazy in my city and I believe in the others too.
This year, the most terrible of all, I will miss Africa very much but I know that thanks to all these wonderful memories, I won't go out of my mind like them.
Thanks Kenya, see you soon.