Love unfeigned

beautiful/fun thing:  We inspected two more apartments today, the ones closest to us:  the sisters' apartment in neighboring Pistoia, and the elders' apartment here.  The sisters' the sweetest little pad we've seen yet!  You walk in to the kitchen, it's sweet, fairly new, with a nice window.  Then you walk upstairs to the two other rooms/bathroom.  There are vaulted, beamed ceilings!  It's gorgeous!  So anyway, the beautiful thing started with the fun thing:  Blaine opened the window upstairs to check on the wooden blind, and leaning out, lost the cell phone from his shirt pocket.  He fumbled trying to catch it, and managed to grab the shell before the rest of it plummeted three stories below.   He came shambling downstairs where the three of us were, and we all looked out the window at the tiled veranda below.  There it lay, enclosed behind a four-foot fence.  It was pretty funny.  The sisters said they knew their neighbors on the front side of the building downstairs, but not the ones directly below where we were.  We all went tromping down to ring the doorbell, but no one answered.  Blaine and I walked around to the back, where he decided he would try to climb the fence.  Thank goodness the big dog we saw was in the neighboring veranda.  As we walked up to the fence, a young woman and a baby came out.  The sisters had explained our predicament to her, and she had come out to help.  They came out as well, and after we all had a good laugh over the phone - which still worked! - we had a wonderful conversation.  She declined interest in hearing our message because she is Mussulmana - Muslim - but she said she likes to study and appeared anxious to share with us that the members of her religion are tolerant of others.  She was a beautiful young woman, and by that I mean that there was an openness and a light about her.  She was very cordial and very soft-spoken.  She knows Russian (she comes from Azerbaijan), Arabic, Turk, and of course Italian.  She said she studied English in school, but lacking practice, has lost it, and was interested when the sisters told her they teach English weekly, at a youth center nearby.  She's on maternity leave from work with her six-month old, though, and didn't think she could attend, but asked if private instruction were a possibility.  Sure!  It was just a lovely, sweet discourse, unhindered by agendas or veiled suspicions.  Today in a magazine I saw a photo of scores of Muslim women demonstrating against Isis and other extremist groups.  They want the world to see Islam as it ought to be seen.  I see too many hysterical posts about radical Muslims;  I want people to reserve their judgment till they've met a real Mussulmano.