EPIPHANY!

-

Epiphany!
Tomorrow is Epiphany Day here. That means that everyone is entitled to be home waiting to have one. Of course it goes without saying that you and I have them all the time, and don't use that as an excuse to do niente. But as my mother put it so UNpolitically correctly, this country is full of "those lazy I--talians," so what can you expect? To answer your question about whether we made it to any wild boar roasts, nobody invited us to any boar-related events. But then again, they didn't shoot us, either, so I am grateful. And unless I have any epiphanies tomorrow, I won't be eating Bambi's mamma, or any hares or bunnies or squid or little game birds or duck, with the exception of the occasional piece of foie gras. Spoken like a true hypocrite, no?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

IF YOU MUST HAVE A SMALL MISADVENTURE, MAYBE YOU SHOULD HAVE IT IN ITALY?

-
Image
We try to steer clear of the mal'occhio (the "evil eye" that causes bad things to happen). But the same week of our little bumper mishap, a close friend told us about his own "contretemps." That's a fancy French word for problems that can arise when one is entering a parking lot at the same time when someone is exiting, but when one of you has the sun in his eyes.  One might say to oneself, as he did, "All I can really see right now is "niente," but what are the chances that anyone would approach during the second it will take me to cross this threshold? Well, because our local Lidl grocery store is very popular at that hour, a quasi-invisible someone could indeed be close enough for anyone entering the lot to scrape two of her car doors.  There was a witless eye-witness to this event. To clarify--the door-scraper's wife who had been following behind in another car and also had the sun in her eyes did not yet realize tha...
Read more

HOW HITTING YOUR BUMPER WHILE BACKING UP INTO JUST ONE IVY-COVERED STONE WALL CAN PUT A DAMPER ON YOUR DAY

-
Image
OOPS! Ivy-covered walls in the Italian countryside are picturesque, but not always as innocent as they look. We thought it would be a good idea to hop into our 1999 Renault to take it for a spin. After all, the poor thing had been sitting there for far too long exercising its primary function as a fruit dryer. If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that the windshield of this proud French vehicle is the linchpin of our efforts to manage all the fruit we produce. The method goes like this: put the fruit of the moment in a foil-covered IKEA roasting pan on a sunny Umbrian day, and you're good to go. Or rather, you will be going nowhere for a while, while that fruit caramelizes nicely.  The red-lit "STOP OR THIS VEHICLE WILL EXPLODE!" did not deter my optimistic husband in the least. "This car is so old that it often says alarming stuff like that, but doesn't really mean it." But I was not convinc...
Read more

ON BEING A PRINCIPESSA (OR IMAGINING THAT YOU ARE)

-
Image
Looks like paradise and a great place to have to oneself for a few weeks, no? Well, it pretty much is. But only by day. The other night I went down to turn off the light in the kitchen only to find that it had been taken over by flying and crawling aliens. They were everywhere, and I had to jump out of my delicious torpor and into a killing frenzy. Last year’s invasion of the flying ants had resumed! They had made an initial appearance the other day, but I had taken what I thought were definitive extreme measures to reclaim my turf. (Just goes to show that the Ancient Greeks did not have a monopoly on hubris.) I had removed all temptations from the counter and ferreted them out of the most unexpected places. I think the other members of the family might be surprised to know that they are not the only ones in the house to love coffee. The biggest swarm of them was on top of and under the machine. But there were some tea-totalers, too, who had decided to set up residence in the...
Read more