In Love with France, At Home In Italy

Huh? Even though you probably knew I was bad at math, you may be saying what's she talking about? For a start, I am recognizing that although I turned 66 on December 25, this is my 5th birthday year in Orvieto. Here's the sequence of events that culminated in the rough night that produced these musings. Getting ready to leave home I was not entirely recognizing myself in the old woman who actually had it together to go to her tap dance class the very morning of her flight, but when her son heard about it, HE did: "Mom, why should you be surprised? After all, by going to Italy, you are going to your second home." He was the smart one who had figured out that his transition-averse mother might be able to travel without freaking out, if it meant going from one nest to another.     Lessons from baseball The poetry of baseball is as old as the game, and literary evidence of the desire to return to home base goes back to the Greeks and beyond...

The “Hallelujah Chorus” is gloriously blaring, the mist over our valley is dissipating, and the hunters have temporarily stopped shooting (after all, it IS lunchtime in Italy). I’m thinking about letters: the one I posted here but never sent to Andre Aciman, the one Kafka never sent to the father who terrorized him, and the one Commissario Montalbano just wrote to himself in the novel I’m reading. Unlike the way it happened with Andre Aciman, with whom it was love at first sentence, it took me a while to get hooked on the Sicilian detective Montalbano. Although I went through an adolescent phase of devouring Mickey Spillane and his ilk, that is no longer my thing. Like the Italian husband who doesn’t “get” what his wife sees in the TV version of what he calls the “really short, bald, bow-legged Montalbano” who so often seems to be having an exasperated temper tantrum over the stupidity that surrounds him, I’m surprised at myself. I’m rethinking quite a number o...

The Dean of my residential college is a man of many parts--adviser, psychologist, teacher, wordsmith, disciplinarian, but mostly philosopher. During any given year, four hundred students look to him for whatever they are missing from home. Every Sunday night, he sends something he modestly calls "Notes and News," whose ostensible purpose is to forecast events and opportunities. But the highlight is always a thoughtful essay about how to live. On the cusp of returning to my academic home, I am thinking about an idea he brought up in last week's message:the concept of the liminal zone--the place where both expats and college students dwell, perhaps without even realizing it. "Liminal zone" is a fancy term for being poised on a threshold--neither here, nor there. As someone who has given her heart to more than one country, I like to think I know something about that. France started off as the love of my life. I teach her language and literat...

 I am celebrating the new year by changing the sheets—something I confess that I probably do not do often enough. Here in Italy, laundry is always something of a production. Umbria is not just the home of s-l-o-w cooking. Although Italian washing machines do seem to get things cleaner and with less of an impact on the environment and the clothes, they require an investment of time and forethought. Electricity is expensive and not to be taken for granted. Some frugal people only do laundry on the weekend when the rates are lower. I like to do it on a sunny day so I can hang the clothes out to dry, the way I imagine the local contadine do. As I consider things new and fresh, I am reminded of a message I just sent to a new friend who already feels like an old one: Ciao, G Thanks for your delightful message, which is a reminder that it can be nice to grow old here with new friends. Whoever tells you that you are a good writer is right! I'm impressed with your en...

As I stand here in my Italian kitchen eating and studying nuts in the fall sunshine, I am thinking that this is the kind of luxury an expat would understand. These almonds and hazelnuts were a gift from our neighbor in exchange for their having taken off our hands a few baskets of our white peaches. (Little did they know that this amounted to a double gift.) Until now, I thought that almonds came in cans, and hazelnuts in chocolate bars. But here in our corner of Umbria, they come right off the tree. When we shipped our half container of goods here, I happened to have included an olive wood nutcracker, origins unknown, that is proving its mettle. Because the nuts emerge from my nutcracker at a pace that makes me savor them, I find that my normally impatient self has been tricked into compliance with the relaxed rhythm of the Umbrian countryside--the aptly named Home of Slow Food. While buying an olive wood cheeseboard for a wedding gift, something made me get a little...

WELCOME TO WHAT COULD BE A NEW OLYMPIC EVENT  Tonight the drama factor was down a bit on the Olympics. Part of the problem is that we can only get the German coverage, which means that if you don't care only about German athletes and you only had one semester of German back in 1966, you are not going to be sitting on the edge of your seat. But then I heard it: the sound of either an enormous piece of agricultural equipment or a dangerous bit of Umbrian fauna. Since it was in the kitchen, it had to be the latter. In such an emergency, I tend to run the other way, close the bedroom door so as not to have the thing land in my room, and hope that it stays downstairs and disappears over night. There is, however, another solution:I can tell someone more courageous than I about the problem. All Olympic events pale in the face of my fearless daughter-in-law going up against a HUGE deadly hornet--the kind that regularly sends Umbrians to the hospital--with a frying p...

WE ARE LUCKY TO HAVE SEVERAL VARIETIES OF LUSCIOUS PEACHES IN OUR ITALIAN GARDEN, BUT THIS IS THE FIRST TO MATURE. IT HAS SUCCULENT YELLOW FLESH AND UNLIKE THE OVERABUNDANCE OF FRUIT PRODUCED BY OUR PEAR, PLUM, FIG, AND APPLE TREES, WE MANAGE TO GOBBLE THESE UP WITHOUT A PROBLEM. IN THE STATES, THIS IS CALLED A DONUT PEACH, BUT THE ACTUAL VARIETY IS CALLED SATURNIA. THEY ARE A JUICY, WHITE PEACH WITH AN EXTREMELY DELICATE, FLOWERY SCENT. SO IF THIS IS A TRIUMVIRATE, HOW COME THERE ARE FOUR PHOTOS? THIS DONUT PEACH DESERVED A SECOND POSE BECAUSE THE FIRST DID NOT DO JUSTICE TO ITS UNIQUE, FLAT BEAUTIFUL SELF. WE SAW PESCHE GIALLE AT THE ORVIETO MARKET AND COULDN'T RESIST TRYING THEM. THEIR SURFACE IS SMOOTH, NOT FUZZY, BUT IT'S DEFINITELY STILL A PEACH, NOT A NECTARINE OR APRICOT. THIS VARIETY, WHICH WAS NEW TO US, HAS A HEAVENLY PERFUME. ********************************** MIRROR, MIRROR, ON THE WALL... SO WHICH IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL? WHICH TASTED THE ...