In Love with France, At Home In Italy

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...