Grazie mille

To whoever you are who read this blog -- any part of it -- this year, thank you.  Thank you for having an interest in our life and our year and for reading what I write, for being part of our Italy adventure for this year.  Sometimes I haven't known whether anyone was reading, and that was okay.  Sometimes a friend would send a message that she or he had read an entry or many entries, and I would feel so happy and connected and appreciative.  Writing has been a really wonderful part of this year for me.  So thank you for the encouragement and support and interest and really really wonderful and generous gesture of reading.

The End

venerdi

It's nearly time.  More packing and cleaning and recycling to do, but the end is nearly here.  Final sleepovers and playdates.  Some goodbyes.  Beautiful farewell letters for each of us from Cristina and Marco.  Cristina's tiramisu at Lago di Vico today.  A final birthday party for a classmate of Hannah's on Sunday.  A sleepover for Connor tonight.  Laundry laundry.  We are here and we are home.  We are eager to go, and I miss here already.

It's 98 degrees today in Viterbo.


sabato

Hair cuts.  Final errands -- washing of duvet covers, more suitcases, a few gifts.  Lago di Bolsena with kids plus two friends.  The heat and my lack of sleep have caught up with me.  I feel sick, a few times today on the verge of passing out.  I lie in bed some, but I can't fall asleep as easily as Connor can; he can sleep anywhere when he's wiped out.  Sebastian stays home to watch the World Cup games (Italy lost to Netherlands -- che triste!), and I stay home to rest, but I putter because it turns out that it is a lot of work to move us across the ocean.


domenica

Coffee at Red Rose Cafe with Pat and Linda and their girls.  Mass at Sacra Famiglia.  The last trip to Emme Piu before they close at 2pm on a Sunday, walking out with Esta The and Nutella, of course.  We play Memory and Old Maid, and I'm reminded of playing Old Maid with Mary, my aunt Margo, and Hannah when Hannah was about 2.  Hannah put the Old Maid above all her other cards before Margo picked from her to make it stick out.  Margo and I laughed for minutes straight.  But it's years later now, and we don't stick the Old Maid up high, and when I'm the first one out, the kids tell me that I'm not actually the winner; I'm just not the loser.  We clean and pack and pack and clean.  We take recycling down to SYA, and I fret a little because yesterday when I went I forgot to call the Vigilanza first and apparently I didn't set the alarm when I left (though I swear I did, and Hannah backs me up), so the alarm company called the director at 2am Sunday morning (though I'd been there at 10:30am).

Alessio's mom Sonia picks up Hannah for a birthday party.  Sebastian goes to play basketball at 7pm for a couple hours at the campetto with Simone.   Daniel buys more suitcases.  We say more farewells when we pick up pizza at Sale Pepe and get gelato at Sacco Buono.

When anyone asks, "When will you return?"  I tell them, "Dieci o dodici anni."  On the one hand, I believe this; on the other hand, I can't imagine that we won't get back here before that.

World Cup Fever

When I was a kid I went once a year to a Bruins game with my dad.  He had season tickets, and one Saturday afternoon a year each of us five kids got to go watch a game with him, get a chipwich (vanilla ice cream covered in chocolate chips and held together by two chocolate chip cookies -- I've found a gelato treat that is similar at Antica Latteria) or a sports bar (vanilla ice cream covered in milk chocolate.  I knew the players (Rick Middleton was my favorite), I had a Bruins hat, and the one year outing was something I looked forward to as I imagine my siblings did, too.

When we were planning our trip to France, Daniel wanted to plan our going to a Women's World Cup game.  I don't know whether there is a better way to call this World Cup.  I think we call the Men's World Cup just the World Cup, so I want to specify.  Since one kid didn't want to go, we got four tickets -- one adult and three kids.  The day

In Spain Sebastian tracked the games, the brackets, the teams, the players.  In our air b and b, the tv was on in the living room for every game.  Sebastian watched every one, and the rest of us dipped in and out and then heard the highlights each night afterwards from Sebastian.  It felt like summer in Scituate from years ago, when my Gram would be watching golf on a weekend afternoon when we came up from the beach or an evening when my dad would have on a Red Sox game.

The day of the game in Paris Daniel and I debated which of us would go.  Generally neither of us gets excited by professional sports events, and we both know that Sebastian likes to stay until the very end.  Daniel preferred not to go, so I went with Sebastian, Mary, and Hannah.

We arrived around 5:40 for a 6pm game.  I've never in my life done this.  But Sebastian was clear on this one: we had to get there early to see the players, watch them walk in, be in our seats well before the starting kick-off.  We sat in the second to last row (reminding me of Mary's birthday gift years ago: I took her to a Taylor Swift concert at Gillette, and our seats were in the penultimate row) at the center of the field.

"These seats are great!"  Sebastian said.  "We can see the whole field."

The U. S. star Alex Morgan didn't play, nor did another star player, their captain, I think.  Chile played hard, and I felt excited for their team -- after the U. S. decimation of Thailand (13-0), I wanted the Chilean women to come closer to the U. S., to feel pride at the World Cup.  The crowd did the wave, cheered, waved Chilean and American flags.  It was festive and positive and exuberant.  I hadn't enjoyed a professional (do we call this professional?) sporting event this much in a long time (I did enjoy taking the boys to a Red Sox game some years ago; I sat beside Sebastian that night, and he taught me how to solve the Rubik's Cube while he watched the game).  After the game, a 3-0 win for the U. S., the Chileans celebrated outside the stadium just like the Americans -- happy happy.

Italy just lost to Netherlands today.  Sebastian tells me that the final game is on my birthday.

Moments in the leaving: some early repeats but with a new feel

Lago di Bolsena.  Emanuele comes with us.  The kids play on a boat with a slide for an hour and a half laughing laughing.

Lago di Vico.  Don't swim there! American colleagues tell us.  You'll get blisters!  Italian colleagues tell us we'll be fine.  Sebastian and I play frisbee in the lake.  Connor has a water gun fight with friends.  Mary sits in the water for hours talking with her friend Benedetta.  Daniel swims out a bit.  (Hannah's at a sleepover at Alessio's house.  His mom sends a photo of the two of them sprawled out on the couch surviving the 98 degree day, likely just watching tv.) 

A walk around the walls.  This week I've gotten back to my wall walks, and there's something wonderfully calming and ritualistic for me.  Yesterday I invited Sebastian to join me, and I was surprised when he said yes.  I thought the 98 degrees would deter him.  Mary agreed to come, too.  Hot hot.  The three of us talked , did the loop around the park at Porta Fiorentina, and then sat at a bar by the Porta, one that always looks quite happening and one that I've never frequented.  We had Fanta and Coke, and the rarity was the ice in our glasses.  (So rare to get ice in Italy.)  We sat outside under cover, talking some more.  I told them, I don't usually stop halfway through my walk for a drink.  Our hour walk and bar stop changed the day for all of us.  Packing remains.  Cleaning remains.  But the outing made the three of us happy, relaxed, content.

Big Day

Daniel theorizes that I'm a six on the enneagram, and so my weakness is fear and my strength is courage.

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When I got home I called the hair salon where I've gone a handful of times this year.  An Italian couple who lived in London for many years owns the salon.  They're both friendly, fluent in English, professional, kind.  Roberta cut my hair the first time I went, and I loved that it was short and easy and grew in well.  When I returned in the winter, her husband Alessio cut my hair.  He said it was best to do it all one length, and he gave me what he said was one of his favorite haircuts, a bob.  It was neat and perfectly dried and styled.  But it had no shape after two days and it grew in quite blah and I had many bad hair days.  It wasn't Alessio's fault that I wanted to do a default ponytail every day; my hair just needs more lift or life or layers or something so it doesn't just hand down.  The next time I went I was scheduled with Alessio again.  He's lovely, and we talked and talked.  When I requested layers, he told me that that wouldn't work because then my hair would stick up everywhere, poof!

Many bad hair days.  Why's your hair so straight?  Daniel asked.  It's a good haircut, just not for me.

I schedule my appointment for the last week of June.  But I know that I need to change it to have Roberta cut it.  I call to cancel.  Roberta picks up and says, "Sure.  I'll schedule for the next day."

"Super," I say.

"I'll put you with Alessio."

Courage must prevail.  "Roberta, could you actually put me with you?"  I ask.  I tell her, "Alessio is great, and he gives a good haircut, but the cut you gave me in the fall worked well for me, and so I'd love it if you could do it."

I'm a forty-six year old woman afraid of hurting the hair stylist's feelings.  It's true.  It's embarrassing to be so concerned, so non-assertive, but there it is.

Roberta is lovely.  She tells me, "Oh, sure.  No problem.  Don't worry about it.  Some people prefer Alessio, and some prefer me.  It's no big deal.  Really.  Don't think about it.  It's great.  See you soon."

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As I began to purge and clean a month ago, I could feel residual frustration from last August (it would be good and healthier to let things go, I know, and I work on this again and again, but it can be hard for me) from all the cleaning and purging of the belongings of the previous tenants.  At the time I communicated the situation and my frustration with the director; a friend told me that I should request that SYA hire someone to clean.  I thought, Well, I've done all the work now, so I'll ask them next spring when we're supposed to hire someone ourselves.

When I saw the director late May I felt awkward: I had something to ask him and I wasn't sure how to do it.  It's hard to ask for things.  After the phone call with the hair salon, I headed over to school to print up World Cup tickets.  I saw the director and asked him for a few minutes as he headed out.   I said something like, "I have a question for you, and it's hard for me to ask, but I'll regret it if I don't, and even if you say no, I'll feel better that I asked."  He waited, and then I requested SYA's covering the cost of the final cleaning since I had to do the final cleaning from the last tenants last summer.

He said, "Sure."

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This asking for things is hard for me no matter where I am -- Waltham, Braintree, Viterbo.  My heart beats hard in my chest, and I try to speak clearly, honestly.  I want to offend no one, want never to be presumptuous, want to feel grateful for what I have and how things are rather than asking for more.  And I know that speaking up is important, too, even when -- or especially when? -- it's hard. But my gracious it's work for me.  I bragged to at least three people (Daniel, Mary, my oldest friend) about my double-assertion day that Friday.

Le Lacrime nelle Tasce

I do hold in most of my tears on the last day of school at Santa Maria del Paradiso.  Two days later we're in Spain, and a few days after that we're on a bus to Grenada to see the Alhambra.  Hannah's packed the book Clementine, and she asks me to read it to her.  I have read to Hannah so little this year.  She plays games more than reads, and when she reads, my heart fills with happy.  This winter she lay on the couch in the living room, laughing and saying, "Mom, listen to this," and then she read some funny lines from Ramona the Pest when Ramona is waiting for a present from her teacher because the teacher says, "Stay here for the present."  Poor Ramona is waiting for days for that present, and Hannah finds this hilarious.  She reads me a couple sentences every fifteen minutes or so until her siblings ask her to stop interrupting their own reading.  I never want her to stop.

Clementine is similar to Ramona and to Dory Fantasmagory.  We adore her.  She gets into trouble but is well-intentioned and sensitive.  We sit together on the bus, and Connor sits across from us or behind us, listening because he forgot his kindle charger, so he is desperate for stories and/or for us to finish Clementine so he can read it.  Clementine hears someone say that she is the "hard one" in her family, and her brother is the "easy one."  She overhears and misinterprets a conversation between her parents that makes her think that her parents are planning to get rid of her.  (Really, they are planning a party for her and planning to get a new cat for her.)  I am feeling sensitive (overtired, too?).  My voice catches.  My eyes fill.  Mary turns around from the seat in front of us, "Mom, are you crying at Clementine?!?"  I can't help it.  I am.  The kids think that this is hilarious: how could someone cry reading Clementine?  The truth is that it's remarkably easy.  Sweet kid, thoughtful parents, feeling misunderstood, death of a pet, wanting friendship and love.  What's not to be touched by, I ask?

I tell the kids, Sometimes I cry and sometimes I don't.  So if I don't cry about one thing -- feeling sad about leaving friends and places and experiences here or about life going by -- I'll cry about something else that seems so not worthy of tears to most people, or even to me at a given moment.

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At some point I talked with our friend Cristina about tears.  She told us that there's an Italian saying that Italian moms carry their tears in their tasce, i.e. in their pockets.  So eventually, no matter when you put them in there or how deep they are in those pockets, they come out.  My pockets are full these days.  They empty out easily when our children feel sad about leaving or feeling eager to go home; when I need to say goodbye to someone here; when I see our year coming to a close; when someone here is kind to me or to any one of us.

I tell Mary that I don't like to cry in front of people.  Mary says, "Why not?  That doesn't matter.  I don't mind crying.  I mind feeling sad."

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Yesterday we went to Lago di Vico with Cristina and Marco and Emanuele and his cousin Gabriele (who is staying with them for a month).  Cristina made Connor a four part photo album and a t-shirt.  The t-shirt she designed and had made looks like this: the United States and Italy with Connor biking to Italy and Emanuele biking to the U. S.  Underneath are images of many of the favorite things they share -- Frutella candies (similar to Starbursts), spaghetti, pizza, gelato, minecraft, bikes, skateboards.  It is a t-shirt of love.

Cristina has also written each child a letter and then one to Daniel and me, too.  We try to read her cursive and understand her Italian and we ask a good number of questions to clarify.  It's hot hot, about 96 degrees, and I'm sweating, and my sweat is mixing with my tears.  I try not to cry (no one else is), but I do, and it's okay.  Hannah comes up and pats my back.  "They're coming out of your pockets," she says as she taps my pockets.

Connor stays there for the night, and I determine that I will not cry this morning when Cristina drops him off at our apartment.  She walks in looking exhausted and weary, puffy eyes, and not her usual smiling bubbly self.  She looked like she had been crying for hours.  I ran down to Break Bar to grab coffee.  When I came back up, she was sitting with the kids and Daniel, and she told me that her pockets were full, and the tears just kept coming.

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I have tears for Cristina and Marco and Emanuele.  This does not surprise me.  But I also find that I have tears for the man who runs Buffetti, the cartoleria that we've frequented since September for quaderni (notebooks) and pens (erasable, Hannah says!) and pencils and backpacks and tissue paper for gifts and any other CVS or Staples type item.  We never learned each other's names, but it doesn't matter.  I get Viterbo snow globes for the kids to surprise them when we get home, and he smiles and we talk.  And when I leave he comes out from behind the counter and gives me the double cheek kiss, and smile through my embarrassing tears and we wish each other "Auguri!"

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Tears of joy.  Of sadness.  Of gratitude.

Tears in my pockets.  Tears in Cristina's.

Such deep pockets.

the beginning of endings

It's the last day of Santa Maria del Paradiso.  No smocks today and no ridiculously laden-with-books backpacks.  Still the navy pants and white shirts for everyone.  Still the mad rush of the morning and the walk to school (though Sebastian went in the car with Daniel, who was bringing a gelato cake for Hannah's class, and Connor arrived with Emanuele and Cristina).

When Sebastian was an infant, I asked a friend, "How can I make it so he's never not happy?"  She told me that I couldn't do it, and it wouldn't be good if I could do it anyway.  But gracious, the hardest part of parenting, I think, is seeing the kids struggle or be unhappy.  I know that they need to get through such feelings, learn, get up again, thrive, but my goodness, I find it tough.

One thing I have so wanted from this year is for our kids to love it here, to want to return to Italy in their lives, to feel attached to Italian life and culture and maybe even a friend or two.  I hadn't thought of what that would look like when it happened.  There are tears about leaving the life they've made and the friends they've made and the school that feels like a community now.  They tell me, "It's a whole year, and I've made a life here, and now we're leaving it."  One said through tears yesterday, "I'll be eager to get on the plane to go home, but I'm sad to leave.  This is my life now, and I have to leave it.  I don't want to go to Spain and France.  I just want to stay here and finish it out here."

I remember thinking, when we made the Spain and France plans, that it would be a good time to go this year, with everything over, and not having the kids sitting here in Viterbo with school and all activities over and just waiting to go home.

Alas.

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When we had the final SYA dinner a few days before the students left, I didn't well up even a little through the "Evviva Santa Rosa!" reflections and videos and farewells.  I mostly just felt happy.  In the end, English classes were good, and I connected with many of the kids.  I found it easy to jot them a note in their yearbooks.  The one-on-one relationships felt valuable and rich.  And while I gave myself a hard time for every class that was not super, every discussion that I should have led better, every detail I should have known, I also knew, in the end, that the students learned a lot -- about reading and writing, yes,  but more that mattered: many told me that they found their voices in discussions and in writing.  So those less-than-stellar classes became more shadowy and more forgivable when Quinn said to me through her tears, "I always felt supported when I came into your classroom."  Funny, I felt the same when she walked in to the room, and she was the student.  So I didn't feel sad seeing them end their time, but thrilled for their voices and growth and getting through a whole year in Italian households and a new school.  I was surprised by my lack of tears since I am a great crier.  (Preferably in private, of course.)  At the end of the evening though, as I said final farewells to a few stragglers -- Quinn (whom I adored near immediately when I read her first piece in which described Italian teenagers as "cooler than [she] would ever be" and having mellifluous names and knowing she'd never smoke, but my goodness, it made those Italian boys look sexy; who asked questions all the time even though she knew more and thought so much more than most kids her age; who loved to talk literature and books and ideas and Classics; who told me how she wasn't good at Latin grammar even though I couldn't imagine it; who just loved loved loved learning; who told me in October that she had a plan to go to Georgetown for undergrad and then Harvard Law, but by the end of the year had decided that she'd like to go to college abroad, preferably Oxford, and I thought, Oh, Oxford, take this wonderful girl; who came to me one day conflicted about what to do about a student who had cheated...she told me, "I could tell him, 'Either you turn yourself in or I will,'" and then did exactly that, so he could turn himself in with less grave consequences; whose moral compass and kindness ran so so deep; who cried at that last dinner; whose parents I kept wondering about because I imagined that they must be wonderful listeners and people; who read The Universe Versus Alex Woods in days late May for fun because I'd just read it and recommended it, and then told me about her uncle who had chosen to die when he was sick; who I so hope does keep in touch) and Genesis (who wanted to leave in December because she was so homesick; who stuck it out all the way until May 25 and was so glad that she did; who came out in a personal essay to me and then to the class when she read the piece out loud; who one day asked me if Mary could tell her how she made such good brownies from scratch because the ones Mary made that I shared with the students were so good and the ones Genesis made for her host family were a flop, so one Tuesday afternoon Genesis and Mary made parallel batches of brownies in our apartment kitchen, and from the living room I could hear them chatting and laughing, and our apartment felt so homey, so like home.) and Vanessa (who wrote her first personal essay on being taken out of her mom's house when she was in the fourth grade; who wrote brave stories about domestic abuse; who did her Capstone on domestic abuse services in Italy, eventually meeting a woman in this field, a woman who had been a guest lecturer one day at SYA, whose presentation Vanessa had to leave because it was too difficult to listen, and so she and I sat by ourselves in the director's office and just talked and talked; who blossomed and thrived and was funny and creative and positive and the first one to say, after someone else read a piece of personal writing, "Wow, that was amazing.") and Nicole (at whose host dad, director, advisor, advisee meeting I shed a tear...another professional moment that I berated myself for...for not being more professional, adept, detached...at the end of that meeting, as she walked out, she said, "Ms. Keleher, You cried!  That made me cry."  And all I could do was say, "I know.  I'm so sorry."  There had been such kindness and compassion from the host dad in that meeting, and I adore this kid and felt so proud of her, too.)  and Dylan (who missed his friends all year; who wrote so brilliantly that I had to gear up to understand what he was writing; who was miserable for months until he changed host families and then got to garden and cook and run run run; who made kombucha that I bought from him; who came to every class with his smarts; who turned down Harvard for Pomona; who found his niche in the end as he helped peers in their cannoli, pasta, chocolate making for Capstone projects) -- I was surprised to feel that bittersweet pang, the pain of leaving something or someone so good.

At the faculty luncheon days later, as I walked out of the restaurant Il Gargolo, saying goodbye to the director in a simple way, exchanging simple thanks, I welled up.  Him I knew I'd see again.  In fact, he stopped by half an hour ago to help me figure out how to lower our blinds.  (Actually, I helped while he figured it out and got the blinds lowered for the 80 degree plus day.)  But it was an ending of the year as a SYA teacher, of being part of this teaching group, and of working for him, whom I admired as both director and boss.

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So today I am underslept because yesterday I had a cappuccino and then ran on that energy to purge and pack and organize give-away and get treats for Hannah's class for today and make cookies for the kids' teachers.  And then I stayed up for the extra hour to do nothing and watch a predictable romantic comedy on neflix.  (When I was a kid, I watched any John Hughes movie I could.  I still love that kind of movie now.  I could still be at my parents' house, watching Pretty in Pink or Sixteen Candles, on the actual television with the VCR going.)

Lack of sleep, sensitive children, final day of school -- I will be so lucky if I make it past Paradiso pick-up without tears.  I am not attached to many people there, only Emanuele's parents really, but I still feel some connection with the people and the place, and perhaps especially the courtyard where the littles play each day from 1:30 - 2pm while they wait for the big kids to be dismissed from middle school.  At times they'd complain about waiting, Daniel would tell me, so very occasionally I'd get over there to pick them up and walk them home.  When I went over this week, trying to help them out so they didn't have to wait, they wouldn't leave.  They just kept playing and playing with Emanuele and Federico and Gabriele and Alessio.  And I thought, One thing -- waiting -- can so often turn into something else -- making friends.

We're not leaving yet.  But the process has begun.

If there were no tears, I imagine that I'd find that even more difficult.

Bar Recollections

Shaker Cafe
Open even on Sunday afternoons.
Kind about filling up measuring cup of caffe for us to make tiramisu.
Always seem happy to see us.
Owner stands outside in doorway smoking and looking at his phone a lot.  If we walk by, he looks up and says, "Ciao," or gives us a nod.

Break Bar
We used to consider using their internet when ours went out.  But we never did.  They know us now.  Me, because I occasionally go in for coffee; the kids, because they occasionally go in to get a gelato from the freezer or a bag of chips; Daniel, because he goes in to buy a parking ticket for the Fiat.  When Cristina and Marco came over for dinner last week, I asked Mary to ask them whether they'd like coffee after dinner.  If they did, I told her, sneak out quietly, go down to Break Bar and get the coffee.  Mary got it.  I heard her offer Cristina coffee.  Cristina said yes, and then said that she wanted to see Mary make it (since Marco taught us months ago).  Mary and I laughed and laughed, then fessed up our plan.  Graciously, Cristina still accepted the offer if I got one, too.  I got decaffeinated as it was 10pm.  When Cristina tells us that coffee keeps her awake, we ask her, "Deca?"  She says, "No!  Caffe or no caffe.  No deca per Italiani."

Cris. Bros.
I like this place.  It's on Piazza Fontana Grande, but off the main road if I don't want to run into SYA folks.  In the winter, I step inside for a few moments for a quick coffee before afternoon classes.  In warm weather, I've sat outside at a table a few times with Daniel.


Bar 103
"Cappuccino deca?" Nadia or Olga says when I go in.  Preferred bar for SYA faculty.


Happiness Cafe
The owner is often opening when we walk by to go to school.  "Ciao, Anna!" she calls.  She's been nice to us since early on in the fall, always welcoming.  My sister went there, my dad and Jacqueline, Daniel's parents.  We can sit outside.  She told Dad and Jacqueline after a few days to get a caffe americana, thinking that they would like that better than a cappuccino.  One Saturday morning as we were leaving, Hannah asked me to buy her a pack of Bubba gum.  I said no.  The owner asked, Che cosa vuole?  Anna, che cosa?  I shook my head, then told her.  She picked up the pack of gum, handed it to Hannah and said, "Non fare complimenti."  Hannah looked at me.  I let her accept the pack of gum.  The Italians love small kids.

Red Rose
They give me a shot glass of water with my coffee even though I'm not Italian and they know it.  I love this gesture.  It makes me feel that I belong here, or, even if I don't, they are welcoming me.  If I speak Italian, they speak it with me, too.  You can sit outside here under a tent-like-structure if you don't mind the smoke.

San Sisto
My friend Julie and I had cappuccino here.  Daniel bumped his head here when we sat upstairs on the comfy couches: the ceiling is low low.  I love looking in, spying a bit through the glass, when I walk down Via Garibaldi from Porta Romana.

Napoleon Bar
Sebastian and Mary's favorite spot after soccer and swim (respectively).  The best hot chocolate, they tell me.  I like the woman who works there because she's friendly.

Geko Bar
My favorite spot between swim and soccer practices.  It's bright and a little closer to the field for picking up Hannah afterwards.  And I like sitting there by myself or with them -- Mary going through her day; Sebastian telling me his highs and lows from soccer practice.  (One week Mary asks him, "Did you score again?"  He says, "No."  She says, "But you said you got two goals last week at practice."  Sebastian says, "That was a fluke.")

The 30 Day Sketch Challenge

Aric, technically the curriculum director for SYA, but really I think of him as the boss of the SYA directors, shared an article on slack about sketching for thirty days.  During a faculty meeting I read the article.  Santo, beside me, finished the article and started sketching.  "Boh," is a common expression from Santo.  "Boh" for Italians means I don't know or who knows or who cares or maybe even whatever at times.  Santo teaches Greek and Latin and Excavating here.  We see Santo around town coming back from the gym or biking -- a recent bike outing of ours was inspired by such a Santo sighting (see Via Francigena) -- or at the Botanical Gardens.  Sometimes I see Santo sitting quietly at his desk, his headphones on, his eyes closed.  I saw him like this when I hiked up to the temple of Jupiter at Terracina, sitting cross-legged, meditating there at the top.

To my left in the director's office, I saw Santo drawing a house, like a house that little kids draw, or at least that I drew when I was a kid, with a triangle roof, square body, square windows.  He made hearts for windows and decorated the house.  The next day he was making another sketch during our meeting.  He told me, "Well, I'll see what it does."  Santo both resists and engages in the changing pedagogy of SYA.  He grew up in the Italian educational system, which was and still is about gaining information, knowledge, and mastery of such.  Experiential learning and Harkness discussions have no place in Italian education.  It's tests and public interragazione in the classroom.  Mary and Sebastian were spared interragazione in the fall; now they don't mind when they get a turn.  The teacher asks the student questions on the subject and the student answers there in front of everyone; you don't know which day your turn will be.  When Sebastian was bored in class in December, he worked out the odds of each kid's getting chosen for interragazione.

So Santo is doing the thirty day challenge, thinking that he's got to adjust with the times and the agenda of the boss of our boss.  If the school is changing, he needs to, too.  I think, Well, this could be fun.  So Hannah and I go to Tiger and buy ourselves sketchbooks for three euro each.

day 1: Hannah's sneaker is out, so I draw it.  I'm reminded of drawing a sneaker in grade school.  We had art once a week, and an art fair once a year.  It was my favorite day.  My kids love the sneaker.  It lacks perspective and dimension and all such, but they are effusive with their praise.

I go on in this vein, drawing whatever is near me at the end of the day, when I finally sit down and remember to draw.   I do the clothesline in our bedroom, a swiss army knife, an empty cup on Daniel's nightstand.

Leaves have so many details that I don't know how anyone ever draws a flower.
I like drawing trees.
I pay attention more.  It takes time to really look at things.

One night Connor was sleeping on his mattress in our room, and so I drew him.  I like this one.

I remember how, in elementary school, we had art once a week, in the afternoon after lunch, and it was always my favorite time of day.  One year I made a Jack of Hearts; one year a sneaker; one year half of a model's face to match the other half in the magazine ad.  One year we were instructed to draw the snowstorm outside.  I looked out the window of our fifth grade classroom and drew what I saw: varying shades of green, branches, black, white.  Other students had pictures of perfect trees with snow on top and snow on the ground.  My picture wasn't quite Jackson Pollock, but it was not a clear snowstorm either.  Mrs. Ryan, our teacher who could be quite harsh, told me it was great.  She told me, "I'll bet you a coke it wins in the art fair."  She owed me a coke.  I think now how wonderful she was to praise that picture that was just, well, what it was.

I draw a tree in Vetralla the first time we're there looking for the Via Francigena.  Then a street light, which, it turns out, is intricate and quite pretty.

In sketching a palm tree in Palermo, I notice what must be the dead leaves that become the bark.  I think.  Or maybe not.

What I liked about sketching was making time for it and noticing more about what's around me.  I also noticed how I don't notice sometimes.  There would be a way to learn leaves and trees and maybe even faces if I stopped and checked out the details more.  I may return to sketching this summer, see how things look back at home.

They say that it's in the leaving that we appreciate what we have.  I feel like I've/we've appreciated what we have here in the being here, and in leaving, we may appreciate it more, but really, we've been cognizant of the beauty of our life here -- the closeness of things, the later getting up in the morning (I often got out of bed at the hour I would have been leaving Waltham for TA), the bars, the gelaterias, the ability to travel, the walking everywhere, the time.

In the almost leaving, perhaps, there's a nothing-to-lose-at-this-point feeling.  Yesterday we went to watch Connor at mountain biking -- he goes Mondays and Fridays with his friend (Emanuele), and I'd not yet seen him (Emanuele's parents pick the boys up from school, feed them, bring them, lend Connor the bike and helmet, etc.) in action.  Daniel, Sebastian, and I found Cristina (Emanuele's mom), chatted, sat in the sun watching.  Another mom was there, the mom of Lorenzo, who is in Mary's class.  I see Lorenzo around town a good bit, and he always says, "Ciao!" with a knowing look, and I'm aware that he knows who I am even though I don't know who he is.

In fact, many folks here in Viterbo know who we are even when we don't know who they are: we're the Americans.  The most common comment I get when I meet someone or think I'm meeting them, but actually I've met them before is, "Cammina sempre."  Yep, that's me: I always walk.  I'm thinking there must be a way to learn better face recognition, and I should learn it soon.  Fisionomia, Cristina tells me.  But then, I'm also thinking, as we again purge and pack and clean out our apartment (weren't we doing this a year ago?), that maybe I'll start using the Italian workbooks that we purchased from SYA in anticipation of learning Italian.  I want to keep learning, fill in the gaps, and I think, Maybe I'll keep learning when we get home.  But really, will I make the time to do that?  I have every intention of making my Italian stronger, but I'm not sure that that is in the near future.  It may need to wait until before our next trip over here.  I've done the math: when Hannah graduates high school, I'll be fifty-seven, so perhaps I can come back and teach at SYA that year.  Perhaps that will be the year I learn both Italian and fisionomia better, too.

In my tough-on-myself moments, I think, Maureen, you have got to look at people more so you remember who's who!  In my generous-with-self moments, I think, You know, virtually every place, face, and word here in Viterbo has been new to me this year, so I am going to cut myself some slack.

Back to mountain biking.  Connor lit up when he saw us.  Emanuele sped around.  The coach spoke with us in English.  I explained to Cristina how during the school year both here and at home I have a hard time feeling awake and aware enough to even think of doing things at times.  Only once before had it crossed my mind that it would be nice to see Connor at mountain biking: it was something he did with Emanuele and Cristina or Marco.  With my days more open, I felt that I had to see Connor mountain bike.

Lorenzo's mom was watching, too.  She asked after Mary, a reminder that Lorenzo is in Mary's class.  She offered us cigarettes and talked with me.  And instead of hiding, buoyed by Cristina on my right, who speaks only Italian with me always with patience and kindness and an of-course-you'll-understand-if-I-explain-well-enough attitude, I spoke with this mom.  In Italian.  Because of Cristina and Marco, I feel confident speaking sometimes.  They remind me that I am fine in Italian.  Months ago I was telling my oldest friend about my struggles with Italian.  She listened and then said that basically she didn't buy it; she thought that I likely did just fine.  Her confidence buoyed me at the time as Cristina's does now.  I don't talk about my language struggles with Cristina.  We just talk, and I stumble and we keep going.  When I learn more Italian, I will likely be mortified at how I have spoken, which errors I have made, but I also know that it's okay.

As I spoke with Lorenzo's mom, she complimented all of us on learning Italian so well.  Of course she didn't realize yet my limited vocabulary, nor had we spoken long enough for her to have Sebastian translate for me.  She told me that she didn't want to speak English with me because she was afraid that she'd make a mistake.  I told her that that's me all the time with Italian.  But I felt comfortable enough to keep talking anyway.  In Italian.  And I feel like that's the risk, the nothing to lose feeling.  I'll mess up, sure, but I'll just have to keep going.

I'm not sure which other nothing-to-lose situations or moments will arrive this month.  Cristina's invited Connor to stay over, having him for almost two days, and rather than feel like we're imposing even more on her, I said yes.  Hannah wants to have Alessio over tomorrow, maybe even for a sleepover, and we said yes.  Mary wanted a birthday party last weekend, and as much as it caused me angst to host a bunch of Italian girls and greet their parents in Italian, I said yes.  Classic Mary: she gave us all assignments, and we just had to follow her directions, i.e. Daniel and Sebastian: make a playlist; Daniel: lead musical chairs and guess that song; me: make brownies; adults: order pizza and get chips and soda and strawberries; me: send message to parents on whatsapp.  When the parents arrived to drop off their daughters and I hid in the kitchen working on batch #2 of brownies (since I'd botched batch #1 -- though actually, Daniel and I ultimately preferred batch #1 which were super fudgy), I said to Sebastian something like, "Oh, golly.  I hate this: what do I say?"

Sebastian said, "You look nice.  That's great.  Don't worry about what to say.  Just be happy."

Really, that's all I had to do?  Easy.  I walked out and greeted the moms and we discussed dying pants green for the final school show a few nights later.

Sebastian's advice reminded me of something my mom would have said: simple, succinct, wise.

And this reminds me of a comment of Hannah's earlier in the day.  I told Hannah, "I miss my friends.  They're all together at our 25th reunion."  Hannah said, "Oh, mom, you've got us.  And you're in Italy.  You're fine."

Be fine.  Be happy.  Go out and greet the world even when they think you're the nutty American who walks everywhere.

Via Francigena

The Inevitable First Try

The Via Francigena is an ancient route that pilgrims walked during medieval times to get from Canterbury to Rome.  We heard it talked about here and there, and in February, when Daniel's brother visited, Daniel wanted to find it.  We drove to Vetralla, about 17 kilometers from Viterbo, parked the car, and walked up to the town to find the route.  On the way we ate our Pane Pizza Dolce pizza, played catch with the nerf football, took photos by a pilgrim sign.  But once we were in the town, we didn't know which way to go.  We walked down the main road one way, walked back, decided to walk out of the town in the other direction, spent likely two hours hanging out on the side of the road while waiting for Daniel to come with the car, playing soccer, chatting, enjoying the sun.

By about five o'clock, a few missteps later, we had walked and driven a bit more, and Daniel had found the trail.  We parked in a lot and walked the Via Francigena, a wooded trail in green.  We walked about half an hour out and then back to make sure we made it back in the sunlight.  Tom and the Sebastian and Hannah kicked a soccer ball, the kids having created some game.  Connor and Mary battled ninja-style with sticks.  Daniel and I walked and talked.

It was not the hike we'd imagined, but we were glad that we had at least found the trail, and the little red and white striped signs that indicated that we were indeed on the Via Francigena.

Try Two: Italian Style

One Saturday I saw my colleague Santo out on his bike.  He told me that he was taking the train to Montefiascone and then biking back to Viterbo.  I went home and told Daniel and the kids.

A few weeks later, Hannah was asking to go biking, so we planned our second Via Francigena outing: Montefiascone to Viterbo.  We told the kids that it would be a few hour outing, and then we could return and they could relax (we value relaxing quite a bit in our house).  We walked to Passione e Pedale on Saturday morning to rent bikes; Daniele, the owner, had moved his shop, so we walked across town to find his shop.  I think it might be easier to bullet point the next three hours.

10:30am  Arrive to P e P; Daniele's not there.  Bummer.  His colleague (a real estate agent who is also renting some of this modest office) says, He's not here this morning, but you can call him.
10:40am  Call Daniele, who says, Sure!  I can meet you at noon.  I'll bring the bikes to you.  Send me sizes.  We're bummed that we need to wait til noon, but it's okay.
10:40-11:45  We sit on the grass at Piazza della Rocca, eat our pizza (from PPD), read, chat, play games.  Alessio's nonna walks by and says hello.
11:45am  Daniele calls to say it's going to be 12:30 rather than noon.  Dang it.
11:50am  We go get gelato.
12:20pm  Daniele calls to say that it's one of those days: he got to his van and he's got a flat tire.  He says that we can still rent the bikes, but we'd have to get ourselves to him, about a mile away.
12:30pm  We can't turn back now.  I call him back and say we're on our way.
12:30-1:15  We find Daniele and his colleague/girlfriend Martina and bikes to try.  We ride around parking lots testing out our bikes.  Happy happy.  He says he'll charge us for only half a day for our rentals (even though, really, he doesn't have a half-day rate).  I adore him and Martina -- they're kind and helpful and funny, too.
2pm maybe?  We catch a train to Montefiascone.

My times might be off, but they're pretty close.  It was a typical Italy experience, and we could do nothing but go with it.  In Montefiascone we stopped at a bar to use the bathroom, buy a snack, and ask how to get to the trail (exactly what we should have done in Vetralla weeks before!!).

Ten minutes into the trail I felt like I was in the movies -- this is the Italy that they show in films and describe in books.  The fields.  I know there's a better way to describe this beauty, but I don't have it.  When my friend from home calls, I pick up my phone, and she lets me blather on about how we are out in the country and it is gorgeous and I love it and this looks like every Tuscany postcard and painting I've seen.  It's sunny and beautiful, and I can imagine nothing better.

Three kids go ahead; Mary stays with me and Daniel.  We eventually catch up to the other three, speedsters and adventurers and kids that are certain that they are going the right way and haven't made a mistake and convinced that we would have found each other eventually.  Daniel disagrees; he points out that they're actually headed back in the direction of Montefiascone.  We spend another hour debating the route, revisiting the scene of the turn, determining that Daniel is right.  I sit down and take a photo of what looks to me like a card from our VanGogh memory game.

(This is how we learned VanGogh's painting: my dad and Jacqueline some years ago brought us back this memory game from the VanGogh Museum in Amsterdam.  I want games like this for every artist I like and I want the kids to know.  No luck thus far.  Years later when we went to the museum ourselves, the kids were excited to spot the paintings they knew.  Familiarity helps us all, makes us feel more connected and excited to see in real life what we've learned or seen or heard about.

Daniel's birthday was last week.  Sebastian wanted to get him a puzzle since they've worked on two this year -- one from the Vatican of a map that has Viterbo on it and one from the museum we went to in Siena.....or was it Florence?.....Sebastian gets him a puzzle of the Allhambra in Spain, which Daniel learned about when he was in high school and which he wants to see when we go to Spain in June.  I'm thinking we'll all get more excited for the site with the buildup of the puzzle.)

We bike at various speeds, and I'm usually last.  I love this ride.  And the kids like it, too, even if our intended few hour excursion ended up going til 8pm.  Hannah can't wait to do it again.

Take 3: Just a Sunday morning walk

Daniel and I go for a walk some weekend mornings, not generally around the walls, because it's the weekend, and I like to switch it up from weekdays.  We walk out Porta Romana, and we decide that we'll see where the Via Francigena route goes, following the red and white pilgrim sign.  I'm somewhat amazed that we haven't followed this before.  Now that we know of the Via Francigena, we look for it everywhere.  The Vetralla debacle with Daniel's brother now feels so long ago, so long ago that we were so ignorant of this town-to-town path.  We follow it for half an hour, staying on roads, though quiet roads, uphill, through Viterbo.  We turn around to get back in time for church.

Take 4: Playing Hooky and Capstone

SYA students have to do a final project, named Capstone.  It needs to be a project that is place-based, with research, hands-on experience, and doing.  They keep a work journal, write a research paper, write a reflection, give a presentation.

One student is doing one hundred miles of the Via Francigena.  She was going to write a book since she thought that that would look good for colleges, but some teachers helped her come up with something more place-based and out and about.  She started in Bolsena, I think, and will finish at the Vatican today.  Since she can't be out there alone, she recruits classmates and teachers to do parts with her.  She'll do one leg one day, and a few days another leg with another person.  I agreed to do one day, happy to be outside rather than at my desk and to explore more of the Via Francigena.

It's a Tuesday.  I tell the kids they can come if they want.  Connor doesn't want to wait around for the student to find where to get her stamp to make official that she's walked, so he says no.  Sebastian has a test that he doesn't think he should miss, so he heads to school, too.  Hannah and Mary -- who, I later learn, just postponed their homework -- are happy to play hooky and join me and Katie on the 17 kilometer walk from Viterbo to Vetralla.

This is Katie's Capstone project so she's done all the research.  We show up with pizza and water, and we get to follow.  It's sunny and warm.  The girls are troopers -- they walk and talk with Katie and each other and me.  We stop to look at wild poppies and a trench being dug for a pipe.  Mary's takes videos of Katie for Katie's project.  Hannah's legs get tired; I get tired.  The other two forge ahead.  We're on a schedule so our breaks are short.  Katie wants to be on a bus back to Viterbo at 12:40, so we keep moving.

As we near Vetralla, Hannah says, "I know where we are!  Do you remember this?  I remember this!"  I have no idea what she's talking about, but Mary does.  They exchange more remembered moments, and as we keep walking and looking around, I get it: this is where we parked the Fiat that Saturday months ago with the gang and Daniel's brother.  This is the hill we walked up.  This is where we sat and ate our PPD pizza.  This is where we took photos.  This is where we should have asked directions but didn't.

Katie gets her stamp, I get a coffee and bus tickets, the girls sit and eat the rest of the pizza and drink Esta The.  The bus arrives at 12:40, and we head back to Viterbo.

So this is what it's like to go on a planned, perfectly orchestrated excursion.

Possible 5 or 6 or 7: Where next?

I'm not sure when our next Via Francigena outing will be.  But I have feeling that we're not done with it yet.  Maybe next month or maybe many years down the road...

Overheard conversations

on the way to school...not the usual Via Saffi route, but the route through Porta Verita because there's a shop there that sells quaderni (notebooks) and is open early, and both C and H need some for the day....

Connor to Hannah:
"I like Italy almost as much as I like America.  I just want to go home because I love our house and yard and neighborhood and my friends."

Hannah in reply:
"I like Italy and America the same.  If we could have our friends here, then I'd stay here."

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in the rental car, riding back from Syracuse to Catania (Sicily)...Sebastian and Mary.

kid 1:  Italian something....blah blah blah
kid 2: Corrects an italian word or phrase or verb ending
kid 1: No...wait..yeah, yeah, justo.

Counting the Days

8 days til SYA students depart

14 days til I finish the school year

21 days til kids and Daniel finish school

31 days remaining in Italy (we're taking two week trip to Spain and France in June)

44 days til we fly to Boston

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How have all these months passed?  All these days?  Almost an entire school year.  I wonder what our kids will remember and what they won't.  I remember what Daniel and I will remember.  Right now I want to hold so tight to so many things.  I'd like to take pieces of our life here in Viterbo home.  There are no photos for the feeling of the feet on the ground or for the sound of the easy "Buongiorno" or even "Ciao"  as we walk down the street or for the Italian I hear our kids speak or for the coffee I just met Daniel for before returning to school to proctor the AP Latin exam.

With school both winding down (no classes) and winding up (grading returns in days with students' Capstone reflections and final grades and comments), I am reading for next year (TA sophomore English reading) and trying to write all those unfinished blog entries that I started, some with only a title, because there must have been some thoughts one day that made me want to write whatever that title indicated, e.g. a Palermo entries from March that I just hadn't finished yet.  If I cannot hold on to things here, I guess I want to give them words. 

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Two nights ago friends from home emailed to say that they were in Rome visiting their daughter and her family (who have lived in Rome for years), and on their way north, they could stop in Viterbo to visit for a short bit.  We were wonderfully surprised, and yet, when I saw Joe and Ailene walking towards a bar across the street from the Porta Romana train station, it seemed the most natural thing in the world that they were here.  We went into this bar that I'd never been inside, sat down, and talked.  And when the server came to take our order, everyone (they also had one of their daughters, her husband, and their daughter with them) just ordered cappuccino and caffe as if this were the most usual thing in the world, sitting in a bar in Viterbo having coffee together.

Ailene and Joe aren't just friends: they're neighbors.  I realize that that sentence might seem backwards, but it's not.  The thing that our kids miss most (I think) from home is our home and our neighborhood.  And while Ailene is 79 and Joe is 89, they are home, even to our kids.  Some days before we left, Mary and I stopped in to say hello -- and perhaps goodbye? -- to Ailene and Joe.  Joe was working on his Italian (they had visited same daughter and traced his family back when they had come the year before) and shared some Italian-learning apps and websites with us, and Ailene and Mary and I sat in the living room and talked.  I imagine that we talked about Italy and the upcoming year, but I don't remember specifics.  I remember Ailene's and Joe's both interacting easily with Mary, Mary's enjoying the visit with them, my being relaxed and grateful and delighted for our evening stroll by their house and our visit.

Days later, Daniel tells me, Ailene stopped by our house to say goodbye, and he and she sat and had a cup of tea together.

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This fall when we went to Rome to meet friends (also neighbors!) from home, we met up with Joe and Ailene's daughter, the one who lives in Rome with her family.

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I asked Joe and Ailene about their coming back to Italy -- they'd never suggested that they might repeat what seemed like a once in a lifetime trip two years ago.  They said that Joe said at Christmas that he'd like to come to Italy, so their oldest daughter planned it, and they came.  He said that he doesn't really care what they see.  He just wanted to be here.

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Our hour together yesterday feels like an almost-bookend, starting to close out our time here in Viterbo as we started to close out our time last summer before leaving Waltham.  An Italian bar instead of a living room on Clark Lane, but the same: some Italian, some talking, some laughter. 

San Giovanni Eremiti, Palermo, Italy

The photos online drew me in because there were these reddish domes that were pretty.  The architecture, which seemed to me concrete with these domes, was so appealing, so simple, so not mosaic or Baroque or Renaissance.  So Mary and I added it to the our list, taken in by the pictures on the web's Top Fifteen Things to See in Sicily.

When I went to Athens a few years ago on a Thayer trip, I went into a church near our hotel one afternoon just to sit down for a moment, curious.  People were milling about some.  Sitting some.  I sat.  It was peaceful.  I remember thinking, People forever have believed in something and have created places to honor this something.  There is ground set aside for spiritual practice, and there always has been.  The Parthenon was packed when we got there, and I stood amazed there, too.  Greek gods, Roman gods, G-d, God -- humans have always revered some being beyond the reality of life.

There's the grandeur of St. Peter's and the duomos all over Italy with columns and paintings and altars and candles.  But San Giovanni was mostly garden and a couple empty old buildings.  It was one of the calmest places we'd been.  Peaceful.  Open.  Beautiful.  A perfect combination of nature and meditation or prayer space.  I just googled San Giovanni dei Eremiti and saw cloisters, and thought, Oh, right, there were all those small decorative columns around the gardens.  How did I forget that?  But really, I guess what I remember is the feeling of being there and of being surrounded by green outside and empty space inside. 

Yesterday I listened to a podcast interview with a woman (Barbara Brown Taylor -- I didn't know of her, but I found the interview on the Fresh Air podcast) who teaches the world's religions.  She talked about God envy and practice over belief (this may have been my favorite part) and learning one's own religion more by learning other religions.  It's probably too much to share with our kids, but as we force them to come to Sunday mass and say prayers and send them to Catholic school here, I might like to put this on in the background as they play their games and do their puzzles and build their forts or as we drive around.  I want to sign up for this woman's class or another like it.

When I was a kid, I asked my mom one day after school (Catholic), "What if we're doing the wrong religion?"  I was concerned because at school I kept hearing that to get to heaven you had to be Catholic and follow the Commandments and do Catholic right, e.g. go to mass every Sunday, go to Confession sometimes, memorize the Our Father and the Hail Mary.  Or at least that's how I heard it at the time.  My mom said, "As long as you do your best with whatever religion you are, then you'll be fine."

San Giovanni Eremiti felt like it would work for anyone in any religion or for anyone with no religion.  Or more simply, for anyone.

The Streets of Palermo

The first night in Palermo (Sicily), my colleagues send us a WhatsApp message to see if we want to join them for street food.  I'm not sure what this means, but I've heard that Sicilian food is delicious, and street food is cheap.  I want to go, but I'm tired, troppo stanca.  Daniel, Mary and Sebastian go.

Mary is proud of herself: she's eaten sausage which looked undercooked, so she didn't look at it as she ate it.  Sebastian loved the sausage, the grill, the eating outside.  The director tells Mary, "If you bring this guy fish you buy at the market, he'll cook it for you one night for dinner."

All week Mary tells me, "I want to get the fish."

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Friday morning, our last day in Palermo, the director calls me, "I'm going to get my fish.  Mary there?"

Mary's out playing freeze tag in Piazza Garibaldi with her siblings while Daniel finds a laundromat and I read student blogs.  I go with the director.  Twenty minutes later we repeat the ritual with Mary and Hannah.

The Sicilian man selling the fish talks to Mary, and the director tells her the various kinds of fish.  Mary winces as the man holds up the fish for her inspection.  I can see her cringe but not look away.  She gets one whole fish and one deboned, and the fish seller (fisherman?) throws in another (for free?).  He weighs them, and I pay.

Next stop: the cook.  We walk fifty feet, see the cook who grilled food two nights ago, and deliver our package of fish to him.  Now he has so many fish from SYA students that he needs to label each new bag of fish.  He labels Mary, "Famiglia."

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That evening we sit outside in the sort of piazza -- three faculty, Daniel and the kids, seven students -- at white plastic tables set up by the man who is grilling the students' chicken, Sebastian's sausage, the three fish Mary's selected, and the fish for other SYA folks.  Cars blare music, though not as loud as they do hours later when I'm trying to go to sleep (director: "I wondered about calling the polizia so they'd stop at midnight."  Italian colleague: "I was thinking that the only way to get that music off was going to be cultural: we needed some nonna to come out from her apartment and yell at them.  That's how it has to be done.")

Mary, Sebastian, and Hannah don't like fish.  But they've come for the Palermo experience (Connor is up in our hotel room and has texted us requesting pizza; last night we bought pizzas for 2.50 a pie.).  I've done the same.  Food and talking with people seem the biggest activities in Palermo.  Palermo has litter everywhere, overflowing trash, tall apartment buildings, a run-down feel.  There's food being sold in bars, but also in outdoor markets.  (When I read the student blogs, I am thrilled to hear that they love the lack of polish in Palermo and the in-your-faceness of life and people.  They could have gone to Turin, which, I've gathered from the blogs of the students who are there, is shiny and clean and modern and had an outstanding coffee museum, Lavazza Museum.

Two Italian boys come by with some SYA girls and get introduced to the director.  The day before, when students were heading to Solanto to see an archaeological site, they got on the train to Solunto by mistake, had to walk to Solanto, found the site closed, and instead spent the afternoon fishing with some Italian teenagers they met.  These boys are back to visit and hang out, and no matter how much the director insists, these boys, with poise and ease and politeness, do not sit down.

We pull out Mary's chedro to share with everyone.  It looks like a huge lemon -- think size of mini watermelon.  It's cut into slices, and we put Sicilian salt on it (from the salt museum in Trapani!), and share it with everyone.  We all eat the fish, even Mary and Sebastian.  It's delicious.

"C'mon, Ms. Keleher, you gotta eat a fish eye!  Try it!"

I don't usually give in to such dares.  But I'm in Palermo, eating fish and drinking wine on a busy street corner.

The eye goes down easily.

Siena

As we drove to Siena, or rather, of course, as Daniel drove and I looked out the window, I realized that, even though I'd been to Italy four times before, I'd never seen the Tuscan countryside.  I lived in Rome and took trains to see other cities, but the quintessential Tuscan countryside I knew only from movies and photos and paintings and books.  I just kept looking out the window, in awe of the rolling hills and thinking that we must need more rain for these fields to look so green.

We sat in the main piazza, the campo, a huge sloping piazza, and ate pizza.  The police officer walked around telling people not to leave trash and pointing out trash cans.

We let Sebastian make our itinerary: the Campo, Museo Civico, Torre de Mangia, a park, the duomo.

Museo Civico...Sebastian and Connor sat with me in a room here, a room with a parable of good government.  The Council of Nine in Siena (1285-1355) had paintings in this room commissioned to show good government and bad government.  The three of us talked about the meaning of a parable; the wall depicting bad government with violence and unhappiness and mayhem; the wall depicting good government with people lining up to get a judgement, a scale, serene countenances.  We talked about a Council of Nine like a City Council, this making sense since Daniel ran for Waltham City Council a year and a half ago.  Our kids don't usually want to go to museums, so I loved sitting with the boys as they looked at these paintings, commenting on the good and the not-good of the paintings and of government.

We found a field and played freeze tag.

We climbed the Torre de Mangia (tower) that made me love Siena more because the views were that Tuscan countryside and the roofs were that orange-y color all over Siena.  This is what I was looking for on this spring break trip -- not sightseeing so much as hanging about,...the kids looked out from each lookout onto the piazza, searching for the police officer who had the job of telling people not to litter.

Bagni San Filippo

Daniel is often on the hunt for bodies of water.  At home, it's rivers and lakes and ponds and swimming holes.  In Italy, it's hot springs.

I was in charge of planning spring break, so I made up a little loop on google maps that would give us some seeing new places and some hanging out.  Tarochi Garden (huge mosaic sculptures all made by one woman); Lucca; Florence (strike 3); Siena; maybe Arezzo (didn't happen); Orvieto.  Daniel added hot spring, though he hadn't determined where yet.

Bagni San Filippo.  Siena to Bagni San Filippo.  This might have been one of my favorite car rides.  Daniel gave the kids math problems for part of it, I looked out the window, and we all seemed somehow part of the same conversation -- all of us, even the kids who usually bury themselves in reading or in finding music.  I wish I could remember what else we talked about beside math problems (my contribution was a word problem about the big Esta The I bought versus the six mini Esta Thes I almost bought...how much did I save?), but I don't.  I just remember that it was the rare ride with no fighting and with everyone in sync and in one conversation.

We walked up to the springs, disappointed to find that the water was not actually hot.  It was tepid at best, even cool in spots.  While the kids and I put our feet in and sat and chatted, Daniel kept searching for a better spot.  No longer disappointed, Connor was throwing rocks to see them splash over a mini-waterfall, and then started making a dam; the others joined in, and everyone was wonderfully, beautifully occupied.  Watching them I thought, Now this is what we needed.  Playing outside.  I was reminded of one of the entrances to Prospect Hill, two blocks from us at home.  Connor and Sebastian and Hannah and their neighborhood buddies Gus and Orly can spend an hour here making a dam, building it, reinforcing it, adding new elements.  (Or at the beach in Scituate, they make a wall of sand and mud to hold up against the oncoming waves.  As the tide comes in, they try to fight it, adding dry sand and height and heft to their wall, maybe even a boogie board for support.)

Daniel returned with news that we had to come see what he'd found.  We resisted: we had just settled in and were happy.  The kids were busy with their dam, I was happy in the sun watching them, nothing could be better.  Simplicity.  I thought, It doesn't matter if we see the next better or best thing.

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After we got lunch, the kids and I went to find Daniel.  Two hundreds yards down from where we had been was a huge mountain covered in what looked like snow, but was really calcium.  Connor ran ahead to climb on the calcium-covered rock, Hannah ran to find Daniel, Mary tested out the hot spring, and Sebastian and I sat to eat our sandwiches.

It looked like a glacier, that rock, and like a set for photo shoots.  We watched and laughed as women posed in their bikinis, their heads back, their hair catching the hot spring water falling down the rock, their poses suggestive.  I lost track of Connor and Hannah.  Daniel said that they went to the top of the rock and were playing there.

Scared, I tried walking on the calcium.  I'd seen some people easily running on it, others slipping as they went down.  I had to try.  I passed the posers, got my footing, felt pretty great and brave.  Mary took Daniel's old spot, lying down on the rock where the spring dumped hot water right under her, hot hot.  She told me, You would have loved it.

Connor and Hannah returned with huge balls of calcium that would have been great in a snowball fight.

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Dams.  Calcium balls.  Snowballs.  Waltham.  Italy.  Okay, maybe we don't get hot springs and calcium-covered rocks in Waltham, but the playing feels the same.

Small Talk

Tuesday

I sat down at my desk this morning and went to fill up the green glass that I snagged yesterday from the SYA kitchen with water from my water bottle.  (I've lost the water bottle I got for Christmas, so really, this one is from the previous tenants of our apartment.  They left a number of water bottles.  We've lost all but this one.  We're the same way at home: no matter how cheap or expensive, flimsy or sturdy, common or unique, most water bottles we acquire go missing.  My aunt years ago made fun of that saying, Go missing.  She'd say, "What's that?  Someone went missing.  It sounds weird.  How did that become a thing?"  In this case, I wanted to use it to avoid the passive voice since I'd gotten myself that far into the sentence.)  I like drinking from the glass rather than from the water bottle.  It's easier.  But this morning the glass wasn't here on my desk.

Sometimes I make myself a cup of hot water or tea at work.  I think I leave my mug on my desk, but the next day I don't see the mug.  Daniel asks me sometimes at home, "Do you know what your hands did?"  And the truth is that I often don't.  When Daniel first met my parents, Thanksgiving 2001, he learned not to leave anything out.  He went into the kitchen to find a tennis ball that he had left on the counter to play four square.  It was gone.  He was flummoxed.  My mom had put it away.  She didn't like for things to be left out for no reason (she likely didn't know he had a reason, but even if she did she might not have wanted it out in her kitchen amidst the Thanksgiving cooking).  Sometimes after Christmas morning, my mom would say, "I have another present for you, but I can't remember where I put it.  I just can't find it!"  This has happened to me numerous times, and our kids sometimes get a present a day late, buried under clothing or hiding in a bag on a hook because I don't remember what my hands did with it.

So when I don't see my mug, I think that perhaps I brought it to the kitchen and washed it.  It's crossed my mind that Rosaria or Anna, who clean the school every afternoon, could have picked it up, but that seems far-fetched.  They would have picked it up from my desk, taken it to the kitchen, washed it.  They have much more to do than collect a mug or glass from my desk.

The green glass wasn't here this morning, and I'm sure I left it on my desk.  When I went to make my hot water between AP proctoring sessions, I found it washed and on a shelf in the kitchen.  I'm thinking that likely Rosaria or Anna have cleared those mugs from my desk this year.

Rosaria I met early on.  She works here at SYA cleaning after school, and then some evenings and weekends she works at the baths.  These are not the free baths that we frequent, but the Terme dei Papi, the Pope's Baths as they're called, where you pay to sit in the huge piscina of thermal water or you can get a massage or other treatments.  (I've been to these baths on a school excursion.  I don't think our kids would like them so much because they're so placid, so filled with people enjoying the quiet.  I found them luxurious and wonderful.)  Last week I saw Rosaria outside the walls on my walk.  She had two dogs.  The next day we talked about her dogs and her work schedule.  Another day I saw her at a tabacchi when I went in to recharge my phone.

Anna I met later and it took me weeks to remember her name.  We speak a little less, but we laugh, too.  As with Rosaria, our conversations are choppy attempts at connecting, and we connect enough, but not as much as I'd like because of my Italian.  I'm reminded of the women in the dining hall at Thayer.  They're funny and kind, and they have a good edge.  They're tough with that kindness, and the humor can be affectionate or sharp.  I know more about their lives than I do about Rosaria and Anna, but still a limited amount.  They help me out when I need snacks for the National Latin Exam or food stored for Fr. Bill's, or they find me a bag of chips, and they tease me when I don't go over to lunch.  Mary likes science fiction movies I would never watch, and Darlene has two dozen chickens.

Often people make fun of small talk, and I can be one of these people.  I like real conversations that connect me to folks.  But sometimes small talk is a fine start and good enough.  Small talk can turn into something else, conversations about what someone does in free time or about family or work or daily routines.  I imagine that my early conversations with LeeAnn, our mail carrier at home, started small.  Or with the women who work in the TA dining hall.

Wednesday

Lots of AP exams this week and I'm proctoring.  During one of my breaks, I headed down to Bar 103 on the corner for a decaf cappuccino, not for any reason other than it sounded good on this rainy day.  I go to Bar 103 if I'm with SYA colleagues mostly.  Occasionally I go with one of the kids, but I think of it more as an SYA break place.  Nadia and her daughter Olga work there six days a week, long hours.  They are both tall, blond hair, smiley, chatty with customers they know.  With me, they're kind, but we don't speak much.  One December evening after a Paradiso performance, when I was there with the kids, Olga made them beautiful hot chocolates and gave them each a piece of candy when we left.

This afternoon I brought TA sophomore summer reading, The Universe Versus Alex Woods, which I didn't care for during the first ten pages, but now want to read every moment I can.  (I love the narrator, a teenage boy with both a lack of awareness and total awareness at the same time.)  Maybe that's why I don't go to Bar 103 much.  They know me a bit, as in with SYA people, and sometimes I just want to read the news on my phone or my book, and it might feel awkward to do so at Bar 103.

As I walked in, a man was walking out.  Nadia said her farewells and said, "Di mi."  I ordered, stood at the bar with my book, not reading it quite yet.  Then she started talking with me.  She asked when we were headed back to the U.S., whether we were coming back for another year, how we liked it here in Italy.  I told her about the family vote and the decision to go home.  She was baffled that we were going home when the vote was 5-1, when only one kid voted to go home.

She told me how Olga, who was ten when they moved here, didn't want to come, cried and cried, wanted to go back to Ukraine.  Nadia imitated her with her fists up to her eyes as she said, "Piangere, piangere, piangere!" She missed her home and friends and grandparents.  Nadia told her, "You can go back when you're eighteen.  For now, I'm here in Italy, so you are, too."  We talked about language a bit, how Italian sounds like a song and I love the sound of it, how she used to know German and Ukranian and some Russian, how now she's been here for twenty years and she speaks mostly Italian now.  At this point she has spent half her life in Ukraine and half her life in Italy.  As I walked out, she called loudly out the door, "Ciao, bella!" with a laugh.

I couldn't pass the AP Italian Language and Culture exam I'm proctoring today, but that's okay.  I'll take the ability to have a conversation with Nadia or Anna or Rosaria.  Nadia said, "If you stayed another year, your language would be perfect."  I'm paraphrasing because she speaks Italian, and it's good enough for me that I got the jist of it.

Eventually small talk can become something else.  Even if we don't speak the same language.

What to See

We had friends in town on Good Friday.  When Daniel met up with them in Rome upon their arrival, they had all gone out for gelato which cost, they realized afterwards, seven euro per gelato.  (We pay two euro per gelato in Viterbo, and generally slightly more in other towns/cities, including Rome.)  Now they were coming to Viterbo for an afternoon, and I wanted to have good meals ready for them.  Viterbo is not on a typical tourist guide, and I wanted to make parts of the afternoon good and easy for them.  They have two daughters, one a friend of Sebastian's from Plympton and one in grade four still at Plympton.  Daniel and I were thinking about what we could show them to make this one day of their eight day Italy trip, worthwhile: the terme (hot spring baths) or Pope's Palace or the medieval quarter or the UNESCO plaques for the Santa Rosa procession.

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The feast of Santa Rosa was such a novelty for all of us.  Since then there's been the day after Santa Rosa festival and the befana procession for Epiphany (the one with the women and the Fiats and candy -- where we temporarily lost Connor) and some feast late March when the streets were lined with stalls selling treats and bags and kitchen utensils.  There have been days that I've heard drumming and not rushed outside to find it.  For the Flower Festival two weeks ago all the piazzas in the medieval quarter were decked out with flowers and knitted creations of flowers and cactuses and wagons; on the side of the road folks were selling flowers and plants and baskets (Hannah stopped to watch a man shaving down a stick before adding it to the basket he was making).

In the past two days I've seen banners and signs for Santissimo Salvatore, and Thursday as I opened the shutters in my office and waved across the street to Renzo, who works or owns the edicola across the street -- every morning I see him and two other men standing outside his shop as I open my shutters -- he yelled something up to me that I partly understood.  He invited me for a caffe as he's done before, and I know that I should follow up on this one though I feel too awkward to walk across the street one of these mornings and say something like, "Buongiorno, Renzo!  Caffe adesso?"  He's asked me twice now from across the street, and I'd like to follow up, but this will take some courage on my part, courage that's not quite there yet.  He is wonderfully friendly with me and with the kids and complimentary of our Italian, even mine.  But still, there will be not awkward silences, but rather moments when he speaks and I need many moments to parse which words make up his sentence and which words I need to respond.  The quick Italian coffee may not be quick enough.

After the window caffe invitation, Renzo yelled up something about a procession that was going to go down Via Cavour, that I'd be able to see from this window.  A day later, noticing the window banners like the ones that hung down from windows during Santa Rosa -- those had pictures of the facinni (men who carried the macchina of the Santa Rosa back in September) on them -- I realized that this Saturday -- today! -- is the feast of San Salvatore, and one sign says that the procession is at 6pm.  The kids are procession-ed out; the drums and marching and dancing on the streets of Viterbo are no longer quite as exciting, and they are happy to stay home and relax even though they would need to walk about two blocks to see it.

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Before our friends -- the family of four from Waltham -- arrived early afternoon, I went for a short run, showered, and cleaned the bathrooms with Hannah.  Daniel cooked and cooked (caponata -- a Sicilian dish he learned to make after our Sicily trip; chicken with peppers and onion).  I ran out to do a few errands in the remaining hour.  I invited Mary, knowing that her Italian makes my life easier and my Italian less awkward since she loves to do the talking and does so effectively, but she declined.

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First: Bancomat for money.  Renzo's shop is a door or two down from the ATM.  He saw me and gave me his usual enthusiastic greeting, introducing me to his friends, pointing across the street at SYA, bragging on my behalf that I can speak Italian and I've been here since only August.  I protested (then later realized in talking with Daniel that really, not protesting is more appropriate -- Renzo is kind and effusive, yes, and he knows exactly how good and bad my Italian is at this point as Daniel pointed out), thanked him, moved on to my next errand.

Taverna Etrusca.  I love their pizza.  This would be good lunch for today.  Without Mary I walk in and ask about ordering pizzas.  The man recognizes me and takes my order.  I'm thinking five pizzas for ten of us.  But I hesitate.  I ask him how many pizzas he would get for ten people.  He says, Whatever you wish.  I say, Yes, but what do you think?  He says, Italians get one pizza per person.  I realize he's right, but I don't want to over-order.  So I order eight pizzas.  (Ultimately, this is ridiculous because we'll be ten people for lunch at 1pm, yes, and then we're having an early dinner around 5pm, and Daniel's cooked for hours, and I can't have us not hungry.)  I walk out of Taverna Etrusca laughing at myself, but also delighted that I've ordered the pizzas successfully and had a lovely conversation in Italian with this man.  I need to keep moving.

Pane Pizza Dolce at Fontana Grande.  Daniel's requested a loaf of bread for dinner.  Pane Pizza Dolce is our favorite bread and pizza slices spot (whereas we order whole pizzas and usually eat at Taverna Etrusca which is an actual restaurant).  Mary comes here each morning before school to get her pizza (bianca or croccante -- I'm not sure which) for morning snack; the school sells pizza -- 1 euro for 2 pieces -- and the others all bring money to school each day.  Mary prefers this PPD pizza, so she stops every morning, likely adding a few minutes extra to her daily tardiness.  One Saturday in the fall Daniel and I stopped at a bakery by Piazza del Erbe to pick up bread to go with lunch.  Before we walked in, Daniel said, "Would you order?  I never know how to get bread."  At first I thought he was faking it, encouraging me to practice my Italian and get out there.  We walked in, and I looked at the options, loaves of bread whose differences I could not discern, and I thought, I have no idea what to order.  Or how to order.  Do any of these have salt?  I don't remember exactly, but likely I turned to Daniel and we pieced together a request for a loaf with salt, she didn't have any left with salt, and we left with a loaf of bread that we all finished off at lunch salt or no salt.

Saturdays we often end up at Pane Pizza Dolce at Fontana Grande to grab slices for lunch.  It's delicious and inexpensive.  Mary orders, and we bring it home or on a hike or bike ride for everyone.  But Mary's still not with me.  I walk in, wait in line, and when I get up to the front, I make my request for a loaf of bread with salt.  Again, I don't remember whether there was any with salt or not at that point, but I know that I walked out happily with a loaf of bread, thrilled that the woman recognized me, granted my request in some way, and I was returning home with a loaf of bread.

Final stop: I really wanted a coffee post-run.  Break Bar is downstairs.  I walk in and the barista recognizes me.  I come here maybe once every few weeks and get a cappuccino to get energy for afternoon classes or endurance for a Saturday out when I've not slept well.  She knows my order, says, "Cappuccino?" before I speak.  This is the place where an older woman once treated me, a woman I didn't know, whose offer I accepted because she said, "Offro io," as she paid.  I stand at the bar and sip my cappuccino.  A woman I recognize walks in; she's a host mom for an SYA student.  Dorianna -- I'm inwardly thrilled that I remember her name and which student is living in her house.  She says hello, orders her caffe, and we talk for a few minutes.  She's Italian: her caffe is gone in two minutes.  From the moment I saw her come in and order I knew that I wanted to treat her to her coffee, an easy offro io to accomplish.  But Dorianna is done before I am; quick and smooth, she walks around me and goes to the register to start to pay for my coffee and hers.  I cannot have another offro io moment here at Break Bar.  I need a turn.  I insist.  Dorianna relents.  The barista smiles.

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I return home nearly ecstatic: these errands brought me so much joy.  Or rather, the people at all my stops made me feel connected, seen, accepted.  I'm not Italian, and I'll never really belong, I know that.  But for that forty minutes I felt like part of this neighborhood, able to communicate in the smallest ways, able to know where to go for what.

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Mary and I put out only five of the eight pizzas (the other three do come in handy for breakfast and lunch the next day); we take our friends to the park by The Awakening sculpture, walking some through the medieval quarter on the way; Daniel takes five kids to the terme for an outing, and I give the most miniature tour of Viterbo possible to the adults -- piazza San Lorenzo and Pope's Palace; Piazza Commune with a gorgeous view; a Santa Rosa plaque in the street; the Stumbling Stones by Porta Verita. 

What I wish I could have shared with them though was those errands.  They would have held no meaning for them -- a spot for money, for pizza, for bread, for coffee.  But they are the stuff of life for me.