befana

To most of the english-speaking world, La Befana means absolutely nothing. According to Google Translate it means The Epiphany. According to Wikipedia it refers to an old lady, perhaps a witch. When Alex took the girls to the indoor pool this morning, she found nothing open. Except the streets. You see, this is the Epiphany: the 6th of January when Jesus is recognized as God the Son, a human child; the day when, traditionally, the children of Italy awake to a mountain of presents under the...  Befana tree?  Maybe not, but nevertheless, they do awake to a mountain of presents left by a wayward old lady who has passed up the chance to accompany the three wise men and spends the rest of her haunted soul's existence dropping gifts at the feet of any child she bumps into.  Just in case they may be the actual Jesus of whom it has been spoken. Can you imagine the effect, when every child considers itself a god-like creature? How disappointing it must be to grow up. 


But La Befana presents a remarkable resemblance to our regular hero. Or rather a blend, or perhaps a prototype of, Santa Clause and the Halloween witch. "She is usually portrayed as an old lady riding a broomstick through the air wearing a black shawl and is covered in soot because she enters the children's houses through the chimney. She is often smiling and carries a bag or hamper filled with candy, gifts, or both." (Wikipedia).


What is remarkable to me is that Italians have incorporated Santa Claus (Babo Natale or Father Christmas) into their holiday tradition. An Italian child today can expect a mountain of gifts on Christmas day from Babo Natale as well as a second lot on the Epiphany from La Befana. How have I missed out all these years?


Anyway, you can rest assured our kids got nothing today. Yet mama, La Alex, received a fancy mop bucket, complete with a mop squeezer, to help encourage her Befana-like habits of compulsive house cleanliness. Ho Ho Ho!

sempre stranieri

Always foreigners. It's been stated by authors who should know. Not the pollyanna ones who write things I can't read, but those who tell it like it is. After Hannibal comes to mind by Barry Unsworth.

On the first day of the Christmas holiday, Thomasina stepped off the school bus in an obviously quiet

mood. At home she waited until we were alone before losing her composure and crying in my arms. Her school friend of many years had avoided her, preferring Italian friends on her 'smart phone' and fruitless boyfriend strategies. Thomasina confessed to not being able to keep  up with the slang, the dialect, of the locals and their fast-track chatter about TV shows, local cinema, immediate society, and current fashion. We have restricted  her cell phone, TV (absolutely non-existent), movies, and most social life. Instead we have insisted on homework, tennis lessons, sailing lessons, swimming lessons, and housework. She and Isolde have lived as a pair of friends in a foreign land. Every adult we know praises our kids as the most polite, the most informed, and the most well adjusted of any they know; but I worry. Any kid who is not accepted by her friends is in for a hard time, in my opinion.

Yesterday, Alex told me we had not been invited to the New Years Eve party of a couple we thought were friends or ours. We passed a nice holiday with numerous visits beginning with Thanksgiving and I felt a bit exhausted by it all, not to mention the frustration of obligatory gift shopping, when faced with the self-imposed schedule of making daily progress on this infinite pile of work I've set out for myself. But, if pressed, I have to confess, I don't have many friends here. When a potential acquaintance, let alone friend, holds a New Year's Eve party and forgets to invite me... well that's fairly obvious. When I learned of the snub I shrugged it off, but it's been haunting me for the whole week. Now I know what it feels like, Thomasina.

All vacation long, we've been thrown together in our small, snug apartment. We've made the best of Christmas with our olive tree and Jaquetta's cooking and inspirations, but it's been a very private season. We all work most of the day, including Christmas Day (cooking, etc.), the girls do their homework, Thomasina does some guitar practice, Isolde reads endless books until she is forced to re-read those she read last week. They practice their bridge (card game), swimming, and tennis. And the girls seem happy to play with each other at loads of make-believe games.

We are currently watching the weather report for signs of snow at the local ski area, but time is running out. School starts on monday and tonight it's raining.

push-button heat

    For the past 10 years or so, everybody we know has enjoyed some form of warmth during the winter months at the touch of a button. Many of our Italian neighbors are facing $1000 per month heating bills if they live in a house like ours and push the button, but then some people seem able to burn that kind of money. Especially for warmth.  After food and clothing it's shelter, after all. For the past 10 years we've been warm in winter only if we are prepared to cut, split, haul, and dress in lots of layers. With windows glazed in picture frame glass and casements with half inch tolerances, a cold and windy night requires some shivering upper lip. But after 9 years or so (one in England, one in South Umbria, and 7 here in West Umbria) we've actually hardened to the task: order in 35 quintale of lumberyard scraps, let it age for three years, get Bob Henry to saw and split it, and then keep warm hauling it up two flights of stairs to the one warm room in our quarters.
     Then, two winters ago, we noticed a wonderful change. Our kitchen was being heated by more than the occasional sunny day. It was Elda downstairs living in our finished guest apartment and keeping it toasty warm with her own wood fire. Our kitchen floor was her sitting room ceiling. This was a new level of luxury for us. So much so that we hardly noticed when our own fire began to ease to embers. All that survival instinct panic was slipping away and winter seemed not so serious.
      Well, this winter things have changed again. We still have the wood stove, and Bob Henry sawed and split a mountain of fuel; but Elda and her fire are gone. She, Martina and Marco moved into their own place on the other side of the estate and took their wood stove with them. I wanted to move into the apartment; but the cold, vacant rooms required us to wrestle our own wood stove into the apartment along with a new stove pipe. Tough decision since it would leave us stoveless upstairs and the apartment already has underfloor heating (that is, there are pipes buried under the paving stones, but there's still no heat source). Further, the clean and bare rooms are ready for a summer vacation rental or two if we could keep our greasy mitts off.
      We moved our stove in. We moved a few kitchen utensiles, but we decided to continue to sleep upstairs. And we committed a travesty. We bored holes in our lovely ancient walls and installed a modern heat pump to take advantage of our solar electricity. It looks like a big, white air-conditioner mounted on white, metal supports 10 feet up the back wall. It's decorated by white insulated pipes unsuccessfully hidden in white plastic conduits. When the sun shines, we push a button and it pumps hot air into the apartment. In summer it will pump cool air into the apartment. If we watch our meters, the heat is free and there's still some left over for the world. But it's the ugliest thing you've ever seen.

 

olive oil

    Unfinished stuff is the stuff of nightmares. I used to be much more comfortable with unfinished stuff, but now that school is long over and I'm no longer trying to understand biochemistry, unfinished projects can really bug me. Like this house.

    I have a pretty good idea of what we need to do to heat this house. I've modeled its heat loss on the computer at various proposed outdoor temperatures and I know how much heat we need. I also know where we can get this heat for the least expense and how to store and distribute it. When I hear our neighbors, builders, and friends discuss the subject I know now not to get involved. They just don't get it and I can't convince anyone I know what I'm talking about. I can only show them. And to show them, I need to get my underfloor heating system installed and get it fed by my solar panels and woodstove. I've been trying to do this for the past three winters, and in my rush, I have overlooked the actual challenge of making the ground floor air, water, and warmth tight as well as improving the strength of the structure and its foundations. It's a huge project.

    In November we got to the point where we could begin the final coat of plaster in the laundry room. The laundry room has been one of the big hurdles. It's deeply excavated below the existing foundations and its walls were never very good. It's also the site of the hot water tank where our precious heat will be stored as well as the entry point for electrical and water supplies. It's the room that must come first. It's taken a long time to work out all the problems and once the final coat of plaster began to go up, I found it almost impossible to stop working. I'd work right into the night. It's been my Moby Dick.

    But in November, everything must stop when the olives begin to ripen, even the final plaster.  It's a crop. It's farming. It depends on the weather and it's tough to predict. Further, harvesting is dangerous and is best done in good weather. Climbing trees in the rain doesn't make sense and wet olives rot before they can be pressed. The whole thing demands a lot of attention and all of one's time. Last year we housed a small army of workaway volunteers and it rained. Rained and rained. I put them to work as best I could throwing mortar at holes in the cantina walls, but the whole month was not our best. Alex had to house and feed a ton of people who had to work in not-so-nice conditions. We got our oil, and it was sensational as usual; but too costly. This year we didn't bother bringing in a single volunteer besides Giles. I was still a sort of one-armed man, scared of being hurt again, and sore from plastering. Giles didn't like climbing trees much and Alex... well, she was just fine, but she's running a household with two children in school, and... well, there's never enough of her to go around. But the weather held and we turned our attention to picking. And the weather got better and better and we picked and picked, and borrowed more and more baskets, and sawed off great limbs in an effort to catch up with forgotten pruning. Thomasina and Isolde got enthusiastic and the five of us spent 10 days or so in the most lovely weather, enjoying the outdoors which we might have missed if we didn't have to harvest the crop. The region was having a poor harvest with some yields down 50%. Our trees didn't look too promising either, but we kept on moving, picking and picking. We even picked Dan and Miranda's trees, and in the end we filled every basket we could borrow. We took two full van loads (mini-van, anyway) to the mill and set a record for quantity. I'm looking at the mill receipt right now and it shows 745 kilograms delivered yielding 109 litres of olive oil.

    One the most delightful things on our calendar is the moment of dipping a garlicky, salty piece of hot toast into freshly pressed olive oil and tasting that oddly pugent, full, outdoorsy flavor of our own oil. It's a taste that doesn't last. As the oil ages, it mellows and becomes less a flavor of its own and more a component to food. We first experienced this with Tom and Ruth after joining a local harvest. A blind tasting was put before us and we all choose the wrong oil with our naive palates. Now we are wiser and look for the elusive flavor elements.

   Olive oil is available in every food store, but the free-run, fresh oil is a completely different thing. Now I'm beginning to wonder if I can air-freight this to America or England in small quantities immediately after the harvest to offer the experience to those who might be interested... hmmm.

My Moon

    October is my birth month. As usual for this unusual year, the weather was sensational. My moon huge and clear as a bell. Thankfully, my birthday was celebrated very low key and almost slipped by unnoticed.
     One would expect that such perfect conditions would set the stage for a tranquil setting where one could write peacefully, reflecting on all one's good fortune and using the creative time to improve conditions in the greater world.  But disruptions always have a way of shadowing bright plans, and that most valuable commodity, time, is the first casualty.

     My good fortune includes Bob Henry. He is a subject all of his own and one day I'll have the time to devote a proper description. Bob belongs to my remote past in Hartland, Wisconsin where I grew up in my High school years. He was classmate to and friends with my brother Matt. He has been staying with us here in Italy since the middle of September. He arrived on the same day that his daughter was being sentenced due to a drug related mishap in her apartment. Bob's got 'issues' most of us can't imagine, and he doesn't deserve them. He asked to be excused from Workaway obligations and, in fact booked himself with Dan and Miranda up the hill as a bed and breakfast customer. Nevertheless, he devoted countless hours to our welfare and showed up at evening meals bearing wine, flowers, enthusiasm, conversation, and dishwashing. He drove us everywhere in his spanking clean rental car and took our other workaway refugees under his wing. We are big fans of Bob Henry. Luckily, Bob's stay overlapped that of Bryn and Lisa tying in two diverse portions of my history.
     A new Workaway volunteer arrived hot on the heels of Bryn and Lisa. Giles got his room back and Tom, the new guy, moved into the camping trailer. This always requires a flurry of bed making, room cleaning and laundry service; but luckily Bryn and Lisa didn't have enough time to get a good mess going. New volunteers always need some adjusting to with their needs for food, comfort, computer access, electricity adapters, physical space, conversation and a job description. Giles, who fits in easily, has a seemingly endless capacity to exhaust all tasks placed before him. It takes a keen mind to organize the jobs to keep ahead of him; but with the added manpower of Tom, management became my main task. I'm not a good manager. Ask anyone. Further, Giles works best by himself. Our best manager, Alex, when faced with a full house, becomes a galley slave, imprisoned partly by our own idiosyncratic kitchen methods. The water rules are so staggeringly complicated that only those fully brainwashed by the underlying philosophy can possibly understand how to flush the loo. Helping out in the kitchen, with it's added layer of food resource complexity, just isn't possible for the average volunteer. So, rather than helping with the goal of constructing the underfloor heating system on the ground floor (which is the main goal at the moment), Tom got put to work moving the growing mountain of firewood that Bob Henry was producing. On the 15th, Tom moved on to another workaway host which happened to be on the next hillside.
    A week later, Bob went on a solitary bike ride to nearby Panicale, where, guess what? he broke his shoulder falling on a downhill corner. At my familiar hospital, he opted out of surgery in order to make his flight back to the states bound up like a mummy! Poor guy!
   October finished with a visit from some of our most encouraging friends, Robin and Steve Cavagnolo. Last time they were here it snowed in the night and we had a very crude woodstove to keep things going. This time we were at least able to provide a finished room and a warm supper, but the highlight was a day at the rustic public baths below San Casciano dei Bagni, a little spa town overlooking the Val d'Orca to cure Robin's hangover!
      Below surface of the diary of vacationers and visitations another story was brewing. Since Alex and the girls returned from their visit to the US, a disruption in our household slowly became more inevitable. Perhaps it was the experience with the luxuries of American life colliding with the lack of progress in our work here, but we began to discuss our arrangements with Marco, our "resident builder," until it came time to announce it's termination. A difficult moment because Marco, Elda and ourselves had developed a close relationship; but it was clear that Marco, Elda, and Martina had established themselves as a family and that Marco's time was no longer ours alone. Luckily they found a vacancy in another apartment on the leCoste Estate so their disruption was minimized and a moving date was set for the first of November. We were getting our first floor back along with our dear apartment, it's bathroom, shower, kitchen, modern windows, and insulation - three years after its completion. And I was getting my old job back as principle builder.

Good Ex

A quick note to say Bryn Gabriel just left after spending the night with us. Wonderful moment for me. She looks very fine and happy. We got the opportunity to meet her partner Lisa as well. More info and perhaps a photo to follow.

energy independent

   If you invested a great deal of time, effort, emotion and money into something that depended on the sun, what would be the most ironic bit of weather you might expect on the eve of its implementation? Yes, a force five thunderstorm complete with its own source of mega electricity. At 2:30am the whole house awoke with a light burst more white and brilliant than a summer's day and a deafening, simultaneous, instantaneous crash. I think the dog downstairs threw up on Elda's carpet. And that wasn't nearly enough. Lightning and thunder continued without pause keeping every one in expectation of the next explosion that would surely carry us all away. Remember, this all came by surprise after bedtime and after roughly four months of NO clouds, rain or certainly thunder. Crash! Luckily, I had unplugged the sensitive stuff at bedtime and the only real damage was a defunct internet modem (yet again).
   When the sleepy kids went off to school before dawn, it was still raining but the tempest had passed. The wind was stilled, and the land quiet. We had accumulated some four inches of rain in any open bucket, yet the sky opened peacefully to a beautiful, partly cloudy day.
    The electrical utility was scheduled to arrive that morning to install their meters and allow our photovoltaic panels to begin benefiting mankind, but damage to local equipment during the night caused them to arrive in the afternoon with only one worker. He did what he was supposed to do and by four pm we were watching our electric meter register kilowatt hours positive. A much anticipated moment. Murphy's Law demanded that clouds would form and of course a light rain broke out at the precise moment, but that didn't keep us from gathering a lawn chair to watch the meter creep off the zero peg during a break in the clouds.

    We are finally producing our own energy. We should be producing enough to allow us to look at a new electric toaster-oven going on sale tomorrow, but we may have to wait until spring. The dry summer has overnight turned into the cool, damp winter.