27 February 2022

None of this would be possible, or even thinkable, without Jonathan, of course. He is not only my one true love, but also my oldest and dearest friend.

We met at the beginning of our first year of college. He was a friend of my roommate and I remember liking him right from the start. There was something indefinable that was very appealing about him.

First we were friends for a long time. Then we dated for a while and then we broke up and lost touch with each other. He went off and married an Italian woman who was the source of his sons and also of the Italian citizenship that makes our whole international adventure so much easier, bureaucratically speaking. I went off and had my two little boys on my own.

And then one day, after 15 years of absence, I heard from him again -- an email out of the blue. He was living in Switzerland, his marriage over. He was thinking of me. I had been thinking of him.

But I was just about to leave for the South Pacific -- a year away on a tiny island. We saw each other once before I left, a flying visit of less than a day. And then I went to Rarotonga with my two little boys and my one carry-on suitcase.

If you have a globe and you put one finger on Raro and one on Zurich, you will see that the entire Earth is between your fingers. It is impossible for two people to be further apart without leaving the surface of the planet and heading out into space. And on Raro, I had only very occasional access to the internet or a telephone. Both were ruinously expensive.

So we wrote letters to each other. I would sit on the veranda of our ancient and rambling house by the sea, shaded by palm trees and summer tipani and guavas, while the boys played together in the garden and the surf murmured at the end of the lawn (or at night, sweating, under the yellow light bulb that hung from the ceiling and the summer rain pounded down outside, watched over by the lizards called mokos who clung to the walls, still and curious) and write letters to him that would takes weeks and weeks to arrive. And he, in the northern hemisphere winter, icy and white and antiseptic in Switzerland, was meanwhile writing to me. 

We fell in love in those letters and longed for each other, so far away. I have them all here now, tied together with a ribbon in a bundle.

That was 20 years ago. I left my little island paradise and moved with the boys to Switzerland. Some people thought -- and said to my face -- that I was insane. We got married there and eventually came back here.

And I am still desperately in love with him. It has been years and years now and every day I am amazed that I have managed to be so lucky. It would have been so easy for the world to come between us -- the world was literally between us -- so many chances for us to just miss each other by a hair's breadth. But instead, he is here now, so near that I can hear him breathe. He has already made me laugh so many times this morning, already made me swoon. All I want, for the rest of my life, is to be near him.

And so we will go off on our next adventure together. We are always happy when we travel together. But then, we are always happy when we stay home, too.

26 February 2022

 

It's not that we don't try. God knows we try. And God laughs at us.

We had the electrician in. We had a long to-do list. The electrician did some of the list and is coming back next week with the parts to do the rest. He gave us an estimate of both time and money. We gave him a check. We handled it and it is supposed to stay handled. For at least, you know, a week.

But now, the light over the kitchen sink has stopped working. It is not a regular light -- even I can just change a regular light bulb. It is a special light and I am flummoxed.

"Ah," Jonathan says. "It needs a new baklava." (In actuality, he says a technical, light-and-electricity-related word starting with "b" that means nothing to me and that I immediately dismiss from my consciousness.)

Jonathan then buys a new baklava and disassembles the light and removes the old baklava and puts in the new baklava. I watch, rapt. But the light still doesn't work. He does various things, most of which seem to be turning the light off and on again repeatedly, but nothing happens. (To be clear, I did not marry him for his electrical expertise -- I married him for his body.) I wander off.

We will tell our new best friend the electrician about this when he comes again this week and hope he can figure out what is wrong. He seems to know his stuff and is very kind.

But I look around the house suspiciously, trying to figure out what will go on the fritz as soon as he leaves. It may be electrical or it may be something else entirely. The gods like to keep us guessing. They are assholes like that.

25 February 2022

 


I am stupid. 

I had forgotten that things do not rush forward in Italy. There is no unseemly hurry. There is no frenetic scurrying about. There is, instead, a gracious and stately procession through time. It is one of the things that we treasure most about Italian culture. It is one of the reasons that we are moving there.

That is all to say that we have not yet managed to rent the rustic farmhouse with trusted gardener. We have merely begun the conversation. There will be many days (or even weeks) during which we will continue to discuss. These will be pleasant conversations, but they will not be speedy conversations. Thus was the Renaissance made. One must respect the Renaissance and settle in for the long haul. Pull up a comfy chair.

In the meantime, I continue to pack boxes of books and cart them in loads to the storage unit. There is nothing that encourages minimalism like physically lifting up into the air every single object that you own. As this process moves forward, as I tote more heavy boxes around, I somehow find that fewer and fewer of my books are actually all that necessary to my future life. It is a hard discipline, but salutary.

24 February 2022

The electrician was here yesterday. He was a lovely person, which is good because we will be seeing more of him in the coming days.

We had a to-do list and a sense of dread. It was a long list and a well-justified sense of dread, given the state of things. We have relied on duct tape and prayer for many years now. But it wasn't as bad as we feared. At least we do not need to have the entire house re-wired, which was my big -- and completely reasonable -- anxiety. But it was a long list and he will be back next week to do more of it.

In the meantime, I moved the first load of books into our new storage unit today. They are very heavy and turned our Subaru Impreza into a low-rider. The important thing to remember about your car's suspension is that it likes to be tested, to be challenged, pushed to see how far it can go. Otherwise, it becomes restless and irritable. Also, after a decade of Jonathan's driving, we are selling the car for parts in May anyway.

And we sent an email to the rental agent about the rustic farmhouse and got back a very favorable reply. The rent is more than we intended to spend, but we couldn't help ourselves -- we were swept away by beauty. It's the old story. We are talking to the agent tomorrow on the phone to settle everything.

This is a video of us making the decision:



22 February 2022

To cheer ourselves up, Jonathan and I have been looking at places available to rent in Pietrasanta. It is too early to rent any of them yet, of course, but it helps us keep our spirits up.

The place I fell in love with yesterday is not quite in our price range, but is so close to it that we considered it. We are still considering it. And by "we," I mean mostly "me."


This is the Google translation of the description of it: 

"Cozy rustic with exposed stones totally immersed in nature, furnished with love obviously recalling the countryside with antique wooden furniture. The steps are made of stone, the terracotta floor and the ceilings have beautiful wooden beams, there are three fireplaces, one in the living room for your romantic evenings, one in the kitchen and one in the tavern for dinners. In the tavern, in addition to the fireplace, there is a large solid wood table and a sink carved into the stone, the kitchen also has the typical rustic furniture but equipped with modern appliances. Upstairs there are two bedrooms and two bathrooms. Here you can get rid of city stress and at the same time in ten minutes by car you are in the center of the delightful town of Pietrasanta. You have access to the garden and the wood (about 5000 sqm) all cared for by a trusted gardener."

The fireplaces for our romantic evenings pale in their allure only against the idea of having a trusted gardener. It's the plot of a movie: the lonely, widowed American woman impulsively moves into a rustic farmhouse in Italy. The trusted gardener is there... Perhaps it is the "widowed" part of that scenario that makes Jonathan less enthusiastic about the rustic farmhouse than he was about the rather gorgeous one-bedroom right in the heart of the historic district. I see his point, but still. It is a view worth dying for:


(Also, I am assuming that the duck is included.)


21 February 2022

A friend of mine once moved apartments in New York City by putting every single thing she owned into two big trash bags and walking with them through the streets of Brooklyn from her old apartment to her new one. She, of course, was a genius. And also possibly a maniac.

But I have held onto that as a glowing vision of the life well-lived ever since.

The key, I feel, to a successful international move, is to have no possessions. Tragically, I seem to have lost my keys.

So I have rented a storage unit near our house. This seems a little on the premature side since we are not planning to actually leave until the end of summer. But my idea is that, rather than throwing up our hands and throwing everything into a shipping container and fleeing helter-skelter (in the way that I have inevitably moved every time I have ever moved in my entire life before), Jonathan and I will sort through our belongings in a calm and orderly fashion, disposing of everything we do not absolutely need for the rest of our lives, selecting very carefully those items that are precious to us (photo albums, etc.) but that are not immediately necessary and putting them into storage, and ending up on the day before we get on the plane with two perfectly packed suitcases and an empty house to rent out. It is a lovely idea.

So I have started by packing only my extremely necessary books into boxes and stacking them in the boys' bedroom to take to the storage unit as soon as this immanently expected snowstorm is over. So far in about three hours of work, I have filled 12 large boxes with absolutely necessary, cannot live without, must be saved for all eternity books. I swear to god that each and every one of them sparks incredible transcendent joy in me. "Statistical Abstract of the Cook Islands 2002" anyone? Impossible to live without.

Minimalism -- so far, so good!



20 February 2022

If there is one thing that global climate change has taught us, it is that you never know when summer will come, how long it will last, or how much of it you will get all at once. Today we have: a Red Flag fire alert, snow on the ground, sunshine and 60 degrees, and a snow storm predicted for tomorrow. So I painted the fence.

Not all of it -- only about two-thirds of it and then, thank god, I ran out of paint. The paint had been sitting here on the living room floor unopened for almost a year. I bought it last spring, planning to paint the fence as soon as the blizzards stopped. It turned out, though, that the thing that stopped the blizzards was a record-breaking, sudden-onset heat wave that lasted all summer.

At first, I felt bad about the paint, just sitting there looking at me, all ready in its can with its paintbrush and paint-can opener and paint-stirring stick on top of it. But after a while, as the killer heat wave just went on and on, I thought, "Fuck it." It's like washing your car to make it rain. If my fence-painting plans are the cause of so much misery -- lawns and gardens destroyed, wild animals suffering, farmers ruined -- then I'll just have to let that paint sit right there forever, stirring stick be damned. I did sort of move it off to one side of the living room, though.

But today I outfoxed the weather gods and painted (two-thirds of) the fence on a balmy summer day in February. I expect the fence will catch fire and burn down tonight. I just hope no one is hurt.

18 February 2022

Wednesday's snow is almost gone. More is expected on Monday. These are the days we envisioned in the heat of last August, telling ourselves that it would all be eventually worth it and hoping that we would not be hit by a bus in the meantime.

August is when the local tomatoes here are at their best. And August is when we make sun-dried tomatoes -- so that we can eat them in February and remember the sun. We sweat a lot in August so that in February we can miss the feeling of sweat, I guess. In Colorado Springs, you have to make your own fun.

We call our sundried tomatoes "Tuscan Sun-Dried Tomatoes" because of the Detroit Rule ("Food sounds better with the name of a place in front of it -- with one exception.") although they are not sun-dried and are not particularly Tuscan in any way. When the Food Police come, there will, undoubtedly, be hell to pay.

This is how we make them:

Start by making Basil-Infused Olive Oil (unless you are using your own tomatoes, in which case, "Start by growing tomatoes.") To make BIOO, roughly chop up a big pile of fresh basil. Mix this with an equal amount in volume of olive oil. How you determine equal amounts of something that comes in a big pile of foliage and and something that comes in a thick liquid is anyone's guess. You may, if you like, drink a lovely glass of red wine to help you figure that out -- you still won't know what "equal amounts" means, but you won't care so much. Heat the mixture gently in a pan on the stove. (Jonathan says, "If there are equal amounts of basil and oil, why is it basil-infused oil and not oil-infused basil?" I would explain it to him, but the early morning glass of wine has made that seem rather difficult, so we call ours Basil-Confused Olive Oil instead. This is what happens when you live with a mathematician. Where were we?)

Heat the oil/basil confusion gently on the stove while kind of pounding it every now and then with the tip of a wooden spoon to bruise the basil and release the oil. Heat until just barely simmering and then turn off the heat and let it cool. When it is completely cool, strain it into a bottle or jar. This can be done way ahead of time and can be done with any fresh herb. Rosemary is particularly nice.

The next step is to wait until the tomatoes are at their very best and then buy a lot of them. Like two or three dozen if they are big. Maybe more. Get perfectly ripe and beautiful ones. Smell them to make sure that they are very tomato-y. The aroma should make your eyes kind of roll back in your head and other people also buying tomatoes will see you fondling the produce and swooning and they will move away from you, giving you room to get all the best tomatoes (everyone, that is, except for one old lady who knows exactly what you are doing and doesn't give an inch. That old lady is your friend and you will give each other knowing smiles over by the zucchini later.) When you get home, wash the tomatoes, but don't peel them.

Cut them into quarters and cut off the hard green stem part inside. Use you thumb to gently scrape out the seeds. You don't have to be fascist about it. Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees.

Line as many baking sheets, cake pans, etc., with parchment paper as you can fit into your oven. Arrange your oven racks to accommodate everything. Put the cut tomatoes on the parchment paper, skin side down, in one layer. I lay them out very carefully to use every bit of space while making sure that none of them are underneath others. I wish I had a picture of this because it is a thing of completely anal beauty, but it did not occur to me last August to photograph any of this. (This failure to photograph myself, more than anything else, gives away my extreme elderliness, I guess.) Lightly sprinkle the tomato wedges with a bit of dried basil leaves and then with kosher salt -- no iodine! (Iodine turns preserved things brown -- or at least, that is my understanding. I have never actually seen this because I was raised by a bunch of southern ladies and have been part of the pickling/canning/preserving process since before I can remember. I have always known about the iodine in the same way that kids growing up in Colorado know about carrying water bottles with them everywhere and kids growing up in New York City know, presumably, about avoiding rats and Woody Allen.) 

Then into the oven the tomatoes go. (This is the part where they are not exactly [or at all] sun-dried. I will not discuss the reasons for this, but only mention squirrels, birds, and bugs in the backyard -- it's like a Hitchcock film out there.) They (the tomatoes, not [hopefully] the squirrels, etc.) stay in the oven at 200 degrees for anywhere from seven to 14 hours, so prepare yourself. I try to put them in the oven the very last thing at night and then wake up early and start checking on them. It is August, after all, and having the oven on -- even at 200 degrees -- all day long is really too gruesome to contemplate. Better, apparently, to risk your house burning down in the middle of the night from an unattended oven.

After seven hours, start checking on them. They are ready when they are the consistency of fruit leather and are quite dry, but not brown or crunchy. They should still be bendable -- like, you know, a sun-dried tomato. They might not be all ready at the same time, like children on the way to school in the morning, so take out the ones that are dry and leave the others longer.

(Heavens, this post is getting long! Here is a close-up of one of the flying pigs from yesterday to cheer you up.)


It is morning when you are doing this and you will need coffee because there is hot oil coming up and hot oil and drowsiness do not mix. Carefully calibrate the coffee, though, because jitteriness and hot oil also do not mix. If you fear that you might overdo the caffeine, you can handle it the Italian way by making yourself a Caffé Corretto, which is a shot of espresso with a shot of grappa in it. Grappa is the distilled product of the seeds, skins, and stems leftover after pressing the grapes for wine. It smells like flowers and goes down like gasoline. It is sort of like Italian moonshine. I think it is funny that this is what Italians call "correct coffee." There is no doubt in my mind that Caffé Corretto played an enormous role in creating the Renaissance -- or at least the Caravaggio part of it.

In any case, when all the tomatoes are dry, roast some cloves of garlic: take some peeled whole garlic cloves and put them on a square of aluminum foil with some olive oil. Twist the aluminum up to look like a big Hershey's Kiss with the garlic and olive oil inside. Bake at 330 degrees for about 30 minutes or so, depending on the size of your cloves. They should be the color of old ivory when they are done -- not the color of sepia. 

While they are roasting, mix together four cups of water with half a cup of apple cider vinegar in a non-reactive sauce pan on the stove and bring it to a gentle boil. In another sauce pan, start gently heating your basil-confused olive oil from so long ago.

When the vinegar mixture is boiling, put the dried tomatoes in it several at a time and let them boil for two minutes before taking them out with a slotted spoon and putting them to drain a bit on paper towels. By the time this is done, the garlic should be ready.

You should now have very very very very clean jars ready to go. It is probably a good idea to have been boiling them in a big pot of water starting when you got up, but I forgot to tell you that earlier. I blame the whole Caffé Corretto thing. How Michelangelo got the entire Sistine ceiling done is a mystery to me.

Start packing the clean jars with layers of dried tomatoes that have been vinegared, throw a clove of roasted garlic in every now and then. Occasionally sprinkle in some chopped fresh herbs -- I put in chopped basil and thyme. Throwing in a sprig of fresh rosemary is always nice. As you are packing the jar quite tightly with layers of tomatoes, pause every now and then and pour in some of the hot basil-confused olive oil that you have been warming on the stove. Be careful -- it is hot and it might splatter a bit. This is where you want to be sure that you have your caffeine/alcohol intake correctly calibrated -- it is not a time to fuck around. The tomatoes might float a little bit in the hot oil. If they do, carefully push them down with a spoon.

Stop putting in the tomatoes when they are about half an inch from the top of the jar. Fill the oil until it is a quarter of an inch from the top. Put a lid on the jar and store it in a dark, cool place. It should keep for many months. Then sit back, look forward to February, and wonder why you didn't just buy the fuckers from the store.



17 February 2022

Regarding yesterday's residency by the plumber ("visit" is too slight a word): 

It has been so long since we've had anyone over to our house that it felt somehow momentous that another human being would be here. The effect was to cause me to re-evaluate our interior "decoration" through the eyes of a stranger: Jonathan's juggling clubs hanging on the wall in the dining room, papier mache pigs flying around everywhere, the "cork tree" I made a few weeks ago by hanging wine corks from our potted hibiscus tree, the glowing cardboard sun. Only now do I realize that our large and lovely wooden carving of the Rarotongan god, Tangaroa, showing very clearly why he is considered the god of fertility, perhaps could have been displayed less prominently.

He never asked about our jobs, despite living with us for so long and having seen so many secret recesses of our world. I hope it's because he just assumed that we are circus performers.


16 February 2022


The plumber was here for five hours today. During that time, darkness fell and the snow began to fall. I contemplated the nature of time and the universe and also did our taxes.

But all of our plumbing is now like plumbing that normal people have.

We were going to have a lovely chicken and lentil curry for our dinner, but that has not happened because of no running water for five hours. We are getting a pizza instead.

Looking at my old journals from when I lived in Italy 40 years ago, I found these soup labels. You might not have thought that Campbell's Soup would have been widely available in Italy in 1983, but apparently it was. I would not have thought I would have eaten it, but apparently I did.



15 February 2022

One of the keys to happiness, imo, is travelling light -- no baggage!

Certainly this works beautifully as a metaphor for a forward-looking mindset, personal growth, blah blah blah. But that's not what I mean. I mean getting rid of physical objects -- or never acquiring them in the first place.

It is legend in our little family that when I went to spend a year on an island in Polynesia all those years ago, I took with me only Aiden, Tris, and one carry-on suitcase with everything for the three of us in it. My rule then (and for many years afterwards) was that I should be able to pick up both boys and all of our luggage and run, if necessary. (It was, on occasion, necessary.) I am extraordinarily proud of this (to the point of inducing eye-rolling around the dinner table when I bring it up) because packing light may be my only actual virtue.

Why, then, given the obvious purity of my ascetic soul, do I own so much fucking stuff?

I am convinced that this whole moving-to-Italy-and-living-under-a-cork-tree-in-the-sun thing will only work if I can pick up all of our luggage and Jonathan and run.

OK, that's a metaphor.

But while I'm procrastinating on painting the fence, I am working on getting rid of stuff. I have started with clothes because that is easiest. Clothes that can go: clothes that I have only for work that make me look sensible, clothes that look good in the closet but not on me, clothes that no longer fit since I gained the covid 19, clothes that there is nothing wrong with in themselves but that I never ever wear. Those are easy and there is a box on the living room floor now that is headed for the ARC.

But what about my Public Image Ltd. t-shirt from 1979, too fragile to ever wear now? Or my t-shirt from The Cave circa 1988, too precious to risk to the rigors of daily life? What about my wedding dress? Or the tiny silk-screened shirts that seem like doll clothes that Emily sewed by hand for my little boys when we lived with her on Rarotonga?

It's not so much the clothes that I mind parting with -- it's the relics.




14 February 2022

Today I took the first step in the massive home repair monstrosity that will make it possible for someone else to live in this house. We imagine that the entire colossus will take us about six months.

Over time, houses evolve and we have evolved with this house. For example, when I bought this house, you turned on the water in the outdoor faucet in the front yard by turning on the outdoor faucet in the front yard. Those were simpler times. Now you turn on the outdoor faucet in the front yard by flipping a lever down in the basement in a hidden secret recess behind the water heater. There is a reason for this, but it is a complicated reason that evolved over several months and several plumbers and I am afraid that other people would not understand. I won't even go into the story of the light switch in the exact middle of the bedroom wall or how to work the garage door.

(A friend of mine was once rejected by the cleaning service she had called because they said that they would never be able to clean the gunk off her screen door. "But couldn't you just ignore it?" my friend said. "That's what we've been doing all this time." Exactly my point.)

We have evolved with the house over time and now the enormity of deep repair is upon us. It is best to ease into the situation slowly, though, as if you are about to swim with sharks. No one wants to make any sudden movements or big splashes. And the first step is the hardest.

So today I glued the broken picket on the front gate back together with wood glue. It is setting right now, temporarily held together with duct tape. Fortunately, snow is expected in the next couple of days and this will delay my plan to re-paint the fence, giving me time to rest up. But I have now crossed one thing off the gargantuan to-do list. Only nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine more to go.

13 February 2022

 I dropped out of college after my sophomore year. Long story.

Then through a series of accidents (including a broken leg, a broken heart, and -- no lie -- meeting two strangers on a train) I emerged on a late summer afternoon from the train station in a little town in Italy that I'd never heard of before and had never intended to go to: Pietrasanta.

The town walls dated back centuries and built into them, just next to the arched gateway opening into the main piazza was Bar Igea. (You can just see it's awning in the drawing below.)


It was tiny inside and the tables out front were in the shade of the ancient trees. I tacked a notice up by the bar saying -- in English, because my Italian then was minimal and mostly incorrect -- that I was looking for a place to live.

In this half-assed way, the next day I rented -- for the equivalent of $35/month -- a two-story, five-room house in the hills above the town. There was no heat except a fireplace, but there was a fig tree growing right by the front door and a view of the sea from the tiny balcony. At night, I could hear the surf from my bed. On clear days, I could sometimes see the coastline of France.

The marble mountains come up very abruptly from the narrow ocean plain and the climb up to my house was steep. There was a bus that zigzagged up the switchbacks from town and I rode it when I was going up. But when I was going down, I walked on the footpath through the olive groves that covered the mountainside. Sometimes I met a herd of goats along the way. People who have ever had much to do with goats know that this is not necessarily as charming as it sounds.

The olive groves are terraced by low stone walls, centuries old. This is a goat-free picture I took one day on the path.


At harvest time, the olive growers hang gossamer white nets under the trees to catch the falling olives before they hit the ground. The olive harvest lasted for weeks and, during it, the mountainside seemed misty all the time, like clouds had taken up permanent residence there among the trees.

You can't eat an olive straight off the trees. Before they are cured, they taste like wood and have the same consistency. I found that out the hard way.



12 February 2022

I will miss this house.

It is the only place I have ever lived where I didn't have a landlord. I bought it 26 years ago when I was a single mom with a one-year-old, just moved to Colorado. It was already over a hundred years old then and it showed it. Even the real estate agent strongly advised me against buying it. I should choose, she argued, something "nice" in a "nice" neighborhood with "nice" people around me. Something that would require little upkeep. Something more like what everyone else had. Something easy to sell again. Everyone agreed.

It was like no one else could see how beautiful it is -- how the rippled glass in the windows sometimes makes rainbows inside when the sun hits them, how the floorboards are warm and soft from a hundred years of bare feet walking on them, how the two old oak trees in the front yard have grown so big over time that they have engulfed the fence. There were doves living in the eaves and frosted glass transoms over the doors and the door hinges are carved with a design of thistles that is hidden away until you open the door.

All the rooms except one had floral wallpaper -- black-and-white in the dining room, black-and-pink in the bathroom, blue-and-white in the kitchen, brown-and-darker-brown in the bedroom... I immediately pulled it all off the walls, which was easy to do since it was mostly falling off anyway. I let Aiden color on the walls if he wanted to while I thought about paint. You can do things like that when you don't have a landlord. It was lovely.

Two years later, I had Tris, so there were three of us together here. When Tris was four years old, we got Spotty from Dream Power Animal Rescue. Then the next year we went off to Switzerland and I married Jonathan and brought him back to this house.

Now only Jonathan and I are here, unless you count Spotty's ashes buried out back under the old apple tree.

And this whole time, our lovely old house has been falling apart as fast as we can fix it up. Sometimes faster. So now we will spend the next six months renovating this house to make it ready for someone else to live in after we move to Italy.

I will miss this house.



11 February 2022

 


I showed Jonathan my first post.

"You're so poetic!" he said.

I'm sure he meant it as a compliment.

Straight up: We have quit our jobs and decided to move to Italy. There is, almost inevitably, a certain amount of poetry involved in that, I guess.

Today is Jonathan's last official day of work. He is spending it in an all-day meeting. They are awarding grant money today -- discussing applications and budget constraints and impact likelihood. The meeting used to happen at offices in Denver. He would drive up and spend the day. A nice lunch was provided.

But because of the Covid pandemic, it is happening online. I can hear Jonathan's voice every now and then coming from the bedroom that the children used to share before they went off to college.

I will work through the end of May, the end of the academic year. Today I am home waiting for papers to come in from my Social Theory students. Then I will spend the weekend grading them. They are about the Postmodern Turn this week. 

My class was held in person for half of the past week and online for the other half because of a big Covid outbreak happening on campus. People are stressed. We never know from day to day how or where or when or what we will be doing. It is very discombobulating for everyone. I try to keep it all together, but after two years of this, things fall through the cracks. People fall through the cracks.

For a while I was teaching outside in a tent, but it is too cold for that in Colorado now. Snow is expected later today.

So, Italy.




 


I had a dream that there was a palm tree growing in my shoe. In this dream, it was falling away from me, down into space, tumbling over and over, slowly, a long way down, and I was reaching out to it as it kept falling away.

When I woke up, I knew that I would need to be leaving this place.