I have started writing a new book. It's called The Farmhouse and The Sea: A Thousand Days in Tuscany. Here is the rough draft of the Preface:
PREFACE
I dropped out of college after my
sophomore year. There was no particular crisis – no single thing I can point my
finger at – to explain why. But I had a boyfriend and, even though we didn’t
love or even really like each other very much by that point, we were both in
love with the idea of escape – of getting out, going away, setting off on an
adventure into the unknown, of flight.
So at the end of the school year, we
got a cheap flight from Boston to Rome and in Rome we boarded a train going
north towards Florence, believing somehow that those ancient stone streets and
bell towers and Renaissance domes could save us.
But on the train we were taken up by
two older and wiser people – Canadian ex-pats who heard us speaking English to
each other and took pity on us – who said, “If you want to live cheaply among
Tuscan beauty, with old stone houses and olive groves and red poppies blooming
in summer fields, you don’t want to try to live in Florence with no money,
where you will end up stuck in some Mussolini-modern apartment block in an
anonymous suburb. You want to go to a town called San Rocco. And this train
stops there.”
So when the train stopped at San
Rocco, we got off and then wandered into a bar across the road from the train
station.
This was many years ago, in the days
before cell phones or the internet or the idea that you needed to know what you
were doing before you did it.
The bar was called Bar Salvatore.
There was a corkboard on the wall with community notices and so we tacked up a
little note (written in English because it was also the days before language
apps) saying that we were looking for a house to rent.
Then a nice young woman in the bar
took more pity on us and took us home with her for the night because, not
having known that morning that we would be in San Rocco that evening, we had no
place to stay. This was in the days when you could go home with a stranger from
a bar without worry or fear.
The next day, on the cork board in
the bar, there was a note for us, also in English, saying that a man named
Michele had a house available to rent up in the hills, in a village called
Trespolo dei Merli, and that he would pick us up from Bar Salvatore that
afternoon at 3:00 to take us there in his car.
That is how I first came to know
Trespolo, up in the Tuscan hills, and San Rocco, the town below it. After a
while, the so-called boyfriend left, but I stayed on, living in Michele’s tiny
house with its red-tiled roof and marble kitchen sink and fig tree growing just
outside the front door. Because the hills come straight up out of the sea the
on the western edge of Tuscany, I had a sweeping view of the Mediterranean from
my back door and, on clear days, of the sprinkling of islands off shore.
Only a few hundred people lived in
Trespolo in those days and they were far outnumbered by the goats that most
people kept a small herd of, which wandered freely among the olive groves that
terraced the hillside down to San Rocco. Taking the path down to town, among
the poppies and the lavender and the wild garlic, I would sometimes come across
a congregation of goats placidly bleating while a shepherd dog tried to nudge
them to the side of the path.
I lived there for a year before I
ran out of money (my rent for Michele’s little house was the equivalent of only
35 American dollars a month and I could eat well and cheaply and drink the
rough new wine with the old men in the Bar Salvatore for the equivalent of
pennies). So after a year, I went back to the US and dropped back into college
and generally tried to behave myself and lead a responsible and productive life
going forward.
I became, eventually, a professor at
a little college in Colorado; I owned a house; I had children and a husband and
a dog and a Subaru. In spite of the Subaru and the faculty meetings, it was a
good life and I was mostly very happy in it. But time gallops forward in such a
headlong rush. The children grew up and moved away, making their own lives. Our
dog got very old and peacefully passed away one winter day. And my husband
Jonathan and I, with our gray hairs and thickening waistlines, began to grow
restless with our jobs and with endlessly shoveling the icy sidewalk in front
of our house and with the tragic state of American politics and we began to
look at each other and say, “What if we went away? Before it’s too late, what
if we went away and made a new life together one more time?”
It was a crazy idea, of course – rash
and romantic. Only fools or simpletons would behave in such a reckless manner. This
is the story of how we did it.
