LIKE A DREAM

Entry #21: Case Vecchie, February 8, 2010: Guy

Some days we wake up and the three of us will tell the others about our respective dreams. Of course I cannot remember any specifically right now. Elio's seem to be about animals or school, mine seem to be broad sweeping moments that sometimes involve people who I have not seen for a long time, and Kate's seem to be about a situation that has happened in the last few days but has gone (many times badly) awry. Being here sometimes seems like a dream and I want to get out of that state of thinking or maybe, at least, accept it. Routine helps ground us. Waking up, running, making photos, eating lunch, picking Elio up from school. This all brings some normalcy but we are doing it all in Sicily. Rural Sicily, where two old cars stacked is, like in a dream, normal.

To try to add to the normalcy I made Kate a lovely little birthday cake on Saturday while she and Elio napped. See the picture. It was a little gem of cake. I decorated it with the candied orange peel that was just made over the last 3 days. But... it was the most terrible cake ever. Too much baking soda (we have not found baking powder here so I had to improvise) and it was hard and dense. Alas, it was the thought that counted. (She just showed me a picture she took of the cake, upside down in the garbage. Perfect.)

However, the sweets part of her birthday was saved on Sunday when Giovanna brought over a tray full of homemade, heavenly, cloud-like, dreamy ciambellas that were still warm. (I think this is why I'm writing about dreams.) Think about the lightest, best sugar donut you ever had and then know that these were better. There was only this little piece of one left for a photo. She brought over 4, maybe it was 5, of them. That was about 14 hours ago, 8 of which we slept. So you do the math calculating how fast they disappeared. To add to that we stopped by Giovanna's about a half hour later on Sunday night to say hi to Enza and her family who stopped by for a visit (Giovanna lives across the courtyard from us). She invited us in.

This was a big step in our relationship. It was the first time we were invited in to sit and visit. She has a lovely, comfortable and warm home. The kitchen is set up with a long table in the middle and a corner banco towards the front of the kitchen and a couch in the other corner. Very cozy and welcoming. We sat there half-talking, half-listening. We talked about Elio and what he will wear for the impending Carnevale festival this Thursday, we laughed at me and how terrible was my try at making a cake (torta), we indulged in more fresh donuts. We had lovely sugary espresso, we were offered liqueurs (which we ineptly turned down trying to explain that we are sick and it would make our head colds worse, but we think they understood that we are allergic to alcohol. Oh boy, we have to get better at speaking Italian...).

So, a lovely evening and a good end to the weekend.

Today, Monday evening, I am about to begin a weekly ritual. I just came back from the vegetable garden where I picked some escarole and fennel, wild swiss chard, arugula and salad greens with Salvatore's help. Now I set up in our little double sink and wash the greens systematically. It takes about 45 minutes, but we have salad ready to go and greens to cook when we want them for the next few days. (OK. It took over an hour to wash and bag the greens.)

Doing this ritual made me remember my grandmother and Aunt Eloise who would save and wash plastic bags and reuse them again and again, hanging them on the clothesline to dry. (We don't wash our plastic bags, but it is not a bad idea.) We do reuse some bags though for this very purpose of storing greens and it made me realize that this is probably what my family was doing with some of those bags. In fact the whole ritual of pulling greens from the garden and washing them too is like channeling my grandmother and Eloise.

Last thought. Just this afternoon, for lunch, I finished the salad greens from last week. It was mostly ricci (a kind of frisee). I sliced up two different kinds of oranges I picked this morning from the trees in the orchard, added them and olive oil and salt. Ate it in our kitchen. Happy.

Was it a dream?

Oh, Give Me Land...

Entry #20: Case Vecchie, February 3, 2010

I ate so many oranges today it's kind of ridiculous. I lost count after the seventh or eighth.

Guy and I spent the morning in the big kitchen with Giovanna, so Guy could photograph her making candied citrus peel. Well, we got so far as cutting the peels from about a bushel of oranges into strips--they're now sitting, weighted down under a lid and a precariously balanced plastic bucket, in a tub of salt water. Tomorrow, Giovanna will pour off the salt water and replace it with fresh and let the peels sit until Saturday, when we'll cook them with sugar.

But, of course, there were dozens of naked oranges tumbling around. So we started to eat them. They were incredible, their pulp ranging in color from orange to deep blush to almost purple, seedless, sweet but not cloying, an underlying tartness. What kinds of oranges are these, we asked Giovanna. "No lo so," she said, with her characteristic shrug and wave of her hand. "Arance di giardina." Just the usual oranges, from the garden. Just the most delicious oranges we've ever tasted.

This afternoon, after Elio came home from school, we drove up to Case Grande to see if Toto, the shepherd was there. He was just leaving for the day, but the late-afternoon sun was so inviting we couldn't resist climbing up to see the sheep. Narrow ruts in the ground show where the sheep follow each other up and down over the hills. That particular area is dotted with old olive trees, their gnarled wood pock-mocked and dividing into two, three or more trunks, their roots humped up. The ground speckled with sheep pellets and fallen olives. We found the sheep near the top of the hill. They were patient with us for a few minutes, but then we must have spooked them because they all took off at a fast trot, single file, down another hill. Their bells filled the air with a kind of music.

After, we drove into town so I could get some sausages for dinner. When I walked into the macelleria, two men were standing around watching the butcher sawing out the ribs from an enormous side of beef that was hanging from the ceiling of his tiny shop. When he saw me waiting, he let go of the rib he was working on, and it thwapped back into the flesh with a ringing sound. Another kind of music.

When talking about being here, it's hard not to play up the romance of it all. The romance of Sicily. I emailed to my friend Jamie the other day: "The light here today was incredible. And everything is so green right now. The almond trees are starting to burst into little white blossoms and are simply humming with bees. I had a staring contest with a red fox this morning. And tonight for dinner we ate artichokes that had been picked just an hour before, a salad of red leaf lettuce and frisee pulled from the garden with Sicilian mandarins. And Elio ate fresh ricotta by the spoonful. This is our life? Strange."

It's like a compulsion, you can't help but make everything here sound kind of dreamy, playing up all the beautiful, sun-dappled vistas. But I also feel myself straining against that, because there are times that being here just feels really hard.

I feel like a heretic saying this. This is an adventure! We should be loving every minute of it! A million other people would love to be in our shoes! True. But, for right now, it's Guy, me and Elio in a little house, in a vast land, where we don't know many people, have friends as such or speak the language well. I do a lot of laundry, running out to pluck it off the line before it rains. We do our work. We cook, variations on beans, pasta, grains, vegetables. We eat lots of oranges. I drink my coffee in the morning. We read book after book to Elio and play his strange imaginative games. It's elemental, for sure. I think I'm realizing that I miss some of the complexity of our old city life. Or maybe just the distractions of it?

Wild and Green

Entry #19: Case Vecchie, January 27, 2010: Guy

We have been back now for two and a half weeks. My friend Laura Husar has a quote on her website that says, "we don't remember days, we remember moments." When, in the beginning days of a new experience, I sometimes, impatiently get anxious, fretful, wonder what the hell I am doing. I wonder when something is going to happen, when am I going to accomplish something... And then, suddenly two weeks go by, two months, two years.

Looking back at these two-plus weeks since our return to Sicily a lot has actually happened. The most significant thing is that Elio has started school, (scuola materna to be specific). We couldn't be prouder of him. He is being brave, facing a new school, new language, nuns who pinch his cheeks (he calls it pushing and pulling)! The first few days were smoother than the last two, but we hope this will reverse again. He is very interested in lunch, as he should be. There are two distinct courses, a pasta and then a meat course, (except for fridays when there is pasta and then fish). Love it! The main conversation before school is "what do you think we will have for lunch, Daddy?" When I picked him up the other day he told me about lunch but said he couldn't tell what kind of meat it was, giving me this quizical look. So, big change for him and us.

We have been using the extra time on organizing for upcoming projects for the website, newsletter and book and also getting some work done.

I was anxious to start making some pictures with people in them, so I asked to go out picking wild greens (verdura selvatico) with a few knowledgeable men who work here on the estate. I am sure many women do this too, but around here and in the villages, we have seen only men out foraging along the side of the road. They literally fill the backs of their little Fiat Panda hatchbacks with greens that most people would walk on or pick and throw away as weeds. I can't deny that this is the stuff I love to do. Being out, getting my shoes wet and muddy, taking part in a tradition that is as old as the hills. These guys know where to go, which is important because of all the chemicals that some of the farms spray for the grapes and wheat fields.

Salvatore (who looms large as the main character, in my mind, of this whole experience here) took me along the road where we got salachi (Siciliano for Swiss Chard) and small wild fennel which will be better to pick in a month or so. This fennel smells and tastes like super-concentrated fennel seeds, like fennel syrup. Sambuca? There is virtually no relation in terms of taste to the fennel we have had in the States.

Then I went out with Carmelo. He is the gardener for Case Grande up the hill from Case Vecchie. He brought me to his land where he has so many different wild greens growing. Most of these literally look like weeds growing within tall grasses. Then we went to his hen house and he gave me about a dozen eggs. Bianco. He was really proud of his white eggs! (That is quite a blow to all of us who love to buy our more expensive brown eggs!) And then he, logically, suggested we eat the greens and eggs together. Which we did for lunch today. They were delicious. Kate boiled them first to take off some of the bitter edge, then sauteed them with these little scallion-ike onions that are growing in the garden down the steps from our apartment. Carmello also gave me a few artichokes from his own garden. I have never seen artichokes growing before.

I was down in the orchard this morning trying to get some pics of Giovanni pruning the trees (the gardener who takes care of the orchard and the rose garden). He started teaching me about all the different citrus they have growing. A sweet lemon they call Lumia and these larger semi-sweet lemons that I have been snacking on. You can eat some of the thick pith as well as the pulpy part.

For Dinner tonight we ate the wild chard with pasta and sheep's milk ricotta. Eating these last few weeks has been another highlight of being back. It is January, yet we are eating salad greens and fennel and small celery from the garden almost daily.

These are just the last few days. A lot happened prior to this too, shopping at a suburban-type mall outside Palermo, eating ciambellas in Mondello, lots of driving around and exploring neighboring villages and tourist sites such as Villa Romana del Casale near Piazza Armerina.

I know it is not all perfect and it will be difficult and challenging at many points to come, but I am happy to have picked wild greens and eaten them.

Entry #18: Milano, November 1: Kate

Right now, we're sitting in a hotel room less than a kilometer away from Milano Linate Airport. The walls are covered in gold-flocked wallpaper. It's pretty fab for an airport hotel. We got in this morning from Palermo and have spent most of the day vegging here, with one outing: a walk around this industrial neighborhood, sort of looking for a large park that is supposedly nearby, but really just trying to get some air. It being Sunday (and a holiday--All Souls Day), everything is shut tight. We got excited when we passed a church and there were lots of people parked across the street, heading towards this large grassy area. My American brain automatically thought, "Ooh, harvest festival!" Then I thought that perhaps they were heading to the cemetery to make offerings to their dead relatives, even more exciting. So we walk in and soon see some young guys inspecting a large semiautomatic rifle. Then we realized that everyone was going to a gun show. We turned around. But, hey, we were able to give directions to other people looking for the event.

So we left Sicily this morning.

The Palermo airport is situated right on the sea, and as we took off, the sun was lighting up the mountains and sparkling over the water. It was a nice send-off. Even nicer was the fact that we spent the last two days at Mary and Tonino Simeti's home, staying in their new guesthouse, sharing dinner with them, even carving pumpkins with them last night as a nod to Halloween. (When we pulled up on Friday afternoon, we overshot the driveway and drove up to one of their sheds that was lined with shelves and shelves of pumpkins. So many honey-hued pumpkins. It reminded me of one of the Gourmet Thanksgiving menus from last year, but to the nth power.)

Our last two days felt a bit like the best of the rest of Sicily. We left late Friday morning, after cleaning up our little house, packing the car, saying goodbye to Giovanna and Pompeo and Salvatore and Giuseppe. Made the twisty drive up the 121 to Palermo and then west on the A29. We realized that we would arrive at the Simetis' smack in the middle of lunch, so we motored on to Scopello, pulled randomly out of the guidebook, which turned out to be the happiest of accidents. Scopello was an old tuna fishery that closed in the 80s. It was one of the most breathtakingly picturesque spots I've ever been, and we had it mostly to ourselves and about seven cats. The water was crystalline, the light ever changing. Elio splashed in the water, gradually stripping down to just a t-shirt, shouting, "I'm having lots of fun!" It was a very special afternoon, one that will replay in my mind's eye for the rest of my life.

The next day we went to Érice, a medieval town set high, high above Trapani. We took the cable car to get there. Wandered around, shocked at how cold it was up there compared to down below. Peeked into castles. Ogled the sea. We didn't stay long, but of course sampled the famous pastries of Maria Grammatico (whom Mary Simeti wrote about in "Bitter Almonds"). My favorites weren't the ultra-moist almond paste pastries, but instead the thin amaretti that were displayed simply in a tall glass jar on top of the display case. I wish I would have gotten a kilo of them.

And of course, we were staying at Mary's, an American who has made Sicily her home for almost the last 50 years and who has written so much and so well about it. The woman who, with my friend and former colleague Diane, is the whole reason we are here. I have more to think about our visit before I write, but we are so grateful to her generosity...

Sidetrack: Oh, the day before we left the three of us went into Vallelunga looking for the mysterious Antonella, who is supposedly THE woman to go in town to for massages and manicures. We wanted to get thank you presents for Giovanna and Enza. We had a phone number for her but realized that with our mangled Italian, it would be almost impossible to convey what we wanted. So we headed into town (forgetting the phone number), planning to go to the tabacchi to ask there. But as we parked, I remembered that the woman at one of the panificios was Romanian and spoke pretty good English, so we headed over there. Of course, she wasn't there, but we talked with another woman who eventually called Dora, who quickly came down. They made a few calls, the guys in the back of the bakery came out, and it became clear that we had to talk with Giovanni, a man who owns the alimentari just as you get into town. So Dora walked us over there, and on the way she told us that she and her husband (whose family owns the bakery, I believe) met over the Internet and got married last October, and that she is an icon painter. Fascinating. So we go to Giovanni's, Dora explains that we're looking for Antonella, he motions us to the back of the store, and we weave our way through the piles of pasta and bottles of water to the back door, which opens out to an alley. We step outside and he motions up to a building. Ah, Antonella. Fortunately, she was home and after several minutes of trying to explain the idea of gift certificates, we all understood each other. It felt like something out of a movie, a treasure hunt of sorts. We felt so ridiculously triumphant afterwards.

Blog Entry # 17, Our Life Here, Case Vecchie, Sicily, October 2009: Guy

Call it what it is, but our last night here at Case Vecchie (at least for this year) is upon us and I am feeling nostalgic. So excuse any sappy prose below. (Simon and Garfunkel's "My Little Town" streaming endlessly through my head is not helping the feelings of nostalgia.) I should be packing, cleaning, resting but instead I feel compelled to write about a few things, sounds, faces, people, land, gardens, experiences. Details.

A few weeks back I mentioned to Kate about the way things are not overly refrigerated here and how we have easily adapted to that. Eggs from the chicken coop left out on window sills, cheese, vegetables, some leftovers from dinner (inevitably eaten the next morning for breakfast). Things we just would not do back home. And, knock on wood, we have not gotten sick.

A few weeks back Kate had the good sense, (she has a lot of that), to go around and photograph details from little apartment. (I love these pictures, is there anything she is not good at?) A normal life lived in a small place, but it is nice to see them now as we approach leaving here.

We already wrote about the wine shop that is attached to Case Vecchie (which means Old House), where locals and some restaurants come and fill up jugs full of good table wine. But it is the sounds now, and the people that I remember. From our apartment you can here the sound of empty plastic jugs bumping together, that hollow low base sound. It will always remind me of this place now. Then the "buon giorno" from Maritzio or Giuseppe (the brothers who work at the wine shop), the customers go in through the beads hanging in the door way, they rattle and click together. Five minutes later they come out with their weeks or months worth of wine.

The beautiful light in these big stone buildings. There is this room that is mostly just full of old tools and baskets, displayed like a museum of the history of this vineyard.

There is a picture below of Salvatore walking in the courtyard. (Elio took it. He also took the picture of me and Kate up on our stoop. We leave Brooklyn to get a stoop, finally!) Salvatore has been a huge presence here for us, he is charming, curious and open. Playful with Elio. He and all the people who work here are one of the main reasons Kate and I are seriously considering coming back here to live and work next year. Pampao and Giovana (last name Pacino, no joke) are the people who keep this place running. Working hard, dealing with two teenage kids, back and forth to town at least 4 times a day. Enza who works here when it is busy with the cooking school, Rosa as well. I wish I had pictures of all of them!

The view out of our bedroom window. (I have shot it about every week and a half, watching the landscape change.) The landscape has not so slowly bugun to look like Spring is about to start. Flowers and grass growing between the olive trees and rows of vines. Grass growing in the fields. Sicily is turning green in November. The roses in the garden are starting to bloom.

And then, again, the experience of being able to photograph the life here. For most people here harvesting, making food and planting a garden is their daily life and I do not want to romanticize it. But I do find a beauty in it. The last picture is me trying out the vibrating tool they use to knock the olives off the tree. I loved trying it, but what was even better was the guy I gave my camera to started shooting like me, squatting down, looking for the best angle. I may try to get a job next year harvesting olives.

Our time spent in the gardens, picking vegetables or eating pomegranates or walnuts from the trees. Seemingly idyllic, maybe idyllic, but, at the same time we really appreciated it. We did not over think it, or try to fill it with more meaning than what it was.

There is no doubt that this has been a unique time. What else can I say about that... there is no way to really sum up the time here. We feel fortunate.