Every Day in Tuscany (37 page)

T
HE FRONT WINDOWS
of Bramasole we keep closed at night now because the air has changed from balmy summer sweetness to chill-tinged breezes. We leave open the small back window of our bedroom almost all year, loving the rush of fresh air and the waves of scent at different seasons—wet spring grasses, plum and apple blossoms, and tonight the spicy fennel flowers. When I’m home in America, I’ll call up these seasonal fragrances, fast-frame, along with the cries of night birds.

The most profound scent that wafts through my room is the intense smell of the grasses after a rain at the end of summer. There’s something of the brushfire that could have spread but did not, of the parched breath of earth, the ancient smell of old honey in a hive, the sparrow nest Ed brought in, no larger than his hand, fallen from the dog rose by the first fall wind.

Praying for the Queen of Hearts

ED LEFT EARLY ON HIS VESPA TO HELP WITH
Riccardo’s
vendemmia
. He took the tiny scythe for cutting grapes that we found among the debris when we bought Bramasole. Riccardo uses scissors, but Ed is fond of the worn handle and the old forged sickle blade. He thrives on outdoor work, especially with the camaraderie that grape picking inspires. They move quickly down the rows, and the sun, luscious smells of ripe fruit, rotting smells of already fallen clusters, and the piled crates at just the perfect sugar-content moment dispel the awareness of back-bending labor. The call came early. “We start today. Meet first for a coffee,” Riccardo said. “We will be eating early, at twelve.” Typical. Any activity is bookended by priority number one, food.

At the end of summer, the intense social whirl slows, spinning out sweet September days with light the color of straw and enough chill by late afternoon to send me to my box of sweaters stored under the bed. The luxury of early fall still seems a prize I’ve won. When I was teaching, I always left for California at the last minute of summer, practically running to class from the airport. Now, we may linger into this most radiant season. No houseguests, the piazza cleared out, no need to reserve tables for dinner, and the grand heat over—a blissful time. I have a day alone in my study.

With only a shot of caffeine in my coffee, I’m reeling with delusions of grandeur. I riffle through my four project boxes, dreaming of several books I will write, all effortless to plan on a September morning. I like to keep going at once a nonfiction book project, a poetry or novel project, maybe a travel article, plus my business writing for furniture designs.

That’s a good way to cook, too. Get three or four pots perking on the stove while rolling out the biscuit dough, chopping the celery, and cleaning out the fridge. Not multitasking, a nasty word that reminds me of driving down the freeway while polishing your nails and talking on the phone, nothing relating. Instead, I like taking advantage of overlaps in activities that connect. I clean the kitchen once; two or three dishes go on the table together. My project boxes offer different places for different rhythms of thought, and the synergy among them yields connections. Sometimes projects finish at the same time.

Work like this feels like play. Play is where we join the gods cavorting on Olympus. From living in Italy and seeing how people live and love, I saw that play is something you don’t always know you’ve lost in daily life. So much energy poured into my job. Leftover time seemed full of a lesser reward: enjoyment. But not play, the exuberant rush of fun that comes so naturally to Italians. At home, many of the activities I planned for fun seemed like summer reruns. Arriving in Italy felt like falling through a trap door into a brighter realm.

Learning from another culture is one of those mysterious movements of the psyche. I think you learn what you need to unlearn.

I
HAVE A
natural tendency toward tidy priorities. I can’t help it. Every pot scrubbed and put away before the dinner is served. A semester’s worth of preparation for the first class. The sheets ironed. Misplaced perfectionism takes time. Lots of it. Now I want to jump in off the high dive.

I’ve occasionally been willing to take a risk when prodded by desire. My big one was plunking down my life savings on this rundown little villa in Tuscany. You hear of people buying houses all over the place now but in 1990, I was in virgin territory, just hoping this was not my own private Donner Pass.

What I experienced was a great big electrical charge to my habits. A grand zap. That act prompted so many other changes. I look back on crucible moments and see how each one burned up something in me and created the ashes from which other plans emerged. Maybe risk is a desperate form of play. You double the stakes and pray that the queen of hearts is dealt to your hand.

How do Italian friends naturally keep the
jouissance
they were born with? I’ve noticed that they don’t talk about priorities. They work but don’t become slaves. Always they have time to visit. Early on I learned that in Italian, there is no word for stress; it’s a recent import:
lo stress
. Just wasn’t a concept. Now
lo stress
exists, but in rural Tuscany work and play are happily still balanced, giving the chance not to just enjoy but to revel in everyday life. Especially the rituals of the table and the piazza. On my first trip to Italy in my twenties, I was having espresso with my husband under those arcades in Bologna. We had just arrived. The café was buzzing, waiters gliding around serving coffee, a musical chairs going on as people visited with one friend, then moved on to another table. The noise level shocked us. The laughter amazed us. The gestures had me secretly practicing in the hotel later. “They are having more fun than we are,” I said. We were having fun, too, but not their kind of fun. I have ever since been drawn to that only-Italian quality—I have seen it nowhere else—of taking great satisfaction in the everyday.

I never will completely get over the nagging sense:
I should be doing something
. But my friends and neighbors in Cortona don’t have that particular demon. They are doing what they need to do by
being
. People who own so much historical time must feel more comfortable inside time. I see: Time can be a river for floating. Our friends drop in. They call and propose spontaneous excursions. They stay out late having dinner on Wednesday nights. We hardworking Americans instead fight time, wring time out, push up against time, clock ourselves constantly. Italians relish the day.
Carpe diem
, they repeated for so many centuries that they don’t have to say it anymore.

“They’re playing, you know?” I said to Ed. “They’re not force-feeding their days.”

W
HILE LEARNING
I
TALIAN
, what began to loosen in my skull was the tightly wound spool of
should
, a word I’ve always found deeply allergic, a word that takes a tremendous toll in time squandered. When my mother said “you should,” I was quickly figuring out why I
would not
. “Should” was a word that figured in my leaving my first marriage. But conversely, I’d always applied the word in many guises to myself. You should brush the dog, fluff the pillows, water the plants, clean out the fireplace, get a haircut, replace the cushions the squirrels destroyed. On and on. Then the big one:
You should speak fluently
.

But I had to speak. Before I could speak. Letting loose in language, mistakes and all, finally cut that restraint. The Italians didn’t
care
that I bumbled the conditional tense. Better to fail than feel hesitant. Better to let the cushion fluff provide nesting for birds than to experience
lo stress
. Better to have no houseplants. Maybe never mastering the conditional freed me, broke the hold of the
brutto
word
should
.

Isn’t it best—to surprise your own life? Beats the bejesus out of my tidy priorities. Hemingway said sometimes he could write better than he could write. If I can extrapolate that—Italians live better than mere living. Even those with little live as though they were put here to flourish and praise.

My flowered project boxes become time capsules. I find menus from Elba, scraps of paper with quotes from Horace, outlines I’ll never follow, images detached from their origins, such as:

His imprecise features look as though his face has come unstuck from a gelatin mold and is slightly melting
.

And:

A miraculous face—surely she grew not normally but from a bulb deep in earth, issuing forth as if a lily
.

Will I ever use those?

M
ATERIAL OFTEN DOES
not like to stay in its appropriate box and wants to leap over into another. While slowly writing this memoir, I’m finishing a book of travel narratives. I’m also hunting and gathering for a book about moving back to the South. I’ve started a magazine article. The South, I find, especially intrudes.

I often consider what my life would have been had I stayed in my hometown, married my first love, who was so beautiful, with eyes green as jasper, black hair cut too short, and a tiny space between his front teeth. With him I could have put down the tap root in the fecund soil of south Georgia. I almost can see it. The one trip to England for Shakespeare and Keats, the blissful vacations at Fernandina Beach where I spent summers as a child, compiling the Methodist Church cookbook, and restoring my grandfather’s half-burned house. I deeply admire those who continue to live under the protective veil of deep familiarity.
I have traveled much in Fitzgerald
. The scenario is vividly imaginable/unimaginable. There I might have written seven southern novels by now, become an eccentric, caused a few scandals. There would still be those who said, “Got your daddy’s lips. I’d know you anywhere.”

At sixteen, I was, way down in the swamps, already dreaming of old-world avenues with chestnuts in bloom, wavy colored reflections in the Grand Canal, and most of all the dry Attic air of Greece, where even the wind might seem to blow ancient sighs of the Oracle.

In my high-school senior notebook I wrote only one sentence from the required reading of
The Old Man and the Sea:

I have seen the lions on the beach at evening.

The colors of the sand and the light glancing off the water and the tawny animals cuffing each other and tumbling—the whole image rose in my mind, as though I actually had seen those lions pacing the tide line in Africa.

Instead of staying where I belonged, I took the first thing smoking on the runway out of Georgia. My grandfather said I could go to college anywhere I wanted as long as it was not north of the Mason-Dixon line. I had an unexplainable longing to escape. Is there a genetic marker for that? I made it to Virginia.

In college I heard a speech by Ramsey Clark, then attorney general. He talked about the passionate, active life and concluded that when he died, he wanted to be exhausted. “Just throw me on the scrap heap,” he said. Amen, I thought.
A way to double
life, I thought. When I move on to glory (let’s assume), I hope I will have lived twice the years actually granted to me.