ON BEING ALONE

This is the long weekend before Liberation day. Italians take this time to go out into the countryside and many will come to visit their condos for the first time since this fall. Suddenly we have all kinds of neighbors and people wandering around the place. Many come to check out whether they would like to buy one of the apartments for sale, or rent for a week in the summer. We will have people around all day tomorrow and Tuesday too as most do not have to return till Tuesday night or Wednesday morning.
It does take us awhile to get used to this. It’s a joke that as soon as a car enters our gates, Steve is outside looking to see who it is, in his unofficial role as watchdog to the peace of the place. Now cars are so frequent that he would be driven crazy doing that. It is not that we begrudge anyone coming to stay at their own condo, it is just that we are so used to being alone. And it is not that they always invade our space, but sometimes they really do. The little grand daughter of the old capo that lives on the street above us stood near the fence and stared at me while I worked yesterday. I tried to stare her down and then finally started to talk to her about the bird, that she seemed most curious about. The neighbors to the side know or are related to more people in Sciacca then we do even though they are from Palermo. And they all visit and stay for lunch. And talk and laugh and make a lot of racket together. Racket or not, it is noise that we are not used to in the months of fall and winter when we are the only people here.
I think I do worst then Steve in my inflexibility with this onslaught. After 34 years of having to be on a job on time and ready to give my all in the time I was there (and then having to do all the housework and childcare and all of the other things I just had to do), now I really enjoy doing what I want to do when I want to do it. But that is no longer possible when the place fills up. I may just want to nap or lay out in the sun to read or do marathon gardening. But I can’t because there is always someone who comes over to talk, or a lot of loud noise or distractions above or on the side from the neighbors. And we like these people. It’s just that we are forced to live next to them in a very un-American closeness. Did I mention the walls and floors in this complex were not built to be noise proof at all? Or that often night life here does not start till 10 Pm and then customarily goes into the wee hours?
Steve and I spend a lot of time together. But we still spend long periods alone, either reading or pursuing our separate purposes. When we have company, we enjoy it, but we also enjoy getting back to being alone again. And being able to choose if we want to be alone or not!

ARCHI DI PANE in San Biagio Platani

One of the many things we always say we have to do it to find the town of San Biagio Platani and see the famous arches erected there every Easter. But it is in the middle of nowhere! So we got lost going there once and other years, we have just not bothered. Until today.
It is isolated. The degree of isolation is enormous, even for Sicily. There is a whole lot of nothing out there and we found it all today. Even after all these years here, I am still surprised at how people live. The convertible was great and Steve’s careful driving meant no motion sickness on the twisty turny roods. But to tell the truth I was busy with the camera and took almost 200 shots.
The arches and the bread designs themselves are quite lovely and according to a woman we bought souvenirs from, they are made new each year by the townspeople. They use a kind of salt dough, plus a lot of natural objects for decorations. We were there when groups of school children were there. The town has a sister city in Germany and was celebrating that fact this year. Some townspeople again took us for Germans that spoke excellent English.
We had a wonderful pranzo at the lovely Ristorante Primavera (Spring Restaurant) and it costs about half of what it would cost in any Italian city. A twenty euro bill covered (for two people) 5 dishes of antipasti (we did not do more than taste the tripe), 2 types of regional pasta, and all the bread, water, wine, and coffee included.

LAST DAYS OF THE NIECE'S TRIP

The nieces left on a big plane yesterday on a hazy warm evening. They will spend Easter night in London and fly home today and be back at work and school tomorrow. By the time it was the hour to depart, both of them were remembering home, school, and work quite fondly, so it was no problem to stuff the last minute things into the few kilos Ryanair allows. Actually, people and pets that they missed were all they talked about those last few days!
We visited Paolo’s furniture store, had pizza with Jo and Brigette and visited the hilltop church of San Calogero on Thursday. On Friday and Saturday the last few activites we did were a visit to the ruins at Selinunte, a search for the perfect sweet red wine blend for Cory at the wine shop (only moderately successful), and pictures of World War 2 bunkers for Laura’s history teacher. We also played far too much Scopa and ate more Easter Colombo (dove shaped Italian cake) than we should have. Both girls lay in the backyard in the hazy sunlight to get some color, since after all, it IS Easter vacation!
Ciao, ci vediamo, arrivederci, and good bye girls!

THE GIRLS DO SICILY

Laura and Cory are becoming seasoned travelers. First, they got themselves here from Columbus Ohio, translating the particular British English they heard in the airport. They stayed awake on the trip home and the next day, they saw the castle keep of San Michelle, the port of Sciacca and the shops along the streets here and cannot wait to shop for local souvenirs. Later we took a long walk and they got to see the cliffs and sea from sunset point. Yesterday they saw the temples of Agrigento (disappointing because they are under construction with scaffolding all around them), the towns of Caltanissetta, Enna, and Pietraprezia where their great grandparents are from,shopped a lot, and really liked Taormina. The views of Mount Etna were just spectacular from the Greek theater!
We found the Harley shop in Acireale and then we experienced the biggest shopping center in Sicily, Etnapolis, and Cory found her Italian shoes. Steve and I shopped at the new Carrefour, the biggest retailer in Europe. We found some things we could not find elsewhere, but there are still American things that we cannot find anywhere!
The girls have been trying new foods and not everything has been good. The pasta last night was supposed to be a seafood special, but instead, the cook at Il Portocello served a mediocre pasta in cream sauce with shells of small shellfish containing very little meat. But they liked almost all the seafood at La Vela and the pizza from Hallo pizza too. Today is a day off and we will go to Brigette and Joe’s house for dinner tonight.

SARDINES FOR BREAKFAST, DINNER FOR FAREWELL

April has been lovely here, but now the winds have picked up and treated us to rain-less windstorms, both mistral and sirocco type ones. The other day, our friend Emilio showed up at the door, showed us a skewer of sardines and demanded,” Get a plate. These were swimming a little while ago.” So we put the sardines onto a plate, thanked him, and Steve said, “They’re all yours, kid!” He does not “do” fish with bones. So yeah, I had a slab of bread, coffee, and sardines for breakfast instead of cereal and bananas.
Jack, Marianna, and Veronica came for a sunny (fortunately windless) outdoor farewell dinner. They’ll return to Montreal, but may get away in August to meet us in Niagara Falls. We will miss them from our stop-off in San Cataldo, and wish them well with their import export business. In the meantime, we have stocks of our favorite little bottles that Jack brings, including pates, sauces, toppings, and such exotics as eggplant marmalade, salted new cheese in oil, and pistachio, hazelnut, and almond crèmes. And of course, we will miss the test kitchen status that we had, for Jack was trying new products right until the last day. Dessert was make-your-own cream puffs, trying out for him two different kinds of crème fillings.

SPRING HAS SPRUNG-CANARY, FLOWERS, ELECTION

We went out and got a new bird! He is Limoncello 2 and when we remember he is not Lili, we call him Li two (Lee2) because his funny noises also sound like R2D2 in Star Wars. He eats way less than Lili but is a strong and frequent singer. So far he does NOT have the funny personality that Lili had.

Aside from two days of siroccos that we just finished, the weather has been lovely and I finished a lot of basic garden chores. So I started on the neighbor’s hedges and plants. Since he was kind enough to cut down all of his pine trees so I could grow some plants in our part of the side yard, I guess I can do that for him. Besides, it cuts down on the lumache (snails) and formiche (ants) in our yard. But my back is killing me after an afternoon of trimming and clean up. Thank goodness for a Jacuzzi tub soak.

Actually another good reason for expanding my gardening room into his yard is for more space to plant stuff. I started way too many seeds as usual, especially flowers, but this year, they may all survive! The two greenhouses have been great, especially with these last days of wind. The native pisotelli tomato seeds (that are also being grown by my high school friend Chris in Virginia) are coming up well too. The carrots, cantaloupe, and peas are way slower than the lumache. I guess they are not used to the long cool days of spring. It has been so dry that I have to water, and that is a pain.

The Italians are electing a new government on April 9^th, or re-electing their old one, headed by the conservative Silvio Berlusconi, President Bush’s super rich friend. Berlusconi looks younger now than he did when we first saw him due to a face lift and hair transplants. He is running behind and took the opportunity to call anyone thinking of voting for the left a very bad word in both Italian and English. You will see crowds in the news with many signs saying “Io sono un coglione” meaning that the person carrying the sign is voting left and they don’t care what Berlusconi thinks of them. If you want to know what “coglione” means and you don’t have an Italian dictionary, write and ask and I will tell you. Actually, there is mud slinging on both sides, theatrics over partisanship on the television (Berlusconi owns stations) and left vs. right accusations. Communists and Fascists change into parties with flower names (margarita) and civic-sounding euphemisms (social democrats). A last ditch tactic by Berlusconi was to promise to abolish the tax on first time home buyers, the “ICI.” From what I gather, localities get that tax and use it for social programs, so that is not really such a popular tax cut as he might have thought. One cartoon in the paper today showed the president talking to a friend about the cut and then musing on which of his many residences was actually his first home!

We will have a good bye meal with Mariana, Veronica, and Jack “the super cook” as they leave Sicily to return to Montreal. Then on Sunday my nieces Laura and Cory arrive for some new adventures in eastern Sicily and around and about.