FIXING THINGS UP, GOING TO PAOLOS

This morning was gorgeous so we took a walk and we took some pictures of the repairs that had taken place after the rains. So here are the details. The sand boat is no longer stuck in the water! There will probably be others this year, but this one is safely moored farther out. The washed-out road got a little pile plowed out of the way and a plastic tape across it which shows it is closed to traffic until more work can be done on it. And the collapsed wall got rebuilt with the help of a good deal of cement, only much lower this time. They even cemented a tree in!
We spent the morning at Paolo’s while the bread was baking, and he made Steve cut up olive wood with a tiny hand saw and he made me climb up onto a wall to pick the big fat olives on the top of the tree. Apparently he can’t get his kids or grandkids to do it but he knew I would. Then he showed us his cotton plants and his partial almond and olive preserving. All of the kids and grandkids were around, it being Sunday and the first day off of the week…the kids and adults work and go to school Saturday till 1 PM. Then the families split up, with the boys taking their kids to their in-laws houses so they can spend time with their wives’ families each week. That must be where the tradition of Sunday dinner on Bennett road came from (my grandmother always came out with us after mass)! All of Paolo’s kids and families are still living at the sea here until the end of September, when they will move back into their houses in town.
Back to Paolo’s cotton plants. He gave me some seeds several months ago and I even put them into the ground! Now I wonder where they are. So he asked if I would like to plant some next year. I told him if he would give me the pots full of compost and the seeds I’d give it a try. His plants do so well because he puts them in pots full of manure and waters daily from a spring. He also has a low ledge that keeps the lower plants out of the wind. Maybe next year I’ll have my own harvest too.

THE PUPPY AND THE RAIN

Brigette, Joe, and Enza have a puppy! So of course we went to see it yesterday on the muggiest afternoon of the summer. As we presented Dusty with two overstuffed airplane socks and a rubber squeaker salami, we remembered how much fun it was to play with puppies! Nothing like a little animal to make humans behave their silliest, as you can see from the picture. We wore that poor puppy out as we sat indoors and watched the rain pound on Jo and Brigette’s garden, and it fell asleep under Steve’s feet.
The rain began as a bit of welcome relief from the oppressive humidity and I remembered that I left the car window open. But we decided it would not last long so we left it….and you can guess the rest. The seat was soaked by the time we left. That rain never really did stop. It rained all evening and later that night it turned into a heavy monsoon-type downpour and a thunder and lightening storm. I know because I was up at 3:30 and could not sleep for the rest of the night as I read and watched the lightening and Instant Messaged my sister-in-law Jo about the progress of my new grand niece, Miarosa.
I watched the cold gray dawn come up on a different world, no longer dry and parched from a dry summer with not a bit of rain. Of course we have a new “sand boat” to watch as we do every year, tossed up onto the sand after it slipped its mooring. Some people just have tough luck with their boats or else depend too much on the good weather lasting for too long.

NO GARAGE SALES-LAND OF WASTE

How do people learn not to waste, to make do, to conserve things and save them for a time when they might be needed? I am not sure, but that is just the way I am. My family was not that way when I was growing up-they would throw things out that they might even need to buy again later because they could not be bothered keeping track of “stuff.” I learned not to leave things that I valued at my parent’s house because they would just be thrown out at the next general cleaning, or one of my younger siblings would end up with them if they were at all “cool.” Then again, we did not have much of value to waste.
I thought about this the other day when I pondered what to do with some of the stuff we have accumulated here. I know value is in the eyes of the beholder, and some of this stuff looks pretty useful. Every time I would ask people here what they do with things they do not want anymore, they answer that if they can’t give it away, they just throw things out. So when we moved in almost three years ago we asked around and found willing homes for duplicate kitchen items and bed pillows, some love seats, and a bed and we know they are all used all of the time. We have even been known to take a perfectly good beach umbrella off of the junk heap once! But this is several years later and there are still things we do not use just sitting in storage places around the apartment.
We are also used to the giving and taking that comes with food stuff. We are constantly given fruits and vegetable from people’s gardens, and then often pass that on to others when it gets to be too much for us to handle. This weekend we passed on white grapes to Giusi and Franco after deciding we did not have enough to stomp for wine, but almost! This bounty of grapes came along with melons and a small pumpkin from Toto and Ana we have a small family farm and always have too much when the crop comes in.
But back to “stuff.” There are never garage sales, and I have seen only one second hand store, and that was the full of almost useless things with the highest prices on ratty furniture that I have ever seen. There are church and charity boxes around town for used clothes, but they are filled to overflowing and you can always see clothes and shoes all over the ground next to them. I have written before about the lack of quality consumer goods, so people just keep buying cheap utensils and daily implements, and when things break, they are thrown out and new ones bought. The huge waste carts at every corner are always full to overflowing (to the delight of the local wind dogs and cats).
At first I thought it was a pride thing, the unwillingness to use second hand items, or even an ostentatious showing off of wealth. But then I realized that it is taken for granted as entirely normal here for folks to do this sort of thing and be rid of what is not used in a final way. Maybe it is not always that way and maybe people were more frugal with things in the olden days. I know Paolo saves every wire, screw, and piece of rope he has ever come across! People tell me that houses of older people, especially, get filled with stuff that is saved for when they may need it, a carry over of the old days of scarcity.
Danilo Dolci, the northern Italian who came to Sicily to try to better people’s lives here, wrote extensively about the waste of crops that cannot possibly all be eaten and water that is not saved for times of scarcity. He was talking about times in the 1950’s and 1960’s before dams were built and trade routes for fresh vegetables were established. Yet we still see fields of melons that are left to rot because they are not worth picking and fresh water from rains running everywhere that is not contained for irrigation in the dry seasons that come every year. Dolci believed this habit of waste was part of the history of the people, the mindset of peasants who could not count on the future with any certainty, so looked on life with a despair borne out of their own tragic lives. There could not be any trust of other men because trust was always risky, and so why trust anything but day to day life?
Maybe that is stretching the point a bit. The frugality of reusing items is not shared by all Americans either. But a good old Garage Sale or two would sure help my storage situation!

A NIGHT OUT IN SCIACCA

Happy Labor Day! To those of you who still work, those of us who are retired appreciate all of your efforts. Last night in your honor (not really), we went out on the town.
Actually, it was our 4th anniversary of living in Sciacca. We had our first surprise when the parking lot that has been closed for 2 years was open! What a shock! It had been closed soon after the main piazza in town, Piazza Scandagliata, was finished with its resurfacing. Maybe you can remember the story of that ill-fated surfacing job, the horror of the gorgeous marble that broke into pieces when the huge Carnavale carts rode over its pristine finish for the first time? Because the job was commissioned in one administration and finished in another, it was all an unresolved political debate for quite awhile, especially since the job was not done in time for Carnavale, which was then held in May instead of February.
Anyway, the lot was finally done two years later! So we parked and followed the haunting pink/blue sky and the light of the half moon to a few favorite locations. Our second surprise was that we saw that the refurbishing of the exterior of the Church of the Carmines was also done and the scaffolding finally taken down. What a gorgeous church that is, the first time I was ever in it, and good for us that we got in before the janitor banged his keys on the pews to kick everyone out. Then we crossed the street to Santa Margarita church, which frequently has art shows, but last night we were able to see it empty in all its beauty. We noticed from the exterior that the gargoyles for water drainage are really canons. What a contrast the church is to the modern apartment building right behind it!
We made our way over to the performance space of “T Fazello” and saw a local woman’s art show. Her work was bright and her themes were very local and she was pleased as could be by our attention. She insisted on taking OUR picture after I took hers in front of a painting.
Wandering down the streets in the pleasant evening coolness, we next went to La Grotta, a favorite pizzeria that we discovered with Gabriella and Fabrizio and that introduced me to ciliegina pizza. That is pizza with sauce, rich buffalo mozzarella, and halves of sweet cherry tomatoes. It is incredibly simple and good. But last night, we got our third surprise and it was not a good one. La Grotta was just not in good form. Steve hypothesizes that they must have changed owners again. Whatever, it was not packed as usual, and service was incredibly slow and our food was cold. The worst was that the arancine and calzone could have been made in Brooklyn and flown over. They just were not up to snuff. Disappointed, we walked the piazza like the other 100 or so people there and waited for the 9:30 concert to start.
The jazz concert we wanted to attend was held in the Ex College of the Jesuits, or town hall, across from the main piazza. Now IT was swaddled in scaffolding and the huge complex looked like a present from the outside. On the inside, a stage and about 300 chairs had been set up and we sat and waited for the inevitably late performance and the antics of Sicilians on display at a public event.
It is never boring to watch, or to look around the ancient quadrangle that once instructed young priests, but now was the venue for music, drama, and the town’s politics. Sicilians swagger around here during the day, bluffing their political opponents, vying for positions of power or simply to get something done, like a permit acquired or a document stamped. At night at concerts like this, they head for the front seats that say “reservato” (even we could figure this out), hesitate, then look around to see if anyone will enforce this rule. Or maybe they are looking around for people they know who reserved it for them? At any rate, some shrug their shoulders and sit, only to be glared at by the performers’ family members. I noticed a few leave once the glaring got so bad. But they always try, and they never are shy about strutting to the front of a packed auditorium.
At any rate, the quartet that performed consisted of a drummer, 2 guitars, and a singer. Before the REAL performance, a little bitty kid got on the drum set and wailed! We were astounded. But the actual performance was kind of stale, and the singer sang American jazz standards in English without knowing what the hell she was singing about, and then tried to describe the songs in Italian afterwards. Most jazz standards are about some kind of love, usually unrequited, so it got a little boring to the audience. We left after an hour or so. The crowd in the piazza had thickened on this balmy night and the temperature had actually dropped into the 70’s. It was a bit chilly driving home with the top down, but we didn’t mind. Happy Anniversary, Sciacca!