Well so much for quiet beginnings.  We had an earthquake last night.  I felt the house shake.  Seeing as it is made of solid rock with walls a foot and a half thick, this was mildly unsettling.


It was the middle of the night so I lay there like an idiot with all the  earthquake protocol that I learned in grade school in California running through my head.  Would ducking under a table really be that helpful if several tons of rock and terra cotta tiles fell on my head?   In California all the buildings are stick frame with cheap stucco, and shingle.  . . . Meanwhile my husband has run outside and is yelling at me to bring the baby out while I am laying there comatose.  Apparently we were going to let our other three children asleep in the other bedroom just fend for themselves.  Which shows us why three people died in this earthquake.  Because we like to think that when catastrophe strikes we are all preparedness and resourcefulness, but what about the earthquake that happens in the middle of the night?  . . . or the fire that ignites the doll your four year old is holding before you have had your coffee?  (yes that happened several years ago, too)

I remember watching a show about Pompeii with my dad as a little girl.  They found that by pouring plaster into these holes at the dig sites they could see the pose of the bodies as they were buried in volcanic ash.  I used to fantasize that I would have been clever and fast enough to get out the minute it became obvious that Mount Vesuvius was blowing her top.  Now it is apparent to me I would have been yet another hole awaiting the plaster of some archeologist.

By the way you can see the grisly plaster casts here

But on to more pleasant things, here is a photo, with more to come...

We are all arrived safe on the other side of the Atlantic!  Gravagna is full of peace and beauty both in its people and buildings.  I am hoping to post some of my favorite spots here.  It is still cold here in the mountains and we are still lighting the wood stove in the evenings.

 Little has changed here in the village.   The silence is broken by sheep bells, church bells and the occasional car honking around a corner on the steep mountain road.   People have been bringing us swiss chard by the armful.  Carla, my neighbor had made us a wonderful broth when we got in.   What generosity.  

A day with my girls

Ben recently went on a buisness trip to Chicago.  Normally we call in favors for the ride to the airport but this time I wanted to drop him off and take the metro in with the girls to the city for the day.

Many of my best childhood memories are of my mom waking us up really early, bundling us up because San Francisco is COLD, and taking us to art museums, or the pier, or a ballet at the Opera house.  These were times when my mother, who was normally really strict, would indulge us.  She might buy us an ice cream,  a ride on a merry-go-round,  do something a little extra that was normally "too expensive."

As a homeschooling mother it is easy to feel like you not only have to be the mother but the teacher too.  This makes for being the rule and schoolwork enforcer more often than my sanguine side would like.  So I have really been wanting to take the girls to D.C., just me and my girls for the day.

  The catch 22 is the thought of riding the metro and braving lines alone with four children has always made me wimp out.   What if Zita clings to me like some subtropical vine while Angelica is begging me for some impossible favor, meanwhile the baby wants to nurse and Julia had is melting down over her buttons?   The people would shake their heads and mutter to themselves in a pitying sort of way or worse yet drop the oh-so-obvious "My, you have your hands full! "  which I always feel is a bit like yelling " Wow, you must be busy!" to a group of men moving a grand piano out of midtown manhattan flat.

 But this time, I threw discretion to the wind and  decided to go ahead and go. . . and the girls were fabulous.  The past year has been an awkward sort of shifting changing year.   It was a mini-adolescence for our family.   The birth of our fourth daughter forced us to grow and adapt in ways we did not know we could..  Its not always perfect and sometimes the kids whine and I yell and it doesn't look or sound great but we all make this big (by modern standards) group of people living under one roof work. I  learned a little about time management and planning and most of all that the greatest resource that we have is one another.

Anyway it is hard to see progress sometimes in these matters when you are at home doing my normal juggling routine of schooling, housework, small scale farming, artist aide, etc.  Our day in the city really helped me to see how far the girls have come, how far we all have come this past year.   At one point we went to the sculpture garden I decided to go order a couple eclairs and a cappuccino from the little cafe.  The line was really long and Ronia who had been really patient in the backpack was simply dying to get out and stretch her little walking legs.  I could tell I wasn't going to make it to the end of the line.  I signaled to Angelica to come and asked her if she thought she could order for us.  I gave her the cash and I went out and sat in the shade, just outside.  Zita offered to chase Ronia for me and keep her from falling into the bushes.   Julia jumped on my lap and we cuddled in the afternoon sunshine.

As I sat there I saw a really pregnant British lady with her two year old who was melting down try to go into the cafe and then reconsider and leave.  Now I have been there and I remember those mothers with older kids of large families saying in what I thought was a snarky sort of way.  " Just wait, it gets easier when they are older and you have helpers."

And that day as  I sat there in the beautiful spring sunshine, while my nine year old was ordering a cappucino and my seven year old chased my toddler around for me, while I cuddled with my pre-schooler,  I realized that those mothers were right.

I bought my daughters not only chocolate eclairs but huge servings of ice cream too.

Oh and the fountain by the sculpture gardens is simply stunning and has ducks.

Thumbs up for a great day.

Occupy your kitchen.

Well, once again I had a great idea for a slogan and I decided to not do anything about it and someone beat me to the chase.

Right now there are huge May first Occupy rallies planned across the country.  So much of the Occupy movement has directed anger and blame at the banks, particularly the big ones that were bailed out by the government.  But it still seems like only a very small minority of these protests are directed at what I view to be an equally evil villain, the food coroporations, in particular the folks at Monsanto.  I had the phrase "occupy your kitchen" running through my head for some time as a means of expressing this and it looks like someone from the Huffington post had already done an article about it here.

In fact it seems like the most radical thing we can do is cook our own food with locally sourced ingredients. . . but cooking is the problem.  Many people want to buy local but when you start to live this way you realize the world is not made of boneless skinless chicken breasts and Campbell's soup.  There is an art to cooking each part of an animal.  A shank is different from a shoulder.  All this knowledge has become a sort of unattainable alchemy to the modern individual and it does require a totally different approach to food, community, and convenience.  I laugh that one of the cheapest, easiest parts of my food routine that I call my "fast food" is the thing that takes the longest to make.  My bread is 24 hours start to finish, but once made it is truly fast food.  But to cook this way one has to constantly be thinking of the future and planning.

I think we would be amazed at what a school of virtue is found in the kitchen.  Patience, planning, reverence, attention to detail.  All these are waiting for you in a pot of stock.

So what we really need right now are skill sharing seminars,  cooking classes,  maybe even real food tastings on the street to get people's interest.   I hope we see these things blossom out of a movement toward less government subsidized eating.

On a total sidetrack however, my friend Jamie recently made a point about how so many people find the Eucharist to be such a crazy Catholic teaching but that if we can get people to wax poetic, gush and become ecstatic over real bread (not wonderbread)  than maybe, just maybe, it will seem less crazy that yes, I truly worship something that looks, smells, feels, and tastes just like bread.

Ben is back from Houston! He was only gone two days but it always feels a little bit like a convent when he is gone, being all women here. We are happy to have him back.

 I got lots of mowing done (all the while thinking about how much better it would be to have a grazing animal because I would honestly rather deal with an animal than a machine any day. Angelica made us crepes for breakfast. I have been experimenting with sourdough and my easter bread recipe. Otherwise we have been very busy getting our house ready for the family who will be staying in it this summer while we are gone.

 That's right. We will be back in Gravagna in Italy for the summer. Mostly this trip will be a chance to be with our families over there. Ben will be inking his third Zita book and I will be doing all the same things I do here but some of them with more relish ( like eating cheese and grocery shopping.) I would like to think that Ben will have time to paint. It is always good to leave your physical goods and conveniences behind. I have a mandatum from Ben that we are only bringing backpacks this time. Every time we go to Gravagna I feel like I come back a little tougher, more like my old world grandmother. I have especially been feeling like I have been getting soft lately.

 Resolutions for the summer include: Read reading list books: Moby Dick, Kristin Lavransdatter(reread) and To Kill a Mockingbird. Watching someone make cheese in the village. Long walks with my girls and my husband. I also would like to use the blog to meditate on little places in the village and life over there. We'll see what kind of internet situation we have. . . . I could add more but

I'll try to keep it simple. Okay time to greet the morning's work.

Finally easter pics. (warning cranky post to follow)

Well, it is election time again and I pretty much washed my hands of politics years ago. I never put much faith in politicians and feel like if they were going to make things better we would have seen changes fifty years ago. It is easy to blame peoples' problems on themselves when things are going great for most people and "the system" is working. But its not working anymore. In fact lately it is hard to feel like my families are not being persecuted by the system.

My brother and his wife moved in with my parents to save money for the second car that they need to live somewhere affordable in CA only to have their current car die on them. A week previous my poor sister-in-law lost out on a little piece of property, a small modest old farmhouse on a couple acres because a scummy bank accepted a cash offer at the last minute.

Now let me be clear. My family members are hard working individuals. I know for a fact that my sister-in-law's husband worked nights for a long time in addition to his regular job to pay the extra interest on their mortgage when their rate went up. My brother (who incidentally also has lost a plethora of houses to the infamous "cash offer" wealthy real estate investor) worked extra hours waitering and lived at home on a shoestring to pay off his college debts and masters degree. These are honest people in the prime of their life, starting families. These people are playing by the rules. And you can't say it's geography because they live four thousand miles apart from eachother. Both my brother's wife and my sister-in-law are frugal ladies who cook home meals and buy second hand. In the old model if you did these things, maybe you didn't get filthy rich, but you had security, comfort and knew that you didn't have to worry about the future.

It has been apparent to me for quite some time that this system of ours is quite broken. It hurts our families and it hurts us.

Oh for two acres and a mule.

Sorry for a whiny post. Elections make me cranky.

Pasqua!

Hooray! He is Risen and Lent is over!

We have been enjoying meat and wine every day of the octave this year and I feel like my head is swimming. I am working my way thru a cookbook based on one of my old fave's, Hildegard of Bingen. She is a big fan of spelt and fennel both of which I am experimenting with. I am convinced that everything she says about cooking and the four humors is true.

Ben and the older girls attended the vigil this year and after the two little girls were in bed I stayed up and cleaned the house from top to bottom. After the floors were scrubbed I brought in fresh lilacs and wildflowers and put out a fresh tablecloth and laid out our blessed Easter bread which we had brought to the church earlier that day. I lit candles and when they returned home close to midnight it was all transformed. I took the two little girls in the morning to the much speedier Easter morning mass but I was so glad the older ones got to experience the Vigil.

We drove into D.C: to visit Ronia's godmother Maggie and had a lovely dinner of pork shoulder and lasagne. The light in Maggie's apartment is so beautiful at dusk. I wish I had brought my camera.