The mind is a silly creature. It seems I can’t ever make a cross-ocean leap without having to spend considerable time walking around with my jaw hanging open, stunned that I’m someplace different.

Not until the second week of quarantine did I finally stop announcing, “We’re here?!?” several times a day. Much to my family’s delight. So maybe only my mind is a silly creature.

In any case, with my brain free of abject awe, I began, well…to live. To think. To feel emotions other than shock. I’ve woven these together, to share with you what I’ve learned from my second week in Italian quarantine. Some of these aren’t really new, I probably said some version of them in Il Bel Centro: A Year in the Beautiful Center. But there’s been a whole pandemic between then and now, so these realizations have the flavor of a-ha moments, even though they feel eerily familiar. A-ha moments are like that anyway, I’ve noticed. it’s never an a-ha moment and then a paradigm shift. It’s a series of a-ha moments punctuated by new intentions, and new practice.

Buckle your seat belts. Or I guess, take them off, since the context here is complete absence of movement. In any case, here we go.

1. Doing nothing is something. The first week, I caught myself rushing. In quarantine. Quick! Get the oven on! Quick! Get dinner on the table! Quick! Clear up! I finally caught myself and laughed. Why am I in such a blasted rush? I’m working now to step away from the frantic phase of my life (read: just last month), into a mellow part of me I vaguely remember. It’s taken a week to relearn the total fascination of looking out the window at…nothing. Nobody walks by in a remarkable hat, we’ve seen alarmingly few cats, and yet, watching the tip of the tree bend a little in the breeze is cause for endless contemplation. Restorative too.

2. Watering plants is therapy. Watering used to be something I spent more time feeling guilty for not doing than actually doing. Up until my tomatoes failed to ripen and my peonies shriveled and then I just felt annoyed with myself. The next year? Same song, different plants. Now, I love watering. I attach the serpent-green hose to the deep stone sink and I take a preliminary spray at the pink walls of Spello, pausing for a moment to appreciate how the colors intensify, like pebbles in an eternal ocean. Then I proceed to the flowers, herbs, vegetables, and olive trees that dot our “alley” and terrazza. As I water, I chat with the lizards chasing each other over the wall. They make good, if capricious, company. I breathe in the scent of rosemary. Is it just me, or does rosemary in Italy seem like a completely different construct? Like it’s tapped into this primal surety of its own rosmariness, while the American version is full of apologies.

3. My husband is a shopaholic. He claims he has nothing else to do, but I’m not actually sure if it’s boredom or he simply fancies the Amazon delivery guy. It’s hard to tell with a mask, but the guy seems pretty cute. Then again, I’d probably find anybody thrillingly seductive who brought us shampoo just when my hair passed the lank stage and entered the “thank goodness she’s not allowed in society” stage. In any case, every day, a new box. I’m not complaining. He ordered outdoor barstools and table so we can sit at counter height and dine while looking over the Chiona valley, and while the table has yet to arrive, we perch up on those barstools with our feet on the stone seat of the terrazza and just sit. Drinking it in. That is until Keith remembers something else he just has to have. Like a Moskiller. Which I’m not making up; it’s a device that lures mosquitos in with warmth and light only to suck them into a crevice to desiccate them. Which brings me to…

4. Mosquitos are bastards. I love their name in Italian—zanzare. Perfectly captures their sneaky depravity. We’ve relearned how to co-exist with them, which I’ll post later for those traveling to Italy (one day you’ll get here, I promise), but for now, we have total delight in smacking them with our murder racquet. Oh, did I not mention the murder racquet? Well, Keith purchased one (whispered aside: of course he did) to deal with the yellow jackets, on the advice of readers who chimed right in when I posted how they were monopolizing our hard-won paradise. Between the time I posed the question and the time the murder racquet arrived, Corrado got the nests down (by the way, not knowing the word for yellow jacket, I called them “ape, ma piu forza”, bees but with more strength, which made me giggle and at least he knew what I meant). Now we get one or two visitors each meal, which isn’t a big deal, but look…we have the murder racquet, we might as well use the murder racquet. What is the murder racquet? Well, just what it sounds like. It’s a racquet that has electricity running through the grid, so any little bug that smacks against the wires gets electrocuted. I know it sounds horrifying, and I’m a monster for enjoying it, but it kills them very quickly, and isn’t that better than swatting and stepping? Siena grumbles that we’ll move onto pigeons next. She’s not a fan of the murder racquet but does sanction their use on mosquitos. They are bastards. We’ve agreed that the racquet is only to be used on bugs that sting or suck blood and have no redeeming features (so bees are off limits, for their pollination skillz). I get a terrible reaction from stings so I’m actually concerned if I get stung and can’t leave our compound, it could be a problem. At least that’s what I’m telling myself.

5. Busyness and productivity are not the same thing. Pre-COVID, I used to derive satisfaction from getting to day’s end and holding my to-do list at arms length to check off items and demand congratulations. Look! I went to the bank, picked up new socks, got a gift for a friend’s birthday, wrote a little, and made a dentist appointment! I’m a rock star! Well, if you’ve been a good global citizen, you know that locking down whisked away most that away. So this is really something I learned in lock-down, but came back full force here, because in lockdown, there was still STUFF. After all, we were preparing to (theoretically) move. Now? No stuff. Nothing to keep us “busy”. Without that emotional static, I’ve discovered a love of productivity. Not at first, though. For the first week of quarantine, I made food, I read, I remembered to moisturize. That was enough. Now, we talk about what we’d like to do to feel productive each day (besides the work that both Keith and I started back up this past week). I’ve been writing (I even finished the Santa Lucia novella! Grapevine readers will find it in their mailbox this fall). Keith has been studying Italian. Siena has been making and studying art. And Gabe…well, I don’t know what will float a 13-year-old’s productive boat. Maybe we’ll figure that out over the year of homeschooling. Anyway, it’s a beautiful thing when I come outside after writing a chapter and Siena looks up from her art history book, highlighter twirling in her hand, and Keith puts his finger in his Italian mystery novel to mark his place, and Gabe is nodding over the cappuccino he made for himself, and they look up at me with shining eyes. Productivity. It occurs to me that busyness sometimes gets in the way of feeling like we’re actually progressing on the things that matter to us.

6. Things don’t have to be a certain way. This one is hard for me, and will be a theme during this upcoming year, I know. For all of us. I hear a lot of why—why aren’t there shower curtains and why is the water level in the toilet lower than it is at home and why don’t Italians like it when words that end with a vowel are followed by words that begin with a vowel? I have a habit of looking for a reason, looking for understanding. When sometimes understanding only comes after acceptance. Once Gabe starts using the shower with no curtain and stops furrowing his brow about the glass divider, he realizes that it’s actually nice to not have to push aside a damp cloth to exit the shower. Once everyone (not naming names here) accepts the toilet, it becomes evident how much water is saved. Once we stop trying to make Italian fit into English rules, we can sit back and let it wash over us like music, even picking out words better. In the evenings now we channel surf through Italian TV shows, appreciating the language. Though one show we adored about funny animals included—multiple times—a person holding a balloon to a dog’s, ahem… bottom, until the balloon inflated. Is this a thing we’ve somehow missed? Well, this will be one item that I’m not sure I can accept.

7. Waste not, want not. Will it shock you to know I didn’t make this one up? But I’ve never lived it as much as I do now, in Italian quarantine. Gabe has yet to learn this vital lesson and so routinely mocks me for carefully putting aside the three wilted arugula leaves at the bottom of the bag. But I know that those greens will be the exact peppery bite tomorrow’s panino needs. And I know nobody will mock my insistence that we save the bones from our ribs since I threw them in a sugo and everyone swooned, Gabe saying it’s the best thing we’ve eaten all quarantine. Italians are uniquely suited to this sustainable lifestyle, from using pasta water to thicken a sauce (like this lemon cream sauce that blew my mind) to using leftover bits of butchering a pig to create yummy things like mortadella. There’s more meat in our lives than we know. There’s more to savor than we’re aware of. Our trash runs fairly empty nowadays, and I think that’s emblematic of something greater.

8. Nourishing myself is my job. I think I expected that the view would be enough to sustain me, and in some sense that’s true. I mean, I’m so content, so present for my life, I’m only eating when I’m hungry and portion control feels kind of effortless. But woman cannot live by view alone and, it turns out, this woman needs certain things to be nourished. One is exercise. I don’t need a lot, but just a quick work-out in the morning clears the cobwebs and sets my internal thermostat to “joyful”. Without time constraints I enjoy the challenge of figuring things out and so improvised a yoga mat out of a broken down Amazon box (we have enough of them) and do a little bit almost every day. The kids must see what good it does me because they joined me the last few times, and we were quite the sight, burpee-ing and lunging all over the living room. The other thing I need for nourishment is produce. My body just works better when it has fruits and vegetables and for some reason it didn’t occur to me that I had to make that happen. Even though Corrado told me that he’d be leaving for a few days over Ferragosto and everything would be closed, and to let him know what he could bring us before he left. So I had fair warning. And yet, I waved him off to Malta like I assumed the produce fairy would descend and fill our refrigerator. It turns out, there is no produce fairy and we went without for two days. I tried to convince myself that the pieces of peach in my yogurt and the thyme leaves in my potatoes counted towards my vitamin count, but my body didn’t believe me. I’m still on a high, so it was more funny than anything, especially when I served up a wrinkly underripe tomato from our terrazza split four ways for supper. But it was a lesson learned. I have to believe in my needs enough to meet them.

9. Unbearable happiness is possible. I’m not sure what else to say about that, except it’s a truth that’s taken me by tearful surprise more times than I can count.

So what are our plans for when we “break free”? Well first, I have to say the word “plans” here makes me chuckle. It’s like “pocketbook”—an archaic phrase from a simpler time, when I could number my dreams on my fingers. For better or worse (you tell me), the pandemic has made me far more prosaic. People ask what’s next, what’s our “plan”, and I just shrug. Boring, I know, and it’s not that I’m trying to save myself disappointment, rather that it just feels like a waste of energy to imagine a future so uncertain.

Maybe we’ll linger for awhile right here. Maybe the kids’ desperation to see the ocean after five months of a lockdown-mandated narrow view will prompt us to head to south (suggestions for southern Italy beaches, or Sicily, or Sardegna?) so we can bask in the call of aquamarine waves.

Maybe.

All I know for “sure” (the pandemic, you may have noticed has triggered the alarming side effect of copious air quotes) is that Thursday we’re opening this gate. We’ll breathe and sigh, and we’ll begin.

We’ll trail our fingers along the rock walls, we’ll call exuberant greetings to people we may or may not know and we’ll be blissfully unaware of their looks of confusion. We’ll pop into Bar Bonci first thing to greet Letizia. I hope she recognizes us. Then we’ll walk and walk until it’s time to catch the train to Foligno, where I’ll apply for my residency. When we did that 8 years ago, it was a bit of a horror show, but I like to believe that the tranquility of the last two weeks will translate. Besides, we know that afterwards, we’ll go to my favorite pasticceria for sfogliatelle and granita. Back to Spello for the very Spelloness of it all. Bar Tullia for gelato or spritzes or…BOTH? Vinosofia for wine and socializing with Brenda and Graziano, Then dinner….can you guess where?

With this final day of what Corrado called “being in prison without doing anything wrong” but what has felt like a time apart, to regroup, reconnect to ourselves and each other, I wonder what life will be like when we’re forced to entertain thoughts about what we should be doing. It’s been two weeks of having no expectations, not of ourselves or of each other. As work kicks into full gear, homeschooling begins, and the wider world is no longer at a remove, I wonder how this ease will morph. And how much like our old lives it will feel.

I also wonder if Keith will purchase us some merch to advertise to all and sundry that we’ve done our time and we’re allowed to be out amongst the populace. Something like “I did my mandated coronavirus quarantine and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.”

But you and I will know the truth.

We got a lot more than that.

Any lessons in here feel relevant for you? I’d love to know! And please do share this post by clicking on the buttons below. And if you want to make sure you don’t miss a beat of this journey, sign up for The Grapevine to get updates (and book reviews, travel tips, and recipes) right into your mailbox.

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