The house is quiet. Strangely quiet. You know how when kids are tiny and it’s quiet, adults get tense? Well, that calculus flips when your children are older, and I’ve long outgrown that particular reaction. Nonetheless, I’m aware of the sound of a fly buzzing in the next room, the nudge of a shutter against the stone wall as a breeze floats lazily passed. You know. Quiet. 

Maybe you aren’t used to quiet either. With the lockdown, many of us have been—well, what’s a nicer word that “trapped”?—with our families for some time now. Often, the image springs to my mind that we’re living under one of those covers fancy people put over a meal; we can’t get out and it’s getting steamy. 

That’s not entirely accurate, since the lockdown in the US was never as intense as it was here—when only one person in a family could leave the house to go to the store and you had to have papers tucked into your pocket in case police stopped you and walking trails closed since they couldn’t allow enough distance for passing. In our version of lockdown, I could go for a jog or jump in the car to go to the store to pick up yet more baking supplies. Still, the sound of my house with no children in it…I don’t think I’ve had that since before the pandemic. Or wait, there was those handful of times all three kids went to a BLM protest. But in 6 months, that’s it. They only left the house when I cajoled them to join me in a walk through the neighborhood. 

Now? I notice it…quiet.

I have to keep reminding myself, this is fine. This is good. This is life. Life doesn’t mean staying huddled together all the time. Quite the opposite. In fact, since we arrived in Spello, I’ve gotten clear that we all need ways to engage with the community. That’s easy for Keith and I, we have friends here. Harder for the children who have barely (or not at all) spoken to their school friends in 8 years and the awkwardness of the divide seems impassible. 

With Gabe wanting to study Italian with me and my very real awareness that that’s the blind leading the blind, I offered him Italian lessons with Angelo. To my surprise, he grabbed that idea with two tight fists. I’m not sure why I’m surprised, obviously we love Angelo, but I suppose I didn’t see a 13-year-old cottoning to Angelo’s charms like we have. And 3 hours a week (or really four, as lessons always go over) of sitting and communicating in Italian, I did not think he’d be into.

But Gabe, despite the fact that two months ago he expressed real and profound grief for our evaporated image of this year (remember, it was really Gabe and I spearheading our around-the-world trip; we spent untold hours poring over atlases, looking up pastries in other countries, using Google Earth to get a better sense of terrain), he has embraced our new adventure as if the old one had been a possible board game outcome, not our plans for his 8th grade year for which we had tickets in hand and several stops paid for.

To my relief, he’s wide eyed and in awe of everything. He can be a kid to notice what he’s missing, where my other two have wiring that makes them rarely think about what they’re not doing (for better or for worse). I thought he might have a mental circle around the date we were scheduled to land in Lithuania. But no…he’s too busy memorizing the biggest city in each region of Italy or asking us to give him English sentences to translate or tilting his head onto his chin to wonder what the archway built into the stone wall once led to or rhapsodizing about the combination of lemon and mango gelato.

He comes home from his Italian lessons and flings himself across the couch to recount what he learned. He’s toying with asking for more lessons. If Angelo asked to adopt him, I think Gabe might have to think about it before deciding he’s rather live with WiFi.

So that takes some time and gets him out of the house. But that’s not where he is right now. Right now, he’s homeschooling. Only he’s not home. Let me explain… 

I know many people have picked up the gauntlet of homeschooling as an antidote to seven-hours of remote learning in front of a screen. From what I can tell, many of these parents have an actual curriculum, but I kind of wanted a year free of rules and deadlines. With Gabe being the kind of person who will learn about World War I for fun, I figured this might be an opportunity to follow his interests. As the worldschooling model goes, you use where you are and what you’re doing to guide the learning.

It works like this. As I’m taking a dish of leftover wild chicory out of the refrigerator for lunch, Gabe will mention something he’s curious about. By the time I’ve figured out what pasta shape would pair well with the greens, we’ve agreed on how he can use that for study. He jokes that he has to learn to stop asking why, as we make him finding the answer the next week’s topic. 

For instance, he asked us why olive trees live so long, and I turned that into his science unit. First, he researched what makes a a plant a plant (where he dove headlong and swam around the world of taxonomy), and then learned about how plant systems break down, then used that to hypothesize why an olive tree would live a particularly long time, then finally researched his hypotheses. This has led to some interesting segues (and dinner-time conversation) about how the palm is the platypus of the tree world. Seriously. Look it up.

He brought a similar process to his study of ancient Etruscans. First we watched a documentary (fascinating, I highly recommend), then he isolated what aspects of the culture he found the most interesting, and did a deeper dive into those. Then, on our walk to the train station the day we went to Florence, we wound up in a long family conversation about polytheism, because Siena believes that people who practice polytheism can rail at the gods, since those gods have human characteristics, rather than believing there’s a “plan” and therefore one isn’t allowed to angry since God is all-knowing. We talked about how this would impact culture and emotional expression, and also prompted Gabe to think about using religion as a way to compare Etruscans with other ancient civilizations. So I asked him on one of his schooldays to dig into Etruscan religious beliefs to isolate what he’s particularly interested and can use a way to compare and contrast civilizations. As we walked through the olive groves the other day, he told me he’s decided to expand his knowledge of the holy texts, as they’re more of a guide for the Etruscans than the storytelling and prognosticating that come in later religious texts. Also, learning about holy texts would also connect to issues like social stratum (who gets to read the text), literacy (how people are educated), and science and math (sometimes). He loves the idea of building on knowledge across the year.

As for English, he got a story idea when we were walking along the aqueduct, so he spends time writing that everyday, and we talk about the writing process—how writing and editing are separate, and how to avoid looking for the “correct” word or grammar when he’s writing, and instead look for flow, etc. I really just want him comfortable expressing his ideas through the written medium. Siena may help him with illustrations.

So his school days look like this:

• 30 minutes math (working from a textbook, asking us when he’s stumped), plus extra when he runs across something interesting

• 30 minutes of writing (creative writing now)

• 45-60 minutes of either science or social science (these will hopefully blur together at points, I’m thinking there’s some overlap between olive trees to Etruscan culture)

• Italian varies by the day, he has lessons 2 times a week and likes to do his homework in Bar Bonci’s garden on his off days

I’d like to get some physical education, too, but we do live at the top of Spello so just going for a gelato is exercise. Also, though he’s finally shaken off the worst of his long-haul COVID, he still does get symptomatic (a headache, increased heart rate, emotional shifts, fatigue) after he overexerts, so we need to be mindful. 

This week he’s wrapping up science and social science and is considering ways to demonstrate his knowledge. Really, he can do this anyway he wants (likely you’ll find his work on his blog, under “what I love”). I thought it would be fun to eventually do something like a Tinder profile for Orlando Furioso or something, but he tells me that’s too weird. Gabe is happy though, to take Giovanni up on his offer to harvest wild greens together. Gabe’s love of cicoria now borders on the obsessive and he not only orders it at every restaurant, he spent an hour researching how to forage for it. Turns out, we’re terrible at foraging, but Giovanni is, by all accounts, bravo at the art of spotting and identifying greens.

We can adjust when necessary, swapping out a day of school whenever Giovanni lets us know that the time is right for foraging. And next week when we’re in Puglia, Gabe will do math every other day (since he’s ahead of the game at the moment), read for an hour a day, and learn about whatever ancient culture influenced the heel of the boot, relating those people to the Etruscans. I already know that being at the beach will trigger loads of science questions. I predict a life cycle or two that he’ll regale us with while we’re eating said seafood.

So where is Gabe now when the house is so quiet? Well, since he learned about olive tree bark and habitat and also how the trunk can die but a new one will grow from the root, he’s out in the groves doing on-site study and drawing.

That’s Gabe…where’s Siena? Siena, remember, is having a gap year. She deferred her acceptance to Rice University before anyone knew a pandemic was on the horizon, and during her gap year, she’d planned to embark on an ambitious project called “80 Frames Around the World”. That plan blew up with all the other ones. She packed her watercolors and pastels, as oil painting (her preferred medium) supplies are too cumbersome and, she discovered in her research, flammable. So she arrived in Spello with no plan other than she liked the idea of having actual time to make art.

Well, after tensing up each time I saw her painting on her windowsill (her only available space), and realizing that it couldn’t possibly be satisfying to create art and in fact it didn’t seem to be, given how little art she was making, I hit on the idea of renting her a little studio.

I asked around, and everyone said they had no leads for me. But I waited, because I know…things in Italy take time to percolate. Sure enough, as I went for a walk with Paola, she remembered a little storage space, or magazzino, around the corner from her shop. Better than the cantinas I’d asked about, which people often use as a garage, this has a glass front and a window and a door. Cantinas are great for now, but when it gets cold, you’d have to close those heavy wooden doors and then you’d get no light at all.

The owner agreed to our use of the space, and handed me a key and in the end it was so easy. I gave the key to Siena and we celebrated with a glass of beautiful white wine at Vinosofia along with exceptional figs from Graziano’s father’s garden and slices of gorgeous prosciutto. Brenda gave Siena a box full of oil paints and solvents that she’s no longer using and said we could come by over the weekend to get her easel. She even handed over a stack of art magazines, which will be great for increasing Siena’s Italian reading fluency.

Wow.

On the way home from Vinosofia we stopped in the studio to drop off the paints, allowing Siena the “moment” of opening her door for the very first time. And seriously? It was like a college move-in. She lovingly took each tube of paint out of the box. She danced around with the key. She posed for photos.

I worried, a little, if it would put too much pressure on her, having the studio. Like it meant she had to produce. But at the same time, it’s so clear that like many humans, my daughter does best with some routine and a place to work and a way to engage with the world. Gabe has Angelo, this is Siena’s version.

 We ordered her canvases and a drop-cloth and an apron and all kinds of things I don’t understand (with a little help from Martha and Doug, who got the first tour of her studio, sent her an Amazon gift card as a studio-warming gift). Brushes! I do know about those. Corrado (our jack-of-all helping) scrounged the storage areas of this house we’re lucky enough to call home this year to find us a surface and sawhorses and a bookshelf and a bucket (no running water in the magazzino, so Siena will have to fill her bucket at the fountain in the piazza, which of course I’m overly romanticizing… her dress flickering around her as she leans forward, brushing the hair off her face to watch the water fall from the ancient spigot into her…well, it’s just a yellow plastic bucket). 

Whenever we go out for coffee or gelato now, we grab an armful of supplies to cart to her studio, and what a parade we make. Sauro the (now retired) baker keeps chuckling, as I think we’ve seen him on every march.

Then came a windfall. I’d thought of trying to track down an art teacher for Siena, her own person in the community to speak Italian with, to have an experience all her own, like she did when she did language and fresco classes in Arezzo. But frankly the proposition seemed daunting. What kind of art? What kind of teacher? 

Before I could even think to ask around, Cristiana sent me a message suggesting an artist she knows in Spello. She contacted him and he said he’d give lessons, and I asked Siena and I half-expected her to demurely decline, but she grinned from ear to ear. Less than 24 hours after getting that message from Cristiana, Siena and I were walking to the borgo for her first lesson with Paolo Grimaldi.

He seems really kind, a gentle presence. His art is intimidating for Siena as it’s so good, but at the same time, he does the combining of new and old styles that, as a student of art history, Siena is very into. It’s also nice that the lessons are a fraction of what we expected (Gabe’s are a bargain too at 15€ each 1.5 hour lesson).

I dropped Siena off and had a coffee with Cristiana, and Siena arrived home a few hours later (she stopped in her studio on the way back) all aglow. She said the language wasn’t at all tricky, which supports what I suspected—without us to blur the edges and allow her to zone out, she fully engages and remembers her Italian. She set up another lesson for Tuesday.

I don’t know if it’s the arrival of the canvases or the art lesson, but Siena has been in her studio a lot lately. I keep thinking she’s saying she’s Jesus-ing the canvases, but she reminds me it’s gesso, a kind of liquid chalk one uses to prime the surface. She’s been twice today, hoping she can begin painting tomorrow. On my walk last week with Susan, who is an artist and knows about these things, she suggested that we not ask Siena questions about what she’s making, so the process can be all hers.

This is so right. We can watch from a distance, but this needs to be her world. She did tell us today over gelato (well, we got gelato, she kept us company, since she needed to go back to the studio) that people keep peering in and watching her and she’s not sure why since she’s brushing white gesso on white canvases. She said she’s keeping the door closed to not invite company. When I ventured to ask if she’s thinking of always having it closed, she looked up, surprised. Of course not. 

Everyone wants to know when her “inaugurazione” is. She laughs and says she needs to make some art first. She doesn’t expect to sell a thing (an American teen won’t be a lure for tourists), but wants this as a creative space and an inroad into the community. I am simply enjoying seeing her covered with what I guess must be gesso. It looks like white paint. For years, my daughter’s permanent state has been to be riddled with color when she gets into a painting rhythm and can’t be bothered tracking down a blotting rag. It’s felt strange to see her arms blemished with nothing but mosquito bites. Soon, I hope, she’ll have her racing stripes again. 

There are so many reasons coming to Spello was the right choice. From having the officer at the questura go from impatient to eager when he realized he knows our old landlord, to being able to have the comune print out the marriage related documents we need for my permesso, to having people know us so we can assure them we did our quarantine (we’d worried about anti-American sentiment, but here, we’re not American, we’re just us, and so we’re welcomed, the more so since we can spread the word that we followed the rules on arrival).

What’s magic about Italian villages is those very strands of connection. Remember that saying that got so many people hot under the collar years ago? “It takes a village”? I never understood the resentment about that being described as the recipe for student success. I don’t even want to live in a place where it doesn’t take a village. Because the love that happens when so many people overlap to pull us in, to help our kids get “village-schooled”, well, it’s just amazing.

Shouldn’t we want that for all our kids? For all of ourselves? That our curiosities and passions can be pulled forward and strengthened in the arms of a village?