Thursday, August 4, 2011

Lunch has been cooked and consumed.  The dishes are done, the clothes are folded.  Dennis' shirts need ironing but I am avoiding them.  I feel like they are staring at me over on the dresser.  Sitting in my room, the window is open but the awning is pulled down to block the heat of the sun.  I can hear the jackhammer sounds from the house across the way.  For two solid weeks men have been tearing down the front walls of that house.  Every day the holes where the windows were are getting bigger and bigger.  We daily try to guess what the end goal will be.

What have we been up to?  Yesterday, after breakfast, Dennis and I spent 2 solid hours emptying, cleaning, organizing and restocking just one cupboard in my mother-in-law's tiny kitchen.  We came across glass jars filled with rubber bands and pieces of string.  Containers of leaven dated 2007.  Tons of jello packets (not the friendly fruit flavored and wiggly variety but the non-flavored kind made from boiling some poor animal's bones, no doubt)  I discovered a huge bag of ancient cookie cutters, ranging from the obvious Santa Claus to the not so usual bat and owl.  The pig, naturally, is my favorite.  I have the overwhelming desire to make sugar cookies now.  And speaking of baking, I had a little run in with the celsius oven when I tried to make banana bread yesterday afternoon.  I popped my bread out to cool...yet found that parts of it were cooked and parts were quite raw.  The sad part of this story is that I was so preoccupied yesterday that I didn't make this discovery until an hour after removing the bread from the oven.  MMMmmmmm.. not to be outsmarted and have my bread worthless, I simply turned the oven back on and placed the pan back in and 20 minutes later the bread was cooked.  Interesting looking but tasting just fine. No one ever need know.

The highlight for me yesterday was Dennis drilling a hole in the ceiling above our bed in order to hang my mosquito net.  The ladder, which he dug up from the magical storage unit I have begun to hall Mary Poppin's bag, looked like it was home made...by elves or gnomes.  It has a weight limit for sure.  So we pushed our tiny bed out of the way and Dennis begins to drill through what must be the oldest plaster ever.  His mother is in the hallway, propped up on her walker, shouting to Dennis while the drill is buzzing and dust is covering him  "But what if the upstairs neighbors don't like it?"  Dennis tried to explain that the ceiling must be a foot thick and there is no way a half inch screw will bother anyone.  I can only imagine what my World War II survivor mother-in-law must think of me and my need for netting around the bed.  Needless to say, the net is up and Dennis hates it.  He calls it "The Tent".  I think its lovely but what do I know?  I can't even get banana bread right.

Well, that was a little bit of yesterday.  This past Sunday we enjoyed the company of some Italian friends Dennis has known for years.  In order to reach their home we drove up a seemingly endless road that climbed drastically uphill and around and around blind corner after blind corner.  You actually have to beep the car horn in order to warn oncoming traffic of your presence.  Very entertaining as a passenger.  Once we arrived, Dennis and a few fellows had to push Denise in her chair up the remaining hill to the house.  What I love about it is that nobody thinks its unusual to do so.  She is in a wheelchair and we live on the side of a mountain..no problem, we just push her up the mountain.  Easy. No fuss.

We enjoyed a lovely meal of pizza cooked in an outdoor oven along the outside of Tatiana and Tony's home while drinking in the view and the sunset.  It was comical to have a group of people together, enjoying each other's company, without one fluent language between us.  I speak only English.  Several of the guests spoke only Italian.  Tatiana speaks Italian, some French and very little English.  Dennis speaks only a little Italian.  Denise goes back and forth between French and English without realizing it.  And everyone was speaking at once. I felt right at home. The smile and nod hasn't failed me yet.

We ate until we burst and then we had gelato and then we went inside their cozy stone house to have coffee.  Everything was handmade by Tony himself. Every stone, every timber of that house was planned and built a little at a time, as the money presented itself.
Serous pizza oven
 We enjoyed every moment with our Italian friends and, as is often the case, the hour became late long before we were ready to say farewell.