Dear Art Lover,
I
have been a workaholic for most of my life.
The instability I gained after my divorce in 2011 had me feeling that I
needed to work even harder just to survive out of my own again. However, for a variety of reasons, it took me
five years before I could find a place to call home and feel somewhat safe that
I might not lose this one. With multiple
moves (including a temporary one to Croatia and my big one to Italy from the US),
my work habits have taken a beating.
I have been in my new home for just over a
year now and judge harshly what I accomplished art-wise in 2016. Logically, it was not so bad. I did two large-ish sculptures [one stone,
one bronze], finished a few paintings, started several others, and even sold
some work from my online efforts. I have
always believed that when the actions do
not match the words, the actions show the true desires. I have not yet decided if I am just out of
practice now or if I am truly seeking to change something in my life so that
maybe I will be lucky in love and find a peace and balance that elude me more
than bring me joy.
So, I have tried to take an interest in
learning to cook. But the truth is that
I do not want to – really. Like car
mechanics, I really wish that I
already knew how to do those things, but I do not want to take the time
to learn them! [This is not unlike my
desire for understanding and speaking Italian, sadly!]
So when my landlord hosted a dinner party
the other night at his rental house next to the one I rent from him, and hired
my neighbor Riccardo, his other tenant and a cook at a nearby restaurant, to
prepare all of the food, I asked Riccardo if I could tag along when he went
shopping for this seafood dinner. The
one thing I hear most often and consistently from those who love to cook is
that buying the right ingredients (in the right condition) is more than half
the skill.
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| Frozen octopus |
Being in the hills of Tuscany and not
close enough to the sea to buy fresh, fresh seafood, Riccardo drove us to a
market that specializes in seafood and most of it is immediately frozen after
caught. I told him that I heard that if
something smells fishy, it is already not fresh. He said the better test often is to look at
the eyes. If they are clear, the fish is
only recently dead. Cloudy eyes are a
sign of the longer-dead and to be avoided for purchasing. Just in case you were
curious. I am not sure how one would
judge cut seafood.
The store is very clean and contained a huge
variety of dead and often shrink-wrapped sea life. Riccardo bought octopus, a variety of shrimp,
clams, squid, and several varieties of whole fish. One I thought must have been a bottom-feeder
by the flatness of his underside; his top a triangular form. Riccardo confirmed this, but alas, I cannot
remember the name of the fish in Italian to translate it to English. [See how interested I am in learning? Oy yoy]
We brought it all home after shopping at a
regular grocery store for the extras needed for the dinner of 15 people. Riccardo ended up sitting the stuff outside
with water raining down over it for fear the food would not thaw in time. His seafood soup required about two hours of
cooking, after he cut and cleaned all of the goodies. While he was working, our landlord and his
cousin came by in their Misericordia uniforms.
They had ambulance duty that day.
The young one, Silvio, is paid to work there each day, but most of the
men here volunteer for service, usually one day every two weeks, but some do
more. Anyway, the guys dropped by in the
afternoon to check on anything that needed to be done and after a 12-hour day
for Silvio, they showed up for dinner, still in uniform (much to my delight!).
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| This would have freaked me out completely when I was a child! |
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| These guys are two of the reasons I have ridden in an ambulance here! |
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| One way to thaw frozen seafood |
I took off in the afternoon to my yoga
therapy class and was charmed to see some freshly washed stuffed animals on a
line outside of a window in my little village.
And shortly after yoga class started, one of the ladies passed me as we walked
around the room, loosening up. As she
did, she put four of these “noci d’oro” (golden nuts) in my
hand. She explained that this is a
custom to share with friends what I believe are gold-wrapped almonds to
celebrate her and her husband’s 50th wedding anniversary! Everyone in our yoga class got a small
handful of these. Fifty years of married
life! Imagine. In the car after class all of these older
married Italian ladies (I am the youngest in the class by about two decades
maybe) agreed that it is not easy, even for their husbands.
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| Noci d'oro to celebrate a 50th wedding anniversary in Italy |
Such bittersweet celebrations, though,
especially because one of the ladies in the car just lost her beloved
husband. While we like to be happy for
others, no doubt these events remind us of beautiful things we may never experience. He was a man much loved in this community and
I was honored when I was asked by his granddaughter if I had a photo of this
man for the funeral service (and I did!).
Like many experiences in my adopted country, the funeral, my second to
attend in Italy, was a surreal experience.
But, I digress, as I do. Oh, I
never opened my noci d’oro. Instead, I
handed them out to the married couples who attended the seafood dinner, as a
sort of good luck charm.
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| Octopus being chopped up for seafood soup: Toscana, Italia |
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| Candied lemons from garden; spinach, ham, and tomato pie |
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| And the seafood soup gets started - 2 hours roughly |
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| Mussells for spaghetti, on the left; other soup ingredients cut. |
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| No small feat: Cooking for 15 people! |
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| I admitted to Riccardo that this looked like Klingon food to me. |
In the end, I returned too late to see
much of the cooking while I got myself cleaned up and went over to help set the
table and later wash dishes; we cleaned up the rest the next afternoon. However, before dinner, a couple of the
guests/our friends came over to see the progress of my mural, a fake window
with scene that might exist if there was a real window there. I do not work on
this often since I have other projects that may help me pay the rent, and the
mural became much more involved than I envisioned in that it is a specific
landscape. As you may see here, each local Italian who views it starts to point
out various locations of meaning to him. This is fun, and seriously, I cannot
wait to finish this mural and then have an Open House! [see image below]
Happy
50th birthday to my little brother Steve! Life is pretty amazing and I am glad that you
are creating yours to be what you want it to be, including being a great father
to a lovely and smart daughter.
If you like, please have a look at some of
my sculpture online here:
Peace
and thank you for following this journey with me,
Kelly
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The mural work-in-progress of the local landscape-Tuscany, Italy
Sister and Brother enjoying the CinqueTerre, Italy
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