Archive | home sweet home

walking in Sicily in the springtime

April 22, 2013 at 2:00 pm

Last Wednesday was such a perfect, blue-sky day! Lena, Gil, and I took our usual weekly walk to buy fruits and vegetables, and along the way I took some pictures of our town in the spring. Don’t you just want to bury your nose in those beautiful wisteria blossoms?

Above, a mural of our town showing a festival below the cliff. On the right, Lena pokes through her snacks for the good stuff while I do my shopping.

^^^ Already I can’t walk anywhere without a big bottle of water to keep me hydrated.

On the left, I picked some wisteria blossoms and hung them up at home as “spring mistletoe.” On the right, I bought these fish in town and then realized they weren’t gutted!

Funny story about those fish, actually. I saw the fishmonger’s truck and spontaneously decided we’d have fish for dinner. The fishmonger saw me waiting with my children and broke into a huge smile of recognition, saying to the five men waiting around me that the signora would go first. After some discussion, I made my selection and was about to pay for them when I realized I was out of cash! Embarrassing. He told me not to worry, he’d set them aside for me. Around the corner to the bank I went, hurrying as quickly as I could when I have a two-year-old who loves to press the ATM buttons for me.

When I came back around the corner… the fish truck was gone! Dismayed, I asked a man in the piazza when the fishmonger would be back.

“He went down that way,” the man said. “He’ll be back in 10 minutes.”

“Ten?” I asked. “Or twenty?”

*shrug*

I sighed, deciding I couldn’t make two babies wait in the piazza for 10 minutes. I turned my stroller towards home. Suddenly I heard someone calling, “Signora! Signora!” I turned around and saw an elderly man who had been another customer at the truck… and he was holding my bag of fish!

“He gave the fish to me,” the gentleman explained. “Here you go.”

I handed him the money to give back to the fishmonger, thanking him over and over. What a kind, trusting gesture! I was so touched.

It’s moments like this that I feel most at home in this little Sicilian town of ours: when people take care of me just because they want to. They know I’m American, they know I’m probably here with the military, they know I’ll come and go just like whole generations of military families before me. And yet my impermanence does not stop their warmth and generosity to me. When they admire my children, wave at me in cheerful recognition even though we’ve never spoken, nod politely as I move through the piazza, call “arrivederci!” every time I drive by, pile oranges from their groves into shopping bags and tell me to come back for more, slip fresh eggs from their chickens to my daughter, memorize my order at the store… I actually feel at home in Italy.

life lately

March 11, 2013 at 5:01 pm

Well, it’s been three weeks and still no internet in our house… sigh. I see the Telecom truck in our neighborhood regularly, but the fire must have done some serious damage as they still don’t even have an estimate about when it will be fixed. “Domani, domani, tomorrow, tomorrow, they say.

But life has been busy and full with my mom visiting from Virginia and we’ve made do without internet quite well (to my own surprise). Now we’re enjoying a beautiful getaway in a rented villa on the Sicilian coast. More pictures later this week! For now, here are a few more Instagram photos from around home in these early weeks with little Gil.

sweet sleeping newborn
& big sister love in the morning

one of my favorites from these early days
& miso soup (hard to find in Italy so this will have to do!)

my sweet little family
& Saturday morning means pancakes and eggs for breakfast!

my little love
& he looks like he’s up to something

ok, can’t get enough of the sister/brother snuggles!
& perfect little hands in the lamplight

reading, knitting, and snuggling with a wide-awake newborn… lasted about as long as it took to take this picture
& I spent hours of my day (and night) walking this little man to sleep

reading by the fire
& oh that precious smile!

Siena and Lena appropriated the toy basket
& just walkin’ around my house with a baby in my arms

journaling and coloring on the balcony on a sunny February morning
& somehow he stayed awake through all of Moonrise Kingdom

chubby chubby cheeks!
& Lena teaches Gil how to wear Mama’s glasses

7 :: in family, Gil, home sweet home, husband, Instagram, Lena, life lately, motherhood

Christmas morning!

December 27, 2012 at 2:25 pm

Puuuuuullll off that wrapping paper!

Oh Christmas morning in Sicily, I hope you are the start of our family Christmas tradition! It was a quiet, peaceful morning for the three of us as we opened a few gifts at a time (still haven’t opened all of them!) and ate a big Christmas breakfast together. Although we kept our gift-giving very simple for each other, our family showered us with many thoughtful presents from afar, and their evident love for us made them seem not so far away. While we loved our Christmas as a little family here in Sicily, we would have given it up in a heartbeat to share our Christmas morning with them!

Later that day we changed out of our pajamas for a Christmas party with friends at Emily and Patrick’s… and then of course as soon as we got home the pajamas went right back on and Elliott started a fire in the hearth. We finished the evening with Skype chats with our family.

One thing I couldn’t forget all day: last year my family was here for Christmas. I tried to hold Christmas Past (which included my sister Julia) hand-in-hand with Christmas Present, carrying with me the blessings as well as the aches. There is so much to be thankful for this year, truly, and even more to look forward to both in this coming year and into the future.

Did you come up with any new rituals or celebrations this year that you hope become traditions? I’m not sure what I think of spreading out the gift opening over four days…! Have you ever done that?

9 :: in family, holidays, home sweet home, husband, Lena

our book tree + Christmas cheer!

December 21, 2012 at 2:38 pm

our book tree!

now with presents… all we need is Christmas morning

Merry Christmas, dear readers! I’ve been wanting to share our holiday decor with you for awhile, but… well, until a few days ago we didn’t have a tree at all, so that would have been a bit of a bust. The other afternoon, though, I had an extra hour and decided to surprise Elliott when he came home with another book tree. We made our first one last year and loved it, as there is no better tree for budget-conscious nerds like us. (It also completely eliminates the “are we fake tree people or real tree people??” debate.) This year our tree is elevated out of the reach of little hands on my craft table, and it has made that dark corner of the living room come alive.

(By the way, I scored the cute vintage mitten wrapping paper and the retro stripe paper from IKEA earlier this week. So pretty!)

And, of course, there are the other holiday decorations for our home, like garlands on the bannisters and bows on the door (although I loved our red ones last year even more than these glittery gold bows). I also love displaying my grandmother’s gift to us: a tiny little tree from Switzerland with its precious wooden ornaments.

I will tell you that I had another tree first. It was quite beautiful and creative, and I was pleased today when Martha Stewart’s Organizing Tip of the Day email had the same idea. I took two medium-sized tree branches, spray-painted them gold, and put them in a glass vase. I then carefully hung all our beautiful handmade ornaments (again, thank you, Grammie, for your gift of a handmade ornament every year of my life!) on the branches as well as two beautiful glass ball ornaments that Elliott and I had purchased soon after we got married.

Unfortunately it was a little top heavy, I guess. It fell over. The casualty? One of those newlywed glass ornaments smashed into a million pieces! I dismantled the tree and took the branches out to the trash heap. Sorry, honey, I have a long way to go before I’m Martha!

9 :: in family, holidays, home sweet home

holding them close.

December 17, 2012 at 10:52 am

I have been moved to tears more than once over this past weekend after the events in Connecticut. I didn’t use to be this way, but then I had Lena and lost my sister, and now it only takes a few words of a news article or interview to cause my eyes to well up with tears.

There just aren’t any guarantees in this life, are there? You choose a small town in a state known for its decorum and law-abiding citizens. You settle down, have your long-awaited children, send them to a lovely elementary school, welcome them home each day. And then one morning you find yourself standing in the parking lot, watching children run out of the school, weeping, and you wait and you wait and you wait and your child never comes out.

Or you fall asleep on a quiet July Saturday night in Sicily, sleep through your sister driving down the highway, sleep through your sister overcorrecting, sleep through your sister hitting a tree, wake up to a phone call from your dad, and phone calls should never come at 4am. Never.

I read A Wrinkle in Time yesterday and my heart swelled with the family reunion at the end of the book:

Sandy suddenly yelled, “Father!”

Mr. Murry was running across the lawn, Mrs. Murry running toward him, and they were in each other’s arms, and then there was a tremendous happy jumble of arms and legs and hugging, the older Murrys and Meg and Charles Wallace and the twins, and Calvin grinning by them until Meg reached out and pulled him in and Mrs. Murry gave him a special hug all of his own. They were talking and laughing all at once, where they were strartled by a crash, and Fortinbras, who could bear being left out of the happiness not one second longer, catapulted his sleek black body right through the screened door to the kitchen. He dashed across the lawn to join in the joy, and almost knocked them all over with the exuberance of his greeting.

Through the achings and the longings of this life, through the griefs and the sorrows, I am holding out in hope and awaiting with eagerness a reunion like this in Heaven, when Booie will come running across the Jordan and we’ll all be together again, reaching for each other and falling down and laughing in the shallow water, reunited for all eternity in joy and peace, where there are no more tears and there is no more night, and all the light comes from Jesus.