Well, for those who have not yet noticed the hand writing on the wall, this blog is now officially inactive. For months now, I’ve been referring to it as my “occasional” blog. The occasions on which I add to it have become so occasional that it’s a stretch to classify it as a blog at all.
I’m not aware of any devoted readership to this blog, but if anyone has been following it, I have merged it with my expat blog, Casteluzzo.blogspot.com, which chronicles our current adventures as we start a new life in Italy.
Casteluzzo is by invitation only for the moment, but I’m not stingy with the invitations, so please ask.
The City Mouse and the Country Mouse
I’ve changed the name of my Italy blog. I like the URL, Casteluzzo. It’s the name of the house in the country we’re going to have someday. And I’ve subtitled it “In Search of a Dream to call Home.” We’re not sure exactly what our dream is, but we’re pursuing it nonetheless. As Bilbo says, “It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
I’ve begun the search. So far, it’s brought us here to Italy, where Tony is in the process of having his citizenship recognized through a strange Italian citizenship law. His great-great-grandfather was Italian, and Italians hold on to their roots.
We’ve considered living many places. On a good day, I think la vita bella is worth whatever you have to throw at it to make it work. On a bad day, I think I’d like to go to what we call “one of the countries up North.” Germany, or even more so (“I thought I could organize freedom. How Scandinavian of me . . .”). The travel agencies here in Italy put up pictures of Norwegian fjords in the summertime.
These days we think we might find our Casteluzzo in France. Maybe we’ll do like the Brits, and renovate a dilapidated old French country house in the middle of the lavender fields of Provence. Then again, people do that under the Tuscan sun too.
We decided once that we were going to live in Paris. It’s far and away the most visited city in the world. (We’ve never been to France, but we’ll like it, just as we love Italy after seeing it for the first time the day we moved here. We are planning on visiting France before we move, though. Just as soon as my legality difficulties are straightened out.)
In London last week, I was reminded of how much I really love the big city. The beautiful parks, good restaurants, grand architecture, cultural and artistic events, the hum and buzz of living in the midst of it all.
But then there’s the allure of the country, where my dream is to have a little farm with goats and chickens and a garden full of heirloom vegetables, and horses, and sunsets over the mountains.
A few weeks ago I was reading my daughter Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse, and realized the dominant dilemma of my life right now is whether I am a city mouse or a country mouse. No, really.
At the moment I live in “Beautiful Chiusa Pesio,” the quintessential small Italian town at the bottom of a mountain with a ruined castle. It is beautiful. I love it. We buy our raw milk from the woman across the street. Tony began his first batch of yoghurt with it today. He says it’s his first step toward becoming a master cheese maker. I have my sprouts out on the counter. We saw fireflies on our evening walk the other night. It’s perfect. But something is missing.
I can’t hear the cars outside my window all night. Nobody’s keeping the place alive while I sleep. It’s difficult to explain the allure of concrete and crowds. But there’s something in it that I can’t live without for too long.
Mother's Day
It's a beautiful morning, but my poor little baby is sick. He had a fever in the night, and was throwing up this morning. He's so sweet, though. He smiles and wants to snuggle, even right after he throws up.
It has been four years since I became a mother. I date it from the time I first got pregnant, because that's when I began to feel like one. I think about being pregnant sometimes. My baby will be a year next month. Not old enough for most people to think about having another, although some people already have another by now. I'm not ready for another yet, or even to be pregnant again. Raj doesn't even walk yet. And he still mostly breastfeeds. He's still a baby, although he's getting big.
It's fun to watch the two of them interacting. Axa has figured out how to make him laugh and how to play with him. He adores her, even when she teases. He follows her around the house, and thinks everything she does is wonderful. I can see why it's so important to do a good job with the first child, since the ones who follow look on the older sibling as the authority. I can't take any credit for what a delightful little girl Axa is, but I'm glad she is. She tries so hard to do everything right. Sometimes she gets quite stressed out. She likes to be grown up in every way. Almost every way. She still wouldn't think of missing "squishy time." But I think she doesn't look on that as something that makes her not grown up.
I enjoy having a family. I love to be a mommy, especially right now when they're so little. There's nothing quite like being unconditionally adored. Just being with me makes Raji happy, not because of anything I do, just because I am his mommy. He's such a sweet little person. I look forward to watching him grow up and getting to know him better. Axa too, but she already seems so grown up in so many ways.
At odd moments, though, I think about being pregnant. It's like being in another world. It causes one's priorities to shift, and one's whole outlook on life to become intensely focused inward. But inward in an interesting way, since there's someone else inside. That's why I love Raji's birth song
I'd love to have twins this time. I thought Raji was twins, so I've read every book on twins at two different libraries. They don't run in the family, though, really. I'd just like to have them. . . .
Der Himmel über Berlin
We were at BYU's International Cinema yesterday, watching "Wings of Desire," or translated literally from the German title, "The Heavens Over Berlin." "City of Angels" was based upon it, although characteristically, the depth was minimized and the sex maximized in the Hollywood film.
The original German film is a beautiful, thoughtful meditation on mortality and the Fall. Damiel the angel has watched humanity unfold for thousands of years, and finally wants to personally step into the world he knows so intimately from above. After his fall and the revelation it brings, his final words in the film are: "I know now what no angel knows."
Our journey to Italy is in some ways similar. It feels almost as if we are looking down from an immense distance, watching ourselves falling into Italy. There is the excitement, the anticipation of seeing the world suddenly in color, of discovering a whole new way of living and looking at the world through new eyes, speaking a new language, rediscovering roots and realizing that everything we are experiencing as new is really only reemerging from some deep genetic memory.
At the same time, it is like watching the ground rush up to you just before you pull the string on the parachute. It's all happening so fast. Yet somehow, everything is connecting like indispensable links on a long-foreseen chain binding us to Piedmont - the land, the people, and some invisible mission that draws us back.
We were in Logan last week. We were intending to go to Moab, some eight hours away. But around the Utah border, we suddenly felt that we should go to Logan instead. It's a little town up in a high valley in Utah, similar enough to the Waldensian Valleys of Italy that it drew the 19th century immigrants, and most of them and their descendents never left. Tony has aunts and uncles and cousins of every description and degree in that little town. Some of them also have this hapless passion for geneology. Richard Boudrero, whom I think is Tony's second cousin once removed, came over for dinner to Aunt Heidi's where we were staying. He brought a slide show of his trip to Italy two summers ago. He went to Lagnasco, where Domenico was born, to Melle, the cradle of the Bodrero family, and to San Germano Chisone, Henriette's hometown, and the place where the first branch of the Church was organized in Italy. He met the only Bodreros still in Lagnasco. In fact, the connection with family was so compelling to him that he cancelled his trip to the Italian Riviera and just stayed inland with the relatives.
His son was leaving on a mission for Mendoza, Argentina that week. We went to the farewell and saw a lot of Boudreros. It was a little strange to be the unknown collateral relatives who are moving to Italy next week--a bizzare, almost artificial notoriety. But at the same time, it seemed an appropriate place from which to depart.
So here we are. Our flight leaves for Italy on Wednesday. Nearly everything is finished, beyond a few obvious essentials like getting a hotel and car in Turin, forwarding our mail to the virtual address we've chosen, and picking up our last documents from the Lieutenant Governor's office. Oh, and deciding how to occupy two small children through eighteen straight hours of airplanes and airports.
Will it really be so different? Is Italy truly so compelling? What will we learn there that "no angel knows"?
I should confess here that I've started another blog. It was an innocent endeavor originally, but it's somehow suddenly taken over our life . . . And now we have just bought one-way tickets to Italy. We leave March 26.
How DID this happen? We're not quite sure ourselves. Or, as Joseph Smith put it, "I don’t blame any one for not believing my history. If I had not experienced what I have, I would not have believed it myself." We've been telling our friends and family for a couple of years now that we're planning to move to Italy. Whether anyone actually believed us, I'm not too sure. I often had the impression of being humored in a childish fantasy when I mentioned it to people. We decided, as noted in my Casteluzzo blog, that the coming October would be the time. But we didn't want to tell people. It was too far away. I did start telling them that our move to Italy was imminent. It's very easy to make that sound like a joke, though. October was the very earliest we thought it could work. It was a good time for the business. Our housing contract was up in October. It seemed logical. But it was evidently not soon enough. We already surmise that if we had been on track, we would have moved to Italy at the end of 2006, and not to Vancouver. So by that calculation, we're at least a year late.
In any event, last Monday Tony woke at 3:30 in the morning to the familiar sound of thumping from above. Our upstairs neighbors had always been a little eccentric - the main audible manifestation being what appeared as a curious penchant for moving furniture all night most nights. However, this particular early morning, Tony felt a distinct impression that something was very wrong (this after a similar incident, in which I had awoken early in the morning with the distinct impression that we should invite the man upstairs to listen to the missionaries in our house on a certain date and time about a week later as they presented a message on "how we can feel the love of God more fully in our lives." He agreed, but canceled at the last moment, looking as if he were haunted). Accordingly, Tony went upstairs and knocked on the door, quietly at first, and then more loudly. Finally, after knocking on and off for a half hour, he rang the doorbell. Mr. Underhill (not his real name) opened the door immediately. Tony said he needed to come in and talk, but Mr. Underhill refused. After trying a few more times, he came back downstairs.
We talked about it over breakfast, and he decided to go back up. In the meantime, we had discovered that Mr. Underhill was a former Marine drill sergeant with a serious physio-psychological disorder causing extreme instability. Tony said that if he banged three times on the floor, I should call 911. He gained admittance this time, and after an anxious hour for me, descended, very much disturbed. Mr. Underhill was abusing his mother at least emotionally, and Tony was almost sure, physically as well. He admitted that most of the thumps were her "falling" a lot. She had a lot of bruises. Even more upsetting, Mr. Underhill brought up the possibility of his mother dying in nearly every sentence. It would be a blessing, he declared, admitting also to making repeated offers to help her legally commit suicide. "She will die in this apartment within the year," he further declared. During the conversation, he was angry and attempted to intimidate Tony, at one point throwing his half-finished bottle of soda on the floor (I heard the crash, and waited nervously for two more). Finally, he ushered Tony to the door.
Tony came home, and we determined to call the police. Then we left our apartment with our children, feeling unsafe under Mr. Underhill, especially after the confrontation. While the police were upstairs interviewing Mr. Underhill, we packed up some stuff and got in our car. We didn't know where we'd go, but we had decided by this point that there was no way we were going to live under this person any more, especially after having put ourselves in the awkward position of calling the police on him (the police determined he was not an immediate threat to anyone, and left it to the elderly abuse division to follow up).
So, driving around that day and the next (after being put up for the night by some kind friends), we considered our options. The apartment complex was understanding, and offered to waive the lease-break fee. We could stay put (not an option, actually. We didn't feel safe). We could move to another apartment complex in the area. Finally, Tony and I confessed to each other what had been our first thought upon realizing we would have to move: move to Italy! In a crazy way, it actually made sense. Here was our chance to move to Italy within the month.
So here we are in a hotel in San Diego, making Amish Baked Oatmeal (our favorite breakfast) in the toaster oven. And in just under four weeks, we'll be touching down in Turin.
It's the place I reach for heaven . . .
. . . and it reaches in return.
There is a way I know that Italy is not just an escapist dream. When I am happiest and most content with my life, I feel close to moving to Italy. When life becomes hectic and cluttered and unharmonious, Italy seems unreachable. It's just like heaven. When life and love and I feel perfect, I'm practically there already.
Tony tells people sometimes (when it comes up) that we used to live in the Dordogne. We did. If you dream the same dream, it's real.
Now we live in San Diego again. We spent three days visiting every available apartment in the Golden Triangle. I knew when we walked into ours that it was home. I loved the way the light came in the windows. I walked out on the balcony, and it turned into a French cafe and a secret rose garden. Left alone in the apartment for a moment, we ran crazily in circles together. Now we have bookshelves. I bought them in my favorite furniture store here. The Teak Emporium. I like it because it's not like all those endless showrooms full of sectionals and fake plants and veneers wherever they can get away with it. They're all the same, and you can order anything in any fabric and any color, and it takes six weeks to get there. We don't shop very well that way. I like to walk in the store and find the perfect piece, and take it home that day. The Teak Emporium is not a showroom. Everything on the floor is for sale. And if you want a different color, they'll have to order it made in India or Indonesia and have it made by hand, and it won't be here for eight months. And the furniture is beautiful. It's all teak and rosewood, and sort of cluttered around the store as if you really were in a little furniture market somewhere in Southeast Asia, and maybe when you finished shopping you were going to have coconut and green mango for lunch. There's something very
real about the store, something noticeably absent elsewhere. They wanted to get rid of the bookshelves, because even though they were beautiful - a sort of creamy, warm toffee color with a rich grain you could appreciate from across the room - the shelves were unadjustable. Charlene (the charming Tiawanese woman who had no idea how to be a salesperson, and was thus infinitely more pleasant than any of the salespeople in the other stores) kept mentioning this point regretfully. We bought them anyway, and now we need to find some other place to keep several boxes of our taller books. But the bookshelves are sensational. We also found a couch at the Teak Emporium. It's a sort of ne0-oriental looking couch--simultaneously sinuous and precise. I liked it instantly when I saw it, but there was something wrong, and I couldn't quite put my finger on it. I finally isolated the dissonant component; the two-inch high metal feet, which gave a jarringly industrial overtone to the warm, almost other-wordly wood. Once Tony removed them, the coach seems to grow right out of our carpet.
It's the first time since we lived in the Villa Maria that we've really decorated. It feels so different. We want to be home. Our house feels like home. Like we could really live here for a long time. Like we've finally really moved in. Like life is beginning again, but this time in the San Diego sun.
Fahrenheit 451
I’
ve never been a refugee before. Or an evacuee, at least. Two weeks after our move to idyllic San Diego, we came home from Church smelling smoke. Undeterred, we packed the children up in the car for our customary walk along La
Jolla Cove. The water was pounding unusually high on the cliffs. The smoke in the air hung down heavier here, and things kept getting in my eyes. I naively wished that the wind would blow it all away. There must be some brush fire in a canyon, and what a pity for it to ruin such a beautiful San Diego evening.
We returned home and went to bed, after closing a window we’d left inadvertently open and leaving the bathroom fan on for a few hours to suck out the smoke. In the morning, I got up and tried to do yoga in our almost-moved-in living room, but realized that deep breathing was not an intelligent thing to do with the air so smoky. Tony went over to the fitness center to lift weights, and watched the morning news, as usual. Only today, unlike usual, national news was fixated on or lovely little town. The hills around us were burning, and so were the communities. A fire had raged through Ramona Sunday afternoon, and then blown into
Rancho Bernardo in the morning. People had received reverse 911 calls at 4:30 in the morning, warning them to evacuate immediately. The fire was only 15 minutes behind. There was fire east of
Chula Vista, and more up by
Fallbrook.
Tony immediately got dressed and filled up our empty car with gas. There was already a long line at the gas station by the time we got home. By the time we turned on our radio after breakfast to listen to updates, every local station was playing the same coverage of the fires.
Rancho Bernardo and Carmel Valley, where we lived previously, were evacuated from 5 to 15, and all the way down to 56, a few exits above us. Just down the road, everything to
Miramar Base was also under mandatory evacuation. The fire was coming down through
Fallbrook, and people were being escorted through Camp
Pendleton to Orange County Beaches. I shivered. I had a sudden mental image of the tall, art-deco Hyatt across the street from our apartment, engulfed in flames. Evacuees, we learned, were being sent to schools and community centers across San Diego, but the main center for evacuation had been established in
Qualcomm Stadium. I cringed, remembering the reports of the mayhem inside the
Astrodome after Hurricane Katrina. By the time they evacuated La
Jolla, if it came to that, everyone else would have been evacuated already. We would be packed in with the rest of the stir-crazy people, breathing smoke and waiting for the rain.
My mind suddenly made itself up. We were not waiting for an evacuation order. We would flee the fire,
preempt the panic, and escape San Diego County. However, when we sat down with the map, it became evident that all roads led us closer to danger before they led away. My parents’ house near Sacramento, our first choice of refuge, was quickly eliminated when we realized that I-5 would take us right through two of the first burning at the same time near Los Angeles. We considered next taking Highway 8 all the way out to Arizona, where my grandparents live. But the
Otay Mesa fires were burning down there. We had been planning a business trip to Utah anyway, so we finally settled on that as the best option. The only problem was that the Witch fire, the most aggressive of them all, had closed Highway 15 from 56 to 78. We had heard on the radio that one lane was still open, so we pinned our hopes on that and spent the next hour gathering and packing for a trip, not just an evacuation.
At about 1:30 we got in the car and headed out
Miramar Road to 15. There was no traffic. We were cruising until 15 was closed at 56. So we drove down 56, past our first neighborhood in
Rancho Bernardo, past our second neighborhood in Carmel Valley past the places where we used to take our peaceful evening walk. The freeway was eerily empty. Some people had left their sprinklers running as they fled the fires. We got on I-5 with the rest of San Diego. As we passed Del Mar and approached the fairgrounds, the smoke got thicker. People in cars we passed were holding handkerchiefs in front of their faces to breathe. We considered how to get back to 15, which seemed the only way to actually escape the fires rather than just going to the safety of the beaches to breathe the smoke until the fires passed. We called the radio station, which told us that 78 was open, so we took 78 toward 15.
As we drove, the smoke began to clear. We saw blue sky ahead. We rolled down the car windows to let in the fresh, clean air. But we knew we had to go north before we could get to 15, since 78 takes a dive south before it connects, and eastern Escondido, where it hits 15, had already been evacuated. We exited at Vista Village Drive and made our way merrily upward, with smoke looming everywhere except in front of us. Like so many other times that day, we could see a patch of blue sky just ahead, but it proved elusive. Going the other way was a long line of cars, evacuated from
Fallbrook, we supposed, and headed for 5 and the beaches by way of 78. At one point, police car after police car came flashing through on the yellow line, going our way, but much faster than our backed-up line. We were to find them at every turn, always keeping us from heading east toward the fire that lay between us and our goal, Highway 15.
We were kept north at Mission Road, rather than heading to the 15 exit, so we pressed on, hoping to get ahead of the fire. But by now we were getting dangerously close to evacuated
Fallbrook. We saw a man towing his ATV, with his leather couch in the back of a pickup. Others were hauling parrots, vehicles, or horse trailers. The farmhouses had an empty look about them, and ash was beginning to fall ominously from the sky. Had we not been in possession of our Thomas Guide Map, we could never have known which of the dusty roads would lead us to safety, and which would leave us stranded in endless winding curves under the smoke of the advancing wildfire. We could see the smoke quite close now, and it was darker, a sign, the radio informed us, that it was the smoke of a fire actively burning, and not just charred earth. The last place I saw to get over to 15 on our map was Mission Road, which went out to Old Highway 395 and 15.
As we turned east again, our hopes rose, since the smoke seemed to now be all to the south of us. But as we neared the freeway, we saw again the flashing red lights and the policeman turning us back. They must have closed it scant minutes before we arrived, since there were only a few cars ahead of us. “De Luz,” the policeman shouted, as he waved us on, and we could only hope that he meant we would eventually make it to 15 on De Luz Road. We turned around, and soon found that traffic was at a virtual standstill going the other way. We inched through north
Fallbrook with its residents, knowing that we were probably the only ones from distant La
Jolla trying to escape by that particular route. We passed a gas station, with “no gas” signs on all the pumps.
Fortunately, most of the cars were still heading to the Orange County beaches by way of 5. As soon as we headed North on De Luz and then
Sandia Creek Drive, there were only scattered cars. We wondered, in fact, if they were just all hoping to hide out in the hills above, or if that desolate, twisting road did in fact lead eventually back to the elusive Highway 15, which was beginning to feel like our holy grail. Our map of San Diego County had ended, but we had yet to truly escape. An
un-uniformed volunteer, a good
samaritan to whom we gave silent thanks, waved us on at a crossroads, and we began to see hand-lettered signs pointing the way to “
Temecula and I-15.” We pressed on hopefully, and finally came out of the hills into the city. It was 7:00. A journey that usually took no more than 1 1/2 to 2 hours had taken us 5 1/2. But we felt so blessed to be there, breathing clean air, and safe, we thought, from the fires. After a few miles on the blessed 15 we reached the fork and took 215, since we saw a sign that 15 was closed at an exit we
hadn’t heard of somewhere ahead. We made the same mistake we always make, and ended up driving east on 60 somehow. We were able to laugh about it though, and be grateful we had made no mistakes as we navigated ourselves painstakingly across the back roads of burning San Diego.
We filled up again, even though we were half full, remembering the empty gas station in
Fallbrook. The winds were screaming around us, and when we went to the bathroom at Jack-in-the-Box, a group of firemen came in after us, after parking their firetruck in the parking lot. As we got back on I-215, we could see smoke hanging above us, light in the dark as it was dark in the day. On the hills to our right we began to see a glow. The freeway was getting very congested now, and we had slowed to a crawl. Our diminished speed gave us time to notice the soot and ash now blowing about us abundantly. The entire hillside was black--recently black, because it was still smoking. Then we started to see sparks on the side of the road, and glowing embers rolling about in the wind. Traffic slowed to a standstill. On the median beside us, we could see a small flame on a post, licking at a tinder-dry tree. We remembered the images we had seen of houses and cars burning, and it didn't take much imagination to know what could happen to our car so easily if the wind were to change just a little. And what would we do? Get out of the car with the children and run? But to where, and how fast. These winds were 60-80 mph winds. Hurricane winds almost, but with no storm but the firestorm. A Los Angeles radio station informed us that in Lake Arrowhead, a small resort town in the hills just to our right, fifty houses had already burned. To our right, a sign informed us that 215 was closed two exits ahead, before it reconnected with 15. We decided to get off at the next exit and go south again on 215, rather than getting routed to 15 south, which I was sure would be a madhouse.
Our decision was confirmed and taken out of our hands, when the freeway closed at the very next exit. We looped around to go south, and were relieved to find that there was no traffic. Suddenly, up ahead we could see flames on the other side of the freeway and in the median. The little flame we had seen on the way up had multiplied a thousandfold. We screeched to a halt, along with the five or six cars in front of us in the right lane. The one car in the left lane meekly scooted backward from the towering flame. We saw firemen and cars, looking tiny against the blaze. Time seemed to stop as we sat trapped between freeway closures, watching them fight the fire, their movements insignificant against it, yet somehow little by little reducing its size. On our side of the freeway, we looked out of the window and saw embers smoldering on the ground, flaring ominously in the constant wind. This, we realized, is how a fire can jump a six-lane freeway--not as a towering wall of flame, but as a scattering of sparks and embers, thrown across by the wind.
After what seemed like an eternity, the fire was gone, first on the median, and then on the other side. We heaved a sigh of relief as we sped down the freeway again, albeit in the wrong direction. But after eight hours now of trying to go north on 15, we were not going to be deterred any more by the actual appearance of the fire than by its premonition. We headed east on Highway 10 toward Palm Springs to spend the night and then make our way around the fiery mountains. At 6:30 am after five hours of sleep, we turned on the television to find that 640 homes had been burned and 350,000 people evacuated in San Diego. Despite our difficulties, all we could think was how grateful we were to be here and not there. We headed off on 62 north toward
Barstow. The sky was clear, and no fire truck was in sight. We were heading for a little road called 247 that winds to the east of Los Angeles, eventually connecting Palm Springs and Twenty-Nine Palms back to 15. No fires raged in that direction, and we knew we could finally make it to our wandering mecca of I-15 and be safely on our way. Somewhere between Yucca Valley and Joshua Tree, we realized we must have missed the junction. We turned around and stopped at a construction site to ask. Someone directed us back a few blocks to the road heading up into the mountains. Then shaking his finger at me, he added, “Stay away from that fire, now.” He had no idea, but no one could possibly have desired to heed his advice more ardently than we.
We miss our adopted city, and can't wait to go back as soon as the smoke clears. We hope there will be something to go back to. Our hearts go out to all the people still in Southern California, and we pray for rain and relief.
