An Italian Affair...Food for the Writer's Soul

The story begins two weeks ago...

We are enjoying the rare experience of a writer’s workshop in the hill country 90 miles east of Rome - aptly titled Italy in Other Words. Liz and I have joined a group of six other writers, led by two wonderful educators and published authors from San Francisco and Washington D.C.. Kathryn leads the daily workshop. Helen has family roots in Abruzzo, and a passion to share the richness of this colorful region of Italy.

The medieval fortified hill town of Santo Stefano di Sessanio is an intriguing maze of stone archways, tiny balconies overlooking secluded courtyards, steep cobblestone pathways, and terracotta planters overflowing with a tumble of red and pink geraniums.

Ancient doors stand closed at every turn, daring me to open them and explore inside. Every house in this charming village is a cave of mystery, lit with candlelight flickering against walls stained with age and smoke.

Books filled with yellowing pages of indecipherable Italian script lean against each other for support, their bindings aged and cracked. Pigeons roost on weathered terracotta tile roofs, while swallows dart for tiny gnats in the deep blue summer sky. Old men sit in the piazza, sharing observations of life in their lilting Italian tongue.

I sip on a late afternoon cappuccino, relaxing after several hours of writing. The poppy I picked yesterday from the field down in the valley is pressed blood-red between the pages of my journal, full of the passion of these villages perched on hillsides throughout this beautiful Abruzzo region.

Santo Stefano dates back to the 13th century, a time when feudal barons ruled a dozen villages and shepherds grazed sheep on the rocky slopes of these Apennine Mountains. At night they would corral them within the security of stone-walled sheepfolds.

The crumbling remains of Rocca di Calascio, the medieval, 12th century fortress, presides from its lofty peak 4500 ft above broad, fertile valleys and surrounding hill towns. Wildflowers grow among the ruins of its ancient walls and Rapunzel towers.

Sextantia Albergo Diffuso is our hotel and the rooms are actually houses scattered throughout the village of Santo Stefano. It is akin to sleeping in a cave, except for the luxuries that have subtly been incorporated into the medieval simplicity of each restored room. Yesterday I soaked in my big white tub fragrant with lavender oil, enjoying the tallow candles casting a soft glow on rough stone walls and ceiling. The bed is covered in blankets woven from the wool of local sheep, and on the dresser sits a bottle of locally-made cherry liqueur.

Each morning we wander into the Cantinone for breakfast – a delicious spread of fresh-baked pastries and pies, bowl of fresh fruit, yoghurt, cereal, and three choices of pureed fruit a long wooden table. The room is mellow and inviting, and we sit at rough hewn tables on long wooden benches. One of the two ladies offers to cook us eggs or frittata.

Our daily workshop runs from 9am – 12 noon, with the mandatory break for cappuccinos at a nearby store in the little piazza.

Our group has bonded quickly, and we have surprised ourselves with the vulnerabilities we’ve shared. The focus has been on a combination of travel writing, food writing and memoir writing, critiquing well-written pieces and studying what makes them work so well and why.

The writing activities have been interspersed with tours to local sites (and some further away than anticipated!), including an olive oil factory, a hike to the remains of Rocca di Calascio in the Gran Sasso National Park, and learning about cheese making near the town of Castel del Monte. We saw the sheep being milked, then watched while the milk was churned into mozzarella cheese. After visiting their cheese shop in the nearby village and relaxing with a cappuccino (of course!), we returned to the cheese factory for some tasting of the final product – fresh from the vat.

To support local businesses in the village, we ate at different restaurants each day.

Lunch one day was at a little restaurant up in the mountains of Campo Imperiale (Little Tibet) in the Gran Sasso National Park. The drive wound up into the high pasture land where we encountered a herd of longhorn cattle, all wearing jangling cow bells that echoed across the hills. Unconcerned at our intrusion to their peaceful existence, they wandered across the road in front of the car, staring at us curiously.

The hotel’s own restaurant – Locanda Sotto gli Archi - was a five star affair, where Massimo, the maitre d’, treated us like royalty in his charming Italian style.

Five or six courses are the norm in Italy, and each one brought new surprises. Liqueurs made locally were the finishing touch to our evenings of good conversation and laughter. Two of our writers had birthdays this very week, and we celebrated in style at Sextantio’s Locanda Sotto gli Archi for Gina, and gave Kathleen a surprise at the delightful Agriturismo Al Borgo by the lake.

The village was a perfect retreat for writers, stimulating the imagination with the mystery of the past, settling the mind and spirit with its peacefulness and beauty. Several of us stayed back from some of the excursions to write, or sat up late into the night in our cave-like rooms, and those times of seclusion helped us tap into the wells of our deeper self.

Kathryn gave each of us a 1:1 consultation and critique, and I shared for the first time the opening chapter to my book in process. She encouraged me to change from 3rd person novelist’s view to a 1st person memoir. In the rewrite I discovered the sharp pain of reliving the experience and making it my personal memoir –but when I read it to the group next day, their warmly encouraging comments let me know the story is both emotive and compelling. So stay tuned – the author is inspired to continue with Whatever Comes Next!

Organic Gardening for Health & Happiness

The pace of life is increasing, so if I’m ever going to share about our gardening adventure for this year, I’d better do it now.

Two years ago it was a disastrous vegetable garden. Nothing did much of anything. But then, I didn’t do too well either. Bill passed away in the spring and I was running crazy, trying to be superwoman, doing the work of two people, absolutely driven. Heart broken, the days and nights had slipped into another dimension. Once midnight passed, time ceased to matter, and memories and torchlight flickering gathered me in their comforting arms. All the shrubs and trees planted in Bill’s memory survived – a million buckets of water that summer. But the vegetable garden gave up the ghost, so last year I declared it a sabbatical year of rest to recover. Perhaps for us both. (Do I really know what rest is? Still working on that.)

Time does heal, I suppose. So this year I was ready to try again – but ready for something new. Square Foot Gardening – several friends had been reading up on it – so we decided to give it a whirl. Totally organic. Raised beds. Forget renting a tiller and ploughing and weeding. Forget the long row crops more suited to a farm. Think small, compact, individual squares with a different crop in each square foot. Grow only what you can eat. Intersperse the vegetables with flowers and herbs – both for pest control and beauty. Sounded like fun.

Julie got the jump on the whole process. Bought the book and determined to follow it precisely. We all need a little structure in our lives, so three of us launched in with both feet – literally!

While Scott scrounged scraps of wood and began cutting them to make our 4 ft x 4ft boxes out of 2 x 6s, we girls headed to the horse barn for a truck load of horse manure.

Great exercise! Was this really part of the plan? I’d already driven to Springfield to load by hand a pile of leaf litter that had been composting in a friend’s back yard for two years. This was getting to be a lot of hard work!

The recipe called for equal parts vermiculite, peat moss, and a mixture of 5 types of compost. Technically, we had 3 types and figured that would work. Back at the DeVos ranch, we spread a tarpaulin in the back of my truck, and began mixing. This was a lot easier than shoveling horse manure, and before long we each had our load to fill three boxes. Then came the grids, using thin strips of wood to divide each box into one foot squares.

It turned into a two-day process to finish it. Before you put the soil mix in the box, you have to spread out thick layers of newspapers or cardboard on the ground to kill the weeds and grass, then wet it down. Finally fill the 4ft x 4ft box with the soil mix. And voila! You are ready to plant!

The idea is to put a different crop or individual plant in each square foot, determined by the recommended planting spaces. For example, in a square foot you could put one pepper plant, or 4 lettuce, or 9 beets, or 16 spring onions. The fun was interspersing herbs and flowers for color and variety. It’s optional, but I also stopped by a bait shop and bought several little tubs of worms to add to each planting box.

I got a little creative, and made a long 2ft x 8ft box for tomatoes and zucchinis, and 3 diamond shaped boxes for rhubarb and cucumbers. Peas, beans, and tomatoes are all encouraged to grow up trellises. My peas are a mixture of sugar snaps and Sweet Peas. Metal conduit is used to make the trellis, and mounted over the top of 18 inch lengths of re-bar hammered into the ground for stability. Plastic netting can be strung across the framework to complete the trellis. I had to cut the 2 inch x 2 inch squares to make the grid big enough to train beans and tomatoes. The biggest challenge is to recycle whatever you can, and only buy what you absolutely have to.

The good thing about this soil mix is that it’s inherently loaded with nutrients, and drains perfectly. Even in a flood! Grass clippings make great mulch to keep the moisture in for the summer and reduce the need for watering somewhat. They recommend you place a bucket of water beside each bed for daily watering. It will be sun-warmed and the chlorine will dissipate. Here in Tennessee we get so many thunderstorms, God really helps with the watering. He’s so considerate!

Julie’s garden got a real setback with Nashville’s devastating floods– their whole property went more than 4ft under (including the house & barn). When the flood waters receded, two of her garden frames had floated away, but, to our astonishment, the soil mix was still firmly in its original shape! Still waiting on some soil testing to determine whether she can replant, or if the whole thing has to be torn out because of toxic residue from the flood. While I think of it, the latest report on the flood aftermath on tonight’s local TV news says no new flood insurance is being issued at present to any properties in the Nashville area because Congress has been in recess and thus has jammed any provisions for new federal flood insurance policies. This also means mortgages that mandate flood insurance as part of their requirements are also on hold. Unbelievable!

However, better keep my cool, and focus on the matter at hand. Gardening is a perfect tonic for that. Let me share the words on the garden plaque we inherited from Bill’s Mom, that has graced our garden here for many years.

“The kiss of the sun for pardon,

The song of the birds for mirth,
One is nearer God’s heart in a garden

Than anywhere else on earth.”

You can see by the pictures what fun this has been! Weeding is very minimal. Once a crop has finished, you are ready to plant something else in the square foot space. And the easy part in the beginning is simply planting one square at a time. The perfect way to plan spring, summer and fall crops. Bite-sized pieces to deal with. Each square almost becomes a mini garden. You find yourself developing an intimate relationship with each little planting.

We have a wedding here at Ghost Gums on the Ridge on July 3rd, and the square foot garden is already an attractive feature with a charm of its own, demanding a lot less maintenance than the standard vegetable garden. Totally organic, and healthy too! I leave for Italy in one week’s time, leaving everything in the capable hands of the groom-to-be (Skylar, who is also my housesitter). Confident that it will be more of a pleasure than a chore to nurture our new style of vegetable garden. Feel free to post your personal gardening stories here to share with us all!

The Great Flood of 2010

It’s six days after the historic flooding disaster hit Nashville and the surrounding region, but while the floodwaters have subsided considerably in most places, the real trauma has just begun. Three nights ago I flew over the area in a Cessna 182 to view the devastation from the air, and at first it’s hard to comprehend the full extent of the impact on so many individual lives.

The countryside is lush and green, a picturesque mix of farmland edged with trees and forested rolling hills. Quite breathtakingly beautiful in the late afternoon sunlight. The flood-swollen Cumberland River snakes across the broad valley to Nashville’s city skyline, a distant silhouette.

(photo: Cameron Stokes)

In one weekend we received 28% of the year’s annual average rainfall, and it wasn’t long before the Cumberland and Harpeth Rivers, plus all the smaller creeks and tributaries, had reached flood level and burst their banks. Up to 18 inches of rain in many areas. People were taken by surprise across 30 counties as flood waters rose rapidly and surged through basements, houses and buildings, turning the landscape into a wetland and cutting off roads and major interstates. Cars and trucks were swamped and even submerged sitting in traffic on the highways, some washed away in the swift current.

(photo: Cameron Stokes)

Heroic rescues and neighbor helping neighbor filled the news stories, as more than 1000 flood victims sought accommodation in shelters around the state. People lost their homes, their treasured possessions, their livelihood. There were over 900 water rescues!

(Photo: Rick Banning)
My best friends Scott and Julie fled their property (above) as over 4ft water flooded their home, rescuing their animals stranded in the loft while their life possessions swirled in the toxic mix below. The water kept rising in downtown Nashville, turning street after street into a waterway, and it grew worse as buildings began pumping the water from basements and underground parking lots. The Pinnacle Building’s basement was 35 ft under, the Schermerhorn Symphony Center battled 18 ft water in their basement, losing Steinway grand pianos and the famed organ console. Irreplaceable archives were threatened in the Country Music Hall of Fame, and Soundcheck – where around a thousand musicians stored their musical equipment in storage containers – was underwater. Trucking depots with dozens of trucks and trailers full of freight were afloat. Thousands were without power and phone service.

Opryland Hotel, Oprymills, and the Grand Ole Opry (above) evacuated everyone before the entire ground level (over 10ft) was underwater as the flooded Cumberland bled across the landscape.

Cornelia Fort Airport would be better suited to floatplane operations, as planes disappeared in the rising water.

At its peak, the Cumberland rose 20 ft above flood level, threatening to overflow Old Hickory Dam and render the powerful waterway beyond control.

Monday morning I received a phone call that the Wanderin’ Star and the boat dock had been lifted off the mooring poles and both moved out into the lake. In fact the flood moved them along the shore, and as the water began to recede, the boat would soon be left laying on its side immobile. It took our team of Meadows, two friends, a boat and canoe, many hours to rescue both sailboat and dock, but she is now swinging at anchor in the cove, awaiting some repair work on the dock that we miraculously restored to its original mooring.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers declared the disaster a 1000 year flood of historic proportions. Probably at least 80% of the victims did not have flood insurance – living in areas not even considered a flood plain. Scott and Julie did not have flood insurance, so like many others, the loss is huge. They had just moved into their new place 3 months ago. Many businesses will go under, the financial loss too great. Opryland alone, which will takes months to recover, will leave several thousand without a job.

Pennington Bend

Flooding is an insidious disaster. You can now drive down streets that just a few days ago were flooded, only the rooftops of houses showing. Today everything looks normal, except for the huge piles of sodden mattresses, furniture, personal belongings, broken drywall and insulation lining the streets. The houses on the outside appear fine. But on the inside they are trashed, destroyed by contaminated water that covered everything. Some things can be saved, but most cannot.

Imagine walking through your own house, and marking a line. Everything below 4 ft will be destroyed or contaminated. It helps you focus on what’s really important in life. It sharpens my own perspective. If I could have Bill back, I would gladly give up everything, cheerfully stand there with nothing by my side but him – an easy, instantaneous choice. How about you? How important are those material possessions? Could you give up everything below the 4 ft line – could you give up your whole house?

My friends and I have walked this past week with Scott and Julie, using every spare moment away from work helping them tear out drywall and insulation, sort through belongings, disinfect and clean what could be salvaged, take truckloads to the dump, and reclaim what we could. They run this endurance race like long distance runners, battling exhaustion, but maintaining good spirits. “Today we throw away our lives,” Julie shared, hiding the depth of loss as they faced the task of going through the sodden piles of truly personal papers, memories and treasured items of a lifetime, much beyond redemption. “We’ll be like honeymooners, starting over. But we have been so blessed. I will always thank the Lord for His goodness." Many others are even less fortunate, and have lost everything.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper arrived in town on Wednesday, stunned at the extent of the devastation, and publicly apologizing for the national media not covering the story before now, preoccupied with the Gulf oil spill and the thwarted terrorist bombing in New York. He is overwhelmed at the volunteer spirit he sees in Tennessee – groups and individuals mobilizing to help those in need on a grassroots level, anxious to do all they can. Organizations pitching in quickly, everywhere people seeing what they can contribute, looking for opportunities to give of time and money and effort. There is very little crime to speak of in the midst of this disaster, virtually no looting. Tennessee is famous for this volunteer attitude, and Cooper has never seen it before.

Pope John Paul II High School, Hendersonville

Over 1500 people gather for the National Day of Prayer at Hendersonville First Baptist – relocated from the Grand Ole Opry that is badly flooded. In spite of the new federal ruling that such an historic day is now contested as unconstitutional, all 50 States in the Union make the declaration to honor it. At times such as this, many realize we need to seek God’s face.

Vietnam Veteran's Blvd

Unlike New Orleans, this region was not built 5 ft below sea level, trusting a levee bank to protect it from a wild ocean surge. Rather than mass entitlement programs, the entrepreneurial spirit is still strong. People don’t sit around waiting for the government to bail them out. They pitch in and help one another. It makes me proud to be a Tennessean.

The music industry, the lifeblood of Nashville, is finding ways to help this city get back on its feet. And for many of them, the personal losses have been devastating. Musicians like Vince Gill, Keith Urban, Brad Paisley and LeAnn Rimes have lost entire collections. The Nashville Symphony is playing a free concert this weekend in the public square. The Grand Ole Opry will return to the Ryman this weekend, and Alan Jackson and Brad Paisley will be performing. The CMA awards in June will donate 100% of the proceeds to flood relief. Volunteer groups are mobilizing across the state. The long road to recovery is just beginning.

Watch this short video for a sensitive rendering of this week’s experience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFjaQoOdJvI&sns=em

More pictures at today’s Tennessean online newspaper: http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage

My Dancing Girl

A week ago we buried my little dancing girl, my sweet Saki – our little spirit of light and joy, light as air, wild as a dervish, gentle as a moonbeam. She has graced our home these past 9 years, but I will always see her spirit dancing in the sunlight, returned to her Creator, the source of all life.

As we stood around the sunlit grave close to Bill's oak tree, Tux spontaneously wandered over, explored around the hole, and, prompted by who knows what, braced himself on the edge and leaned in. His head reached down to Saki's - the only part exposed from her little white shroud, and he sniffed her in a farewell kiss. Then he withdrew to the oak tree and lay down in the grass.

Saki arrived on Bill’s birthday, December 10, 2000. Somewhat traumatized by the party and houseful of people, that first night. A little bundle of white fluff edged with chocolate points. Startling blue eyes. Our perfect little Siamese.

When I left on my round-the-world trip to visit family early in 2001, Saki was in the prime of her wildness, Flying around the house, up curtains, across dressers, leaving a trail of chaos in her wake. But she was great comfort to Bill when his sister passed away as he stood by her bedside – and I was half a world away.

Saki soon had a little brother, a cheeky tuxedo kitty who survived her witchery. When Tux could defend himself, they became fast friends, inseparable, intuitively connected. These two irascible felines brought much love and laughter to our home. Tux the sociable greeter, Saki the velvet-soft lover. When Bill passed away just two years ago, Saki took it upon herself to cuddle up with me every night, bringing sweet comfort that filled a void in my broken heart.

I have to admit, she was my favorite little girl. Hard to imagine my sweet little soft, furry girl, so full of love and impudence, has gone. I will miss her running wildly through the house, lapping fresh running water from the kitchen faucet, scampering high into a tree stirred by a sudden gust of wind, and nudging my face to kiss me goodnight with a gentle mew. The days and nights have lost a tender magic.