...Perchance to Dream...

Darn it, Calandria! She's gone and put her "I want to to run away and start a new life" post on her blog. She never wants to run away to cold places like Helsinki--it always seems to be warm, Mediterranean places, where the sun shines, the pace is slow, and the food is great (to be fair, I think she may have at some time mentioned some place in Ireland, too, which is where the sun doesn't often shine, but that may be an ancestral pull, I don't know). Anyway, how serendipitous that after reading her post I spied my copy of Under the Tuscan Sun just sitting on my bookcase. So I took it down. Again.

It's not that it's the best book ever written. It may not be the best book about Tuscany ever written. (It is the source of one of the worst movie adaptations, in my opinion). Anyway, there's just something about that book...it makes me want to do what she did. Of course there are some obstacles.

Problem #1: The work. You know, I'm not really into super hard work. I might, on occasion, be considered kind of lazy. You know, in the way Barack Obama is kind of considered a Democrat. I can get up for a necessary task, sure. When we have to cut a tree down. Or I have to weed my entire yard (front and back) in just a few hours. But let's face it--am I really going to work 7 to 7, seven days a week, with sleep feeling more like a loss of consciousness? Even in Tuscany? Or...would I putz around the town, looking at platters and furniture, or sit under a tree making lists, or reading a book, roused only when it became painfully obvious that my husband was seriously cheesed at my lack of effort on a project I talked him into? Yeah, that's probably how it would go.

Problem #2: The kids. Sadly, no matter how hard I try, I have not raised television children. You know the kind--they walk into a room, say something clever, the parents smile and then suggest they run upstairs to play. And then you never see them again. Sometimes for the rest of the season. MY children, well, they're a titch more, how shall I say, obvious. They require attention. As in, I haven't completed a sentence in 13 years, much less a conversation. I have not used the toilet, taken a bath, or passed through a room without having to clean something, fix something, or settle something. It occurs to me that my life in Tuscany might be...a little less serene, let's put it that way. One of the things about having 3 kids is that one is always out of sorts. They have inherited my level of interest in work. At any one point one is content, one is in a holding pattern, and one is working on the other two. I ask you, how am I supposed to clear 5 acres, re-establish the vineyard, clear out the olive orchard, rebuild the stone wall, scrub floors, and strip paint with kids underfoot? Hypothetically speaking, of course (see problem number 1 above).

Problem #3. The cooking. This goes hand-in-hand with Problems Number 1 and 2. I like to make appetizers for a get-together. I like to cook on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. The author promises that because because everything in Tuscany is fresh and perfect, cooking is a snap. I bet it's not, really. I bet there's some effort in it. I've always wanted to make my own jam. I've spent 20 years visiting my mother in the summer--my mother, who makes jam and has all the paraphenalia for making the same. Have I ever ONCE asked her to help me make jam? No. Now why do I think I might do that in a foreign country? After all, when I couldn't get decent bread in Tanzania, I didn't make my own. I didn't even make my cook make it. I just ate crummy white bread when the good stuff wasn't around (see, this is part of Problem #1).

Then there's the kids. Here is a list of things mentioned in the book I'm very sure would go 0 for 3 in my family: veal, peppers, eggplant, arugula, onions, plums, figs, apricots, hazelnuts, custard, chickpeas, mushrooms, chard, cooked tomatoes, zucchini that isn't part of zucchini bread, beans of any kind, and apricots. To be fair to them, there are some on this list they haven't tried so it's theoretically possible that I'm selling them short. To be extra fair to them, I have eaten everything on the list and there are several that I don't like, either. They happen to be some of the things the author continuously raves about. I suspect we might subsist largely on bread, cheese, and pasta. That's not that great for the long haul. Oh, and chicken.

Problem #4: Money. The author is an author (thank you, Captain Obvious) and teaches at a university. Her husband also is a university professor. She references a divorce settlement, but describes the purchase of the farm as "costing the earth" and that they'll have to do a tremendous amount of the work themselves. Which they do. And they hire out tons of it. Whenever I read the book, I'm always wondering, just how much did the house cost? And just how much did those renovations amount to? Since she's never going to tell me, I'm left with the very distinct impression it's far more than I have. Or maybe not. We are notoriously cheap people, both in the good way (we have no debt other than our house) and in the bad way (we often don't do things that we would like to do because we think we need to save, or we by something less expensive when it would be better to buy quality). And while I do feel blessed, I always have a nagging suspicion that if something bad's gonna happen, it's gonna happen to me. None of which is conducive to renting houses around the world, falling in love with an Italian farmhouse, buying it, and then restoring it.

On the upside, I do get the feeling that Italy may be Europe's answer to Tanzania in terms of the way things get done (slowly, and all according to who you know), the distinct lack of attention to time, the going to several different places every day to buy groceries, the sky-high utility costs...so yeah, like Tanzania. Except with excellent cheese. So I'd be a step ahead in that respect.

I take comfort from a passage in the book, where the author recounts several of the houses she has rented around the world. In each place she became enamoured by her surroundings and pictured herself with new clothes, new attitudes, and a new life. Once she left each place, she never looked back. Until the house in Tuscany. At that point everything came together where she could take the plunge.

So maybe it's OK to dream when the weather is cold, to imagine another kind of life with other possibilities--and still be perfectly content with the life you have now. And the kids you have now. Because the things you have now are blessings and you do know that, don't you? Sure, I do.