Notes from a Domestic Goddess

I'm clowning around in the living room with Lorenzo and the TV is on when I think I hear music, not music from the TV but live music. I mute the TV and I hear the music again, it's a brass marching band playing in the street, followed by a procession of people, and then they stop playing and I hear one voice praying over a microphone, it's a church procession heading somewhere at 9pm, complete with a band, five priests, nuns, and parishioners including children, many of whom are carrying candles. The procession is topped off by a Carabinieri car with its lights flashing following slowly behind. The priest finishes his prayer and the band strikes up again and the procession heads on down the road. I didn't see Sig.ra Pala today so she couldn't tell me about the procession, which I am sure she took full part in, probably carrying the priest's microphone or something. Lorenzo asked me why we never go to the things like that, silent church processions around the neighborhood with our children in the soft darkness, and I point out that Giulio would ask to be carried on Lorenzo's shoulders within a block of the church and Livia would want to get out of her stroller and would be so whacked out by 9pm that she would be unbearable. We'll go when the kids are older, I tell Lorenzo, i.e. when they can carry their own candles without accidentally setting themselves on fire. We'll have plenty of opportunities, they do these procession around four or five times a year. Don Vincenzo it seems, is a fan.

The other morning I'm wiping down the kitchen counter before heading out the door to go to work and I tell Giulio to get his rain coat on because we are about to go. "Are we going to America?" he asks, making me wish that going to America was as easy as telling Giulio to brush his teeth and get his coat on. You can't blame him, it is getting to be summer and summer to me means sweating it out in the midwest as I dash from parking lots into over air conditioned discount stores. We spend all year talking about what we will do when we get to the States and who we will see and what we will buy that Giulio knows that one morning I will turn to him and tell him to get his shoes on and that will be THE morning that we are flying out. We won't be going until August though and "only" for three weeks, so my summer is still a long way off, leaving me for the first time to have to organize summer activities for Giulio. Livia is covered, her daycare closes the day before we leave for the States so she is fine, except for one week after we get back and I'm hoping to work something out with Terry for when I will be back at work, but Giulio is set. I didn't know this but apparently our town runs its own day camp for kids from the second year of preschool up to middle school. Theresa told me about it, you pay for what weeks you want to send your kid and it's open all of July and August (Giulio's school closes at the end of June), except for the week of Ferragosto when everyone and their mother is on vacation in Italy. The camp also offers extended day, and is open til 6pm, which really makes my life easy as it is also around the corner from Livia's daycare so I can get both kids at the same time without worrying about making it in time from work. And lunch is included. So how much is this camp, with ex-day and food included costing us? 37 euros a week. Yes, that is right, 37 euros a week. I love it when I feel like my taxes are actually paying for something that I use, instead of trying to remind myself of that fact when I see the city paving the roads or something boring but extremely useful like that. So Giulio will go for all of July and then one week in August after we come back from the States. Here's hoping he likes it!

Last week a colleague of Lorenzo whose daughter is two years older than Livia gave him a bag of hand-me-down clothes for her. I like hand-me-downs, and I always welcome new-to-us clothes for my kids, but I’m afraid that Livia won’t be wearing these. Not because I don’t like them, but because I am unable to replicate the ironing and folding job that this woman did before sending them over. Amazing. I doubt a Chinese laundry could do better. This isn’t the first time I have been given clothes for Livia (no one had any boys clothes to pass on to me) that I gratefully accepted and then promptly put in my closet until the necessary amount of months had passed so I could send them back. First of all, there is no way I can do such beautiful ironing. I have this shameful scene in my mind of giving the woman the baby clothes back, thanking her for letting Livia wear them, and her telling me that it was no problem, really. Cut to the woman a few hours later in her own home unpacking the bag and tsk-tsk-ing over my shoddy ironing and folding. She would take the clothes and wash them and iron them again, sighing and rueing the day she ever lent them to me, before carefully putting them back into storage for some other friend’s baby. I would feel awful about making someone do extra work on my account, but at the same time it annoys me that lending me clothes will ultimately cause more work for me. The few pieces that I let Livia wear, the ones I felt confident enough to iron, I was constantly worrying about removing all the stains in a way that I never am with clothes I bought myself. It also seems silly to me to send the clothes back, because by the time something has been worn heavily by two or three toddlers, well, you really don’t want to pass it on again. In the States the idea is always you take the hand-me-downs, use them, and then pass them on to another person you know who needs them. Instead here the idea is that you eventually give them back, unless otherwise stated. I gave all of Giulio’s clothes away to Terry and let her do what she wanted with them, as along with Alessandro she has several nephews younger than Giulio who more than glad to take his Gap cast-offs and keep them from taking up space in my storage room.

As a final note, we had the blinds put up in the veranda. I wasn’t there for it, thank God, but apparently the man came and put them up himself. Which shows how scaring the whole door incident in the cantina was for Lorenzo, that he let this project be done by someone else. I was so sure I would have to spend a stressful morning holding the ladder, handing Lorenzo tools while listening to him swear that I can hardly believe I got off so easy. I came home for lunch that day and found lunch ready and the new blinds hanging in the windows. They look great by the way, I still can’t believe we kept the old ones for as long as we did. And despite being spooked by working on the cantina he now thinks that fixing up it up is the best thing he has ever done. He has the bench press down there, along with a TV and he mounted some kind of desk to the wall. I joke that he is slowly moving his things down there so he can live down there permanently, except that my parents think we should keep it free for them for when they come. My mother thinks that despite that it’s a three flight walk up to the nearest bathroom, (though they could do it ala’ Sig. Piero and just pee in the garden,) and the fact that I would have to lock them in at night when they go to sleep, she’s convinced that we now have a great guest room for when they come and visit. Yeah, I can just imagine that conversation.
“So Claire, where do you parents sleep when they come visit? In your room?”
“No, we’ve found a great solution, we have them sleep in the storage room in the basement. It’s amazing what a few tiles can do for a room. They can’t believe we waited as long as we did. It's every New Yorker's dream--finding a room in your house that you didn't know existed.”