Who is Tolly?
Tolly is a little turtle made from a walnut shell, that was my aunt's toy when she was a child. Then my aunt gave Tolly to me.
Now Tolly is a miniature window on my aunt's past, and on mine.
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For more corner views on miniature worlds, see Jane.
Looking back through the pages of your life, do you find foods that you passionately hated as a child, which have become your favorites? I do.
For me it's artichokes, which I disliked intensely throughout childhood. I was never forced to eat them, but I was offered them a lot. My mother loved them, and I remember her, at around this time of year, munching on raw artichoke leaves dipped in olive oil and salt while making dinner. "Would I like to try one?" she'd always ask. Risotto and artichokes, slow cooked with garlic and parsley, was our Sunday lunch, because it was my maternal grandfather's favorite dish. "Would you like to try some?"
When Tom and I lived in Rome, I always bought fruit and vegetables at a certain market stall. One day the jolly lady who ran that stall greeted me munching on artichoke leaves. "Would you like to try one?" she asked. I tried one plain, raw leaf, and I discovered my new favorite vegetable: the spiny artichoke.
The stall-keeper taught me to peel away the tougher outer leaves, chop off the spiny end, and slice the artichokes thin, then serve them, alone or in a salad, with nothing more than fresh lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper. She showed me that the stem is delicious, as long as you peel it. That day I bought my first crate of spiny artichokes.
Tom and I embarked on an artichoke adventure, and tried many varieties, feasting on the Romanesco artichokes and the Tuscan mammola ones. But my favorite remained the spiny artichoke: they grow where we live now, too, and I still buy them by the crate.
Because artichokes are blossoms, you keep them in water; there's often an artichoke "bouquet" on the kitchen table this time of year. I munch on leaf after leaf as I cook dinner, like my mother used to do. And sometimes I ask my children, "Would you like to try one?" I wonder what they'll remember, and whether they'll someday discover the delicious food beneath the spines.
My geraniums weren't happy this morning to wake up under a cold blanket of snow, in March. Somebody else wasn't happy to see more late-season snow, either. Two Somebodies, in fact.
Somebody had to fill the wood box again, you see. Somebody had to take out the garbage and take out the compost. All in the March snowstorm. The two Somebodies I picked out weren't at all happy. They even joked about deserving a pay raise. I explained again that there are chores to be done, and that everyone in our family does some of them - for the benefit of the whole family, not for money.
The two Somebodies went out into the March snowstorm, filled the wood box and did all the rest. After which I gave them many extra kisses, because they are big helpful boys, but they're still my babies, and though I didn't pay them for their help, they deserve a generous pay raise in kisses.
Given our different cultural background, Tom and I sometimes see the issue of chores and allowances a little differently (he grew up with an allowance). How do you handle work and pay in your family?
(all photos except for the last one are Pien's)
She's not afraid of cold or snow!
She's not afraid of sharks. Especially the kind her husband bakes for their son's birthday.
Pien and her young family have recently moved to the heart of the Dutch countryside, to follow their dream of running a small farmstead and living immersed in nature (you can read about them here).
And a few weeks after I received her handmade bag, another package came for me in the mail, containing a most unexpected present: a collection of unique fabrics and ribbons which Pien spontaneously sent me, with a note suggesting that I "have fun with it and make some more pretty things." This tells you the kind of person Pien is!
Today the weather plunged back into winter and its many grayscale shades. Do I always seem to be talking about the weather, I wonder? When we first moved into the countryside, Tom and I were constantly surprised by how dramatic and changeable the weather seemed.
Later we realized that it was living immersed in nature that made us feel the changes in the weather and the seasons more intensely than ever before.
I've become acutely aware of the weather: the angle of the sun in the sky and the quality of the light in the different times of day. The color of the landscape surrounding us, and every change in nature's palette, from the stark grays and browns of winter to the sudden emerald green of spring, to the gradually spreading yellows and golds of summer and autumn.
And the sound of the wind as it blows through the woods in the valley, hissing furiously through the naked winter branches, or dancing with the soft full leaves in the summer ... I discovered all this, but my kids are growing up with it.
I love this drawing Nicholas has been patiently working on over the last few days. He says it's not finished yet. And he says it doesn't matter whether it's spring or summer: it's our hills.
The other day I dropped in on my neighbors door just as they were making a pizza. Because my 85-year-old neighbor loves to tell stories, he told me how he'd kneaded the dough first thing in the morning, and recalled every single step of his pizza making including the number of olives - 27 - he'd used in the topping. That's when I noticed that his olives were all neatly pitted.
We've been picking olives from abandoned olive trees around here for a few years now, and have accumulated an impressive number of jars of olives in brine. Those jars are doing precisely that, I'm ashamed to say: just accumulating, without being eaten really. The local olives here, of the Taggiasca variety, are quite small and slender - basically pits padded out with a little olive flesh. Which makes them a little difficult to use, when you have hungry kids who like their food in nice plump bites.
I asked my neighbor where they kept their magic pitless olive tree. My neighbor laughed, and showed me the coolest kitchen tool ever: a garlic press with a little cup under the garlic area, where you drop in an olive, squeeze the handle, and ecco fatto, out pops the pit. You can even pit your olive and press some garlic all in one go. This device is totally new to me. Have you ever seen anything like it before?
I borrowed it, and in no time I'd pitted all of our 2009 olives.
Later on, as I was baking a pizza and a focaccia with pitted olives, and was getting ready to throw away the pits, Tom suggested that olive pits, which are both woody and oily, might make a good fire-starter. How many new olive discoveries can you make in one day?!
My first cup of coffee: in the last few days, when I make my morning coffee, which is always the first thing I do, I haven't needed to turn on a light. Here's my view out the window at 6.40am, and my first glimpse of my coffee companion: sunlight! We've entered that magic time of year when sunlight embraces us from the moment we wake up.
My second (or third?) cup of coffee: it's early afternoon, and I'm sitting on the terrace in layered long-sleeve t-shirts and sunglasses, soaking up the spring sunlight, which feels so good after a long, cold winter. The sun is the perfect coffee companion all year round, if you ask me.
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For more coffee companions around the world, visit Jane's sidebar.
On the wall where I'd cleared some of the ivy (here), I noticed some violets blooming. Violets have been celebrated since ancient Rome as the first flowers of springtime, so I was really moved to find them - spring must finally be on the way! Before long, hopefully, the new garden wall will be lush and purple with violets.
And then, as I was clearing some dead foliage nearby with my sickle, I unearthed a sword Jeremy had made almost entirely by himself about 5 or 6 years ago. He'd been was terribly proud of it, brandishing it as he marched around in the woods, and even taking it to bed with him at night. Until one day, when it mysteriously vanished. We spent days and days looking for it, in every conceivable corner of the woods, with no luck.
And today, in an overgrown corner of the terrace immediately behind the house, there it was! It was weather-stained and had a snail on it, and looked like an antique. And in fact it was an artifact of an earlier time in our family, when 5-year-old Jeremy marched around with a wooden sword in hand.
Now it was Rebecca's turn to admire the sword, though she seemed to love the snail even more, and really liked its pretty shell.
I'm posting over at the co-op today on Chronicles of a New Garden: a timeless tool, where I discuss the sickle, an ancient gardening tool I've learned to use and appreciate over the last several years.
We drove down out of the mountains, descending 2000 meters in a few hours' time, from the snowy peaks to the foggy metropolis (where we stopped and took Jeremy to a bookstore - who would have thought that our 11-year-old boy would be so eager for new books?). And in the afternoon we drove on, all the way to our village by the Mediterranean, where the mimosas were coming into bloom, and spring seemed to have almost arrived.
We were in the car quite a while, but I've really come to enjoy this kind of travel through changing landscapes. Luckily, our children love to travel just as much as their parents do. In the slower moments, Rebecca directed the family sing-along, mostly consisting of "Row, row your boat," over and over and over.
Now, as I write this, I can see a reflection in the window: Tom is reading to Rebecca, while Jeremy and Nicholas are deep in their books. Reading is another good way to travel.
Family life at the edge of an ancient rural community near the Mediterranean
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