It’s official. No turkey this year; at least not this weekend. Anna Maria and Giancarlo just cannot face all that food and Luciano’s godparents Assunta and Checco who are the traditional guests had not yet been contacted. I asked Luciano if he even talked to them.
“Well, I spoke some more with others who were invited. There was some discussion, some hesitation and doubts… and then I just ran out of energy. Besides I am having trouble with my phone.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“I am unable to make calls and talk to people.”
“How are we going to fix this?”
“I dunno…but in any case, no Thanksgiving.”

And with that, the whole event disappeared from my horizon. Truth be told, it did so quite easily and I have now set my sites on Christmas. Thanksgiving just doesn’t exist in Italy and so why force it? Recently I saw an article on line about the “hard to find foods” when travelling abroad. Besides all the obvious ones like Moon Pies and Fat Tire Amber Ale, the writer included the classic most elusive trophy: the whole turkey.

Yawn. Not really, as we all know. And what is all the fuss?

After all Thanksgiving has become a bookend for the Christmas shopping season, even getting shouldered out of the way in favor of camping out in front of Walmart. With sadness I read of mobs rushing the doors, injuries and mad spending. Especially here, in the hills of the Veneto where the only Thanksgiving celebrated for miles around happened right downstairs in our dining room and which, I am sorry to say, only seemed to spark discourse among the cousins fighting for an invite to the only turkey in town. More fighting? What does it all mean?

Luciano and I went for a walk on Sunday morning. We visited all our dog friends in their yards, admired the yellows and oranges of this seemingly endless fall and laughed again at the strange construction decision of a Mareno bus stop. As we passed the Soffratta church, Mass was just ending and I watched as a throng of people spilled through the door, led by the priest who I did not recognize.
“Who is that?” I asked. The identity of the priest here is often a hot topic. But I was immediately distracted by what the priest was doing. Standing before a tractor-big, red, dirt-encrusted- that stood by the church door, he raised his arms “Wait, what is he doing?” I asked.
“He is blessing the tractor. It is Thanksgiving, Serena.”

Before the church, set up on folding tables was a collection of samples of the Mareno harvest: pomegranates, persimmons, pumpkins and chestnuts, Bottles of grappa and Malbeck lay against freshly killed pheasants and ducks and a heap of apples and hazelnuts.
“See Serena? That’s it.”
On that table, set up in the gravel in front of the church where we were married, were the symbols of what was really important. But not just on the table. Kids chased each other around the tractor and parents mingled in the November sun. Once again Italy brings it home. And not a cash register or turkey in sight. There must be these kinds of scenes going on in the US, but here it is the ways things are…not the way it used to be or a charming human interest story for the end of the news broadcast.

I realize in fact that I have a lot to be thankful for without having a dinner to celebrate it. I am thankful that the owners of the scruffy field across the street decided to put in a crop of winter wheat. A massive tractor arrived one morning, and passing back and forth across the field without stopping, and plowed the entire thing in one day in a relentless agricultural marathon. The earth, which for eight years had been untouched but for the occasional flock of sheep and our tossed apple cores, was pulled open to the sky, steaming in the early morning. Two days later it was already sown with seed and now it is covered with rows of delicate green, punctuated by mole hills.

I am grateful that my car Topo starts and goes; a streak of peppy blue across the farmland as I motor to Treviso. Ok, sometimes she is capricious as she was on Monday when I put the key in the ignition and got nothing but a whirrrr and a few clicks. It did not make sense, but I had a class to teach so I left her parked downtown and set off, prepared to deal with this later. As I said to Carlo my student, I did not really have to be anywhere for another four hours. He commented that I could be in Rome in another four hours and offered to call the mechanic.
“No, I am going to try again after the lesson. Maybe she will start after she has a rest.”
“Serena, your car is not a cow.”
“This is true, but first I want to check.”
Sure enough after an hour and a half to think about things, she started right up. After I let his office know and without any more discussion, Topo and I headed home. I got a text from Carlo: “I was informed that your car is a cow. Good for you!”

I am thankful that the Italian government is such that one madcap leader can walk out the door and go home to dinner, and just like that there is a new Prime Minister. No campaigning, no chad checking, no drawn out discussion. We woke up this morning to a leader who is so sedate, intelligent and proper he may be run out of town for his lack of flamboyance.

I am grateful for the fact that the tractor which passed just our front door did not drop any of its suspiciously steaming load on the street.

I am grateful for Luciano who greets me at the door each evening with an embrace that melts away the stress of the day and notices that I sometimes touch him lightly in the night to be sure he is really there.

I am grateful for Anna Maria and Giancarlo. Today she carefully placed the salt and pepper on the table and hid the cheese spoon under a napkin so that we could not guess what she had prepared for lunch until she burst through the door carrying the plates of lasagna. She said she didn’t like to be predictable and so had thought up this clever ruse. I had no idea this was weighing on her. When I told her that now I knew she was trying to hoodwink us, I would need to be extra cunning in the future. She said, “I will change it next time.” Giancarlo grinned from his chair. What fun.

And honestly, secretly, I am thankful that I don’t have to cook a Thanksgiving dinner. I will roast the rich orange-red pumpkin, juice the pomegranates that our neighbors brought us from their trees and pour myself a glass of wine that I picked up on my bicycle from the winery down the street….and say thank you to Italy for once again putting things into perspective.

Years ago, in a moment of excessive propriety, I explained to Anna Maria that there was a more delicate way to announce one’s need to er, fare caca. Americans use euphemisms such as “I need to powder my nose” or “I have to read” I said. The last one I made up, but she liked that the most and it has stuck. Perhaps for its comedic potential;

“Yesterday I was reading an interesting article…”

“Serena, were you reading or reading?”

Or

“Look Serena, I think that sculpture is of a woman reading…but not reading.”

~~~

The sheep are on the move. As Luciano tells me, they have to get to the mountains before the 25th of April or they are stuck here in the lowlands like all the rest of us. For some reason, they walk up there. Loading sheep into a truck and driving up the mountain would take an afternoon. Yet, they walk, meandering their way across miles of fields, gardens and unwatched roads dodging traffic and angry homeowners for weeks to finally arrive in the promise land of cool breezes and green grass.

I have learned however, that there is a reason for the meandering route up to the hills. These flocks are one big maternity ward. Recently I looked up from my computer…bells, barking, a few shouts. Sheep were arriving! I think Giancarlo had made it painfully clear that no sheep could set hoof on our street with their pooping destructive ways, but our campo, the field across the road, was another matter. The group swelled and undulated across the scruffy grass and ruts left by the recent roadwork project. The sheep found nourishment there somehow and called to each other in plaintive oddly human sounding bleats. The serious sheepdogs floated across the bitter grass to gather them up and bounce the group off the back fence, for fun it seemed.

I noticed however that there were many babies, trotting on tip toe, some with umbilical cords still dangling, after nonchalant mothers. Their coats were white compared to the matted mud-crusted coats of the adults. Stoic donkeys punctuated the herd, standing quietly as the dogs trotted around them. After a few hours of this the scruffy shepherds pulled out a roll of netting and started to set up a fence around the enormous herd.

“They are staying a while it seems.”

“Yeah, I am giving them until tomorrow and I am calling the police.”

“Come on, they are not on our street and they seem to be keeping them away from the rosemary and Giancarlo’s grapes”.

Indeed, Giancarlo had given one of the shepherds a bottle of wine as they passed through town last year. He stomped out across the field with a bottle of cabernet franc and we have not seen them on our street since. I am not even sure if it is the same group of shepherds bedding down across the way, but this is how it works.

“Yeah, whatever.”

A few hours later I noticed more babies.

“I think babies are being born, Ciano.”

“That could explain a few things, but I am still calling the cops.”

Those sheep stayed all night and at dawn, stirred, and with bells, bleating, barking, and moved on. The net fence disappeared into a banged up truck and the sheep flowed like water before the snapping teeth of the dogs. The herd was a little bit bigger with the newborns that arrived during the night stuffed into pouches slung over the backs of the bored donkeys as the new mothers shuffled a little faster to keep up.

A week later a large circle of dead grass matted down with an oversupply of newly installed manure still remains. It looks as if a UFO landed, leaving a crop circle in our campo, which honestly makes our shabby field more interesting. And now I understand that these herds linger because babies are being born and this should happen in an open field instead of in a truck on the highway…at least in my idealistic frame of mind..

The last time those sheep appeared actually on our street in fact I was not here. Having seen it before I was happy to have been gone and when I got home the street was clean, pristine even. I could only imagine Giancarlo’s rage as he swept up the detritus. Anna Maria filled me in.

“Serena, there were thousands of them. What a disaster, donkeys, dogs, everything. Even a pony. I am surprised the grapes are still standing. What a mess; and you know Serena, those sheep read a lot!”

~~~

Now they are moving crap from one end of Mareno to the other. Literally. Lumbering tractors chug down our little street pulling massive trailers filled to the brim with shit. As I sit here in the library I can see the top of the pile go by the second story window a few seconds after I smell it. I asked Anna Maria where it comes from…well, I knew where it came from, but just exactly what was the plan? Why this conveyance of cow pie from point A to point B?
“There are a bunch of bulls down at the far end the street and so they are moving it.”

I wanted to teach her, “That’s bullshit!” I think she could handle it. After all, she is the one who invented the word “crash”, a combination of crap and trash. Maybe later. She was keeping an eye on Giancarlo, who was keeping an eye on the tractors. And the tractor drivers all had a wary eye out for Giancarlo who, armed with a broom and a watering can, waves his arms and yells at the drivers who go too fast. Every bounce from those crash-encrusted wheels catapults a bit of merda onto the street and Giancarlo is on it, angrily scraping and rinsing away every trace. They seemed to have learned to slow down in from of our house…I can hear the shifting of gears as they approach the corner.

Now, I want to know why all this work? Why can’t they just move the producers to the wherever all this shit is going and eliminate the middle man? I must ask at lunch tomorrow. This is exactly the kind of question Anna Maria likes to field: previously unconsidered, very practical, a bit scatological and just a little ridiculous.

(courtesy of Luciano)

After lunch I made my annual trip to the attic and pulled out my wedding dress. Oriella my dress maker told me of her neighbor who once a year gets all dolled up in her wedding dress and cleans the house.

While I don’t think I need to go to such ends, I feel strongly about putting mine on once a year to be sure I can still fit into it. Is that weird? Perhaps. In fact, I did not attempt it having just eaten a substantial lunch and not wanting to be disappointed. I will put it on over the weekend, perhaps tomorrow before the onslaught of Easter lunches. I did however open up a few boxes and looked through the contents. I found a bag of candied almonds that had petrified after 5 years and a lace handkerchief that had not.

Fifty years before her daughter married an Italian in the Serenissima Repubblica; my mother made a stop in Venice on her European tour at the age of 18. She bought this bit of handmade lace as a keepsake and fifty years later I tucked it into my dress as something old before leaving for the church in Soffratta, a few miles outside of Venice. Life moves in circles that are often too perfect to question. I gazed at this bit delicate cotton which had travelled the world and wondered if I should send it back to my mother. After all, it might have been intended as something old and borrowed, not just something old.

In the evening Luciano and I walked to the church and touched that old door…now five years older.

(courtesy of Luciano)

On Friday we celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. Never could I have imagined in my life I would be able to utter such a sentence, much less reach that milestone. Five years ago we married in a white and gold haze, standing on the uneven marble floor in the little church in Soffratta. People threw pasta in the church doorway; my bothers swept it up under the watchful eye of Don Gabriele and I oozed happiness. The Americans decimated the wooden boat with prosciutto sails and the Italians effortlessly cranked their way through seven courses that overwhelmed those Americans. We danced our waltz, my brother Dorsey drank a little too much grappa and la Nonna said, “Tonight I have wings.”

The towering profiterole cake tipped over in a heap of white chocolate petals and pastry cream before any of the guests could see it and the caterer served it by the handful out of plastic bus pans.

I blissfully beamed.

(courtesy of Giorgio)

But wait…wasn’t all that yesterday? How could it be that five years has passed? I even ask Luciano if he is sure of the math. He rolls his eyes. But who am I to say? He is the mathematician in the family.

Ok, I suppose if I think about it, I can sense the passage of time. Don Gabriele has been put out to pasture in Miane. La Nonna is gone…not so long after she sprouted those wings in fact. Next door neighbor Augusta has also died and a new family is now working on making her house a home again. As I write they are knocking down the chicken coop where the red hens used to hide and cleaning the old bricks to use yet again. There are a few new babies around and I am now teaching English to one who came to our wedding before she was even born, in her mother’s belly. The little red plum tree that Giancarlo planted before we got married is now, much to his chagrin, producing a bumper crop of yellow plums. Still no wrens have take up residence in the birdhouse. And after two years and fifteen minutes, we replaced our ancient television with an enormous digital marvel.

But I still tour around on my creaky maroon bicycle, the damn Italian cat still shits in my garden and Luciano still trims his toenails outside, even in the snow, after I asked him almost ten years ago to do so when he was visiting me in Berkeley.

I saw him headed to the fire escape with his clippers and stopped him. It was a cold day in California for such activity. I relented a little.

“Maybe you don’t need to do that outside. Can you control your toenails?”

“They’re going to fly like eagles.”

“Ok, out you go. Close the door behind you.”

Somehow the flying toenails don’t bother me anymore; is that what happens after five years of marriage? Yet, he is careful to perform this act outside, no matter what I say.

I wonder how I lived my life so incomplete before; without this person who keeps an eye on me at parties to be sure I am happy, who remembers that certain grammar mistakes make me crazy, or who takes my hand if I extend it. How did I do it? We roll over for a goodnight kiss, like synchronized swimmers, each and every night… that is over 1,825 goodnight kisses. Here I had thought marriage was difficult. I was told it was work, even a struggle sometimes, but it seems to get even easier and satisfying, like a belly laugh, a good cry or… breathing.

In the recent balmy weather I dust off the maroon bicycle, Luciano pumps up my tires and I spin up and down our little street feeling the late afternoon sun on my face. Luciano, who has lately rediscovered photography, pulls out his camera. I like to think I am his muse, but in fact I am just a stand-in for a small, plastic bulldog named Mr Dobbs when he is feeling peevish. Mr Dobbs has become quite the internet sensation so I should feel lucky to be second string. He is actually quite good: he always hits his mark, is able to evoke all sorts of emotions and never worries about his butt looking big. But he cannot ride a bicycle and today I am just happy to be doing just that, in my favorite sundress, with the delicate breezes whipping about my legs with my husband laughing, shouting, “Ok, go a little faster!” as he trains his lens on me.

I ooze happiness.

(courtesy of Luciano)