The bells rang today, once a long haphazard slow ringing because there was a death in the village and a couple times more for Palm Sunday. There weren’t any olive-branch-porting procession-ers in the streets today though; no mass in the sweet Chiesa dell’Annunziata, which opens the doors to its late-Baroque grace only rarely, but always for this day.

What won’t be celebrated in the streets is finding its way out in food, regardless of the restrictions. Yesterday, coming home from the studio I was almost at my door when Annamaria from the bottega across the piazza called out to me. Come here! Blue-gloved and masked, she handed me a small package. As I walked in the door, the unmistakable orange-blossom scent gave it away—pastiera!

This smell and the taste of this torte brings me back to my childhood when my family would pile in the car on Easter Sunday to drive an hour to the home of one of my mother’s aunts, usually Millie or Jay, to crowd into the dining room with at least 15 or 20 other aunts, uncles and cousins to eat. All day. Six courses, maybe more. Near the end, before the fruit came out, there would be the pastries and the rich, sweet, dense pastiera. My mother’s aunts would have been cooking for days. They were first generation Americans and knew all the recipes from “home” by heart. This was one of my favorites. Before arriving in this valley, about two and a half hours by car from where all my great grandparents came from, I hadn’t had a slice of pastiera in many years. My first Easter here I was flooded by a mix of memories of vinyl-covered sofas, laughter and loudness, uncomfortable “Sunday” clothes, foreign words dropped into the conversation like expletives, the mystery of the great-uncle whose hair was blacker than my mother’s (and she so much younger), the perfume of the women, the perfume of the lasagna; staying at the table to listen in on the conversation of the men (and steal sips of sambucca unimpeded), and the small cups of bitter coffee.
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Today I start my day with half of the last piece of pastiera and an espresso. Later I call my mother. It’s her birthday.
 

Day 27
 (April 4, 2020)
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It’s late in the day but the mountain behind me hasn’t yet started to cast its shadow across the valley in front of me and outside my studio windows the moon is rising in the pale blue sky. My brother writes from Thailand to share that today is Qingming Jie, Pure Brightness, or the day for sweeping the tombs of our ancestors; for giving thanks to those who’ve gone before us.  I have no tombs to sweep but I call out my gratitude to all the ones who survived the insufferable, who handed down their faults and virtues; who paved the way for my birth and my life. I come from a very long line of farmers. When I first arrived here I knew it was them who called me back and though I still can’t say exactly why, I sense they’re trying to explain.
 
With the growing light and pure brightness and waxing moon, it’s a day for gratitude. I am so wealthy with space to make my work, with work I love, with inspiration, with sustenance (it’s a giving day for the garden), with freedom, with friendships, with good health; with love.

​I wake in the early hours from a dream in which I was weeping. He wakes also, a different kind of disturbing dream. A little later there’s a message from my oldest son who’s woken 7 time zones away from a nightmare. I am curious now about how many sleeps are disturbed by dreams this night.
 
The bright morning seems almost ordinary. There is a loose line in front of Annamaria’s bottega, the chitchat muffled by masks. Each bench has just a single occupant, two of whom shout at each other across the distance between them; the other smokes, his mask pulled down, and tilts his face to the sun that fills more of our small piazza than it did just a couple weeks ago.  We are off the main road and there is less danger here of passing carabinieri or a ticket. On my short walk to the studio I am greeted by the twittering house martins who have returned from Africa to repair their nests or make new ones.

(first published April 2)

There are different ways to get up and down from the woods from town. Mostly you have to go through the borgo, the oldest part of the village, and from there, take one of the three or four steep rocky trails. Today I come from a different part of town and take the path across the scrubby hillside, then up through olive groves, mainly abandoned, and through chestnuts, to where, at the head of a deep crevice, that trail intersects another. I can either continue up the old stone footpath to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Madonna of Monte Carmelo (a roughly three hour uphill hike), or I can return to the heart of town through the borgo. I’ve never gotten all the way up to the shrine on foot and today doesn’t seem like the day for it, however fine a day it is. 
 
Returning through the borgo, I meet Pasqualina in a warm patch of sun on the steps that run past her home.

We wake surrounded by white mountains. It’s snowed in the night but the valley stays green. We learned yesterday that there is a plan to start again, to re-open, piano piano (little by little) beginning, aptly, just after Easter; and we learned that it may be too soon or too late, depending on whether you are listening to people of science or to people who’ve waited long enough and have nothing left to live on.
We see that in some places it’s so much worse and are both horrified and grateful.

Deeper in the south there is unrest; ​the out-of-work petty criminals are getting hungry.