Italy

From Arkansas to Italy

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Wading through Lethe is an unexpected mix of rural Arkansas and then, suddenly, ancient Rome. Why?

I grew up dreaming of other places. My first poem at age six was about taking a trip in a boat and admiring the night sky. The poem speaks to a wanderlust that for years I had to satisfy with a set of 1963 World Book Encyclopedias. My two favorite sections—the only ones in color—were found in the “F” and “P” volumes: the flags of the world and paintings.

As I was growing up, my aunt and uncle hosted exchange students from around the world. I pummeled them with questions, wanting to know everything about their lives back home. At fifteen, I decided that the best way to see something of the world was by being an exchange student myself. The only problem was I had no money for the fee. If my adventure was going to become a reality, I had to raise the funds. I started cleaning houses and teaching piano lessons in addition to my Saturday stint at the local post office and babysitting gigs. Family friends and organizations offered items for me to raffle—art prints, an Aromatique gift basket. My friends helped me with a car wash, my family hosted garage sales, and my mom baked thousands of cookies to sell at various community events. The local church also helped. And then, just before I needed to make the final payment, an anonymous donor made a $2,000 deposit into my bank account.

The Bridge of Sighs – Venice

And suddenly I was in Italy, knowing only enough Italian to ask where the bathroom was. My host family lived an hour south of Rome, in quaint Ferentino. My host mom was a retired Italian teacher and taught me how to speak, even though we had no common language between us. My host father’s garden and fruit trees supplied most of our food. My host siblings went out of their way to make me feel welcome, even though it was months before I could contribute to a conversation.

Why Italy? I wanted to attend an art school, and in Italy the high schools allow students to specialize. My classmates were quick to take me under their wing and show me the local historic places and the best pizzerias. My professors were kind and patient. They helped with the language, but above all they helped me understand Italian culture. Once a week I was excused from class so I could visit Rome and let the city be my teacher.

Florence, Italy

It was the year 2000. I didn’t have a cell phone. Dial-up internet was slow and spotty and cost per minute. I wrote emails home offline and then got online long enough to send them. I spoke to my parents with a prepaid phone card once or twice a month. I sent postcards home.

In the poem “Leaving Rome,” I had just been to Piazza Spagna to see the Spanish Steps and the museum commemorating the English poet John Keats. He’d left his love Fanny Brawne for Italy in hopes of finding a climate more hospitable to cure his tuberculosis. He never saw her again.

“Leaving Rome”

Along the Spanish Steps, streetlights popped on
like syncopated fireflies. Walking up Via del Corso,
I passed shop mannequins with averted eyes,
pulled my coat tighter, thinking of Keats,
dead at twenty-five. A cyclone of cars spun
at the foot of Vittorio Emanuele’s grimy shrine.
The Colosseum’s pocked crown rose above
the Forum’s broken bones. I mailed a postcard,
the scene depopulated and clean, knowing
it would arrive months before I returned home,
knowing it looked nothing like what I’d seen.

The poem explains the desire to share an experience with someone and the difficulty in truly conveying it to someone who wasn’t there. Postcards are beautiful, but the real place is always more complicated than the beautiful, glossy photograph shows.

Most of the other poems about traveling in Wading Through Lethe follow my summers abroad as a college student and later as I worked for International Programs at the University of Central Arkansas, coordinating trips for the university as well as co-leading trips with my husband.

The year in Italy changed the course of my life. I’m forever grateful to the many people who helped make it possible, as well as the many who made my year in Italy unforgettable.

“Leaving Rome” first appeared in October Hill Magazine

Transitions and a New Year

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ariel and mommy at the tiny cabin

2018 was a year of transitions. We spent January packing and repacking suitcases for Italy, trying to balance what our rapidly-growing baby would need over the course of three months and changing seasons. One year ago today we boarded a plane to Italy. We lived on a hillside just outside of Florence in a 15th century villa with 33 students, teaching courses and taking side trips to Rome, Paestum, Capri, and L’Averna. At the end of the trip, just as spring was finally taking hold, we traveled south to visit my host family for the first time in 11 years. It was a joyous reunion with them and other friends and professors, as well as a bittersweet departure.

Sometime in March, I was offered a full-time professorship that I’d interviewed for before going abroad. I began phasing out my editing business and thinking about book orders. Chuck, too, was thinking of the upcoming academic year—he’d accepted a position in the Department of Communication to start a film major, teaching a new set of classes in film production, editing, etc.

Returning to Conway, then, was both a homecoming and a farewell. We’d been weeding out our possessions since before I was pregnant, but there’s nothing like a move to force you to make hard decisions. We gave away furniture to family and had a big garage sale. We left our home semi-furnished for our renters, and there’s still a big, bad back closet of stuff we need to go through. It’s like the pink spot in The Cat in the Hat—it keeps getting pushed around from one part of the house to another. One day, maybe, it’ll vanish.

In July we moved an hour up the road to a two-bedroom apartment on Harding’s campus. The cabin is now only four miles away and living there is still our ultimate goal. But without daycare for Ariel, it has been convenient to be on campus to trade off watching her with my husband. A couple days a week when I finish my last class, Chuck hands her off to me to go teach his afternoon and evening classes. Ariel—always ready for an adventure—loves outings in the stroller. She lights up when she sees the students from our Italy trip, some of whom even babysit for us.

Ariel turned one at the end of September and we used the opportunity for an Italy reunion. A week later Ariel was walking, and she hasn’t slowed down since. That has dramatically reduced the amount of work I can do from home—now, at 16 months, she is into everything. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. She’s doing everything she can to figure out this world and how it all works.

ariel in the reading chair

If 2018 was a year of transition, then perhaps 2019 will be a year of arrival, of becoming. Many times in 2018 I did not know where I would find the strength for the task ahead. The checklist of things that had to happen seemed impossible in the time allotted. And yet here we are. More than once I cried out of sheer exhaustion, so one of my resolutions this year is to build in more time for R&R. But more than that, I want to live in a mindset of slowing down rather than speeding up. I’ve never trusted that I could accomplish what I need to get done by slowing down; now I think that may be the one thing I’m meant to learn. Like faith, I may not be able to see it until I’ve lived its truth, and even then I may not believe it’s possible.

Chuck has been out to the cabin a few times. The rain barrels are full of water; the bathroom has a stack of tile waiting. We’d like to be done ASAP, but we’re also happy with our current living set-up. We want to add onto the cabin so Ariel can have space to move around as well as a private room of her own. But for now we want to finish the “tiny” cabin and camp out there on weekends as we perfect the amount of water and solar power we need.

Next week Chuck is taking a group of students to Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, and we have a couple other trips in the works later in the year. Mainly we are looking forward to settling into our teaching positions, watching Ariel grow, seeing good movies, reading great books, and spending time with the wonderful people in our life.

Italy: Family, Food, Festivity – Part II

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Friends and family have been asking: “What was the best part of your trip?” As expected, the sites were mind-expanding and the food tantalizing. But the next time I visit Italy, not much will have changed along those lines. So my answer is: “The people.” We spent three months with sweet and enthusiastic students, faculty, and staff and made side visits to see Italian friends and family.

 

My Italian professor from high school, with whom I’ve been in contact for nearly twenty years, came up to the villa to speak on Machiavelli’s The Prince. His son, Paolo, a documentary filmmaker, Skyped in to discuss his film Terra di Transito (Land of Transit) about the immigration crisis in Italy. When we went to Rome, we met them for an incredible authentic Roman meal at Giggetto in the Jewish district near the Porticus Octaviae. The next day I had lunch with my high school friend and her husband, and we took a long afternoon walk along the Roman aqueducts in the Archaeological Park a few blocks from their home.

 

 

Our semester wound down with a trip to the Casentino Valley. Of all the rainy days to have, this was the best: beside a roaring fire in the common room of the Castello di Porciano, a restored Medieval castle Dante once stayed in that is now a hotel and museum. The students were studying for their final exams; I was preparing for my last class on Petrarch; and Chuck was keeping Ariel entertained.

 

After leaving the castle we headed to Poppi, where we toured one of the most intact and intricate castles I’ve ever visited, complete with a library containing 14th century copies of Dante’s Divine Comedy (no pictures allowed). From there, our bus wound through the mountains to La Verna, where St. Francis is said to have received the stigmata (and where we saw his 800-year-old blood-stained robes). More things added and checked off my bucket list.

 

At the end of our semester abroad, we made our way south to the town of Ferentino to see my host parents. This kind and generous couple hosted me for an academic year when I was in high school. I hadn’t seen them in 11 years. My host sister flew in from London and rode down from Rome with my other host sister and her two eight-year-old twin girls. We had a weekend of fun and then my host brother and his wife joined us for Sunday lunch.

 

Ariel was delighted to meet the twins, who, like her, had Micky Mouse pajamas. We enjoyed fresh veggies from my host father’s garden as well as my host mother’s homemade pasta and famous ricotta pie. (My mouth is watering just remembering it.) Sadly, their fruit and olive trees were scorched by a hard freeze–it seems Tuscany wasn’t the only part of Italy that endured a bitter winter.

 

While in Ferentino, I also reconnected with my professors and had dinner in the historic town of Alatri, inhabited for nearly 4,000 years. The huge stones of the acropolis, placed without mortar, were legendarily believed to have been stacked by Cyclopes. We enjoyed a rich meal from 9 to midnight while Ariel slept peacefully in the pram.

 

Saying goodbye to such great people was the hardest part of this trip. I am more aware than ever of the incomparable joy and fulfillment of having a good meal with good people. We have tried to maintain this spirit since being home, not wanting to take anyone or anything for granted.

It’s been a whirlwind summer, though–Chuck worked on the cabin until June, and then we began the slow process of packing up our home and looking for an apartment to rent until we can finish the cabin. I have been hired at Harding University as a Professor of English, so we definitely didn’t want to continue commuting 100 miles a day. We’ll miss our friends and family in Conway, but living close to work means more time with Ariel and less stress.

The Italians have an expression, “piano piano,” or “little by little.” We may not be in the cabin yet, but we’re going from 2500 square feet to a two-bedroom apartment. We’re storing some heirlooms and other keepsakes we’ll have to go through at some point. But the more we let go, the greater the value of what we decided to keep, and the more headspace we have for old memories and the new ones to come.

Italy: Family, Food, Festivity – Part I

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We’ve been home from Italy a few weeks now, getting used to a different grind.

But first, a few reflections of our semester abroad. Assumptions I had before leaving: we’d eat well and we’d see amazing sights. That’s Italy, right? We’d been before—but never quite like this: living in a villa with 33 students, a 4-month-old in tow, the backdrop a cold and wet Tuscan spring.

 

Whether we were hopping a ferry to Capri or simply taking the tram into Florence, each day was “un avventura,” an adventure. Every time we buckled Ariel in her car seat she grew wide-eyed and kicked her feet. She was at ease on the move, even lulled to sleep by the bumpy cobblestones.

The directors, students, and Italian staff at the villa became Ariel’s clan. She thrived on the attention, squealing at the friendly faces she saw each day.

Despite sub-par weather on many of our outdoor excursions, we enjoyed dozens of incredible sites. One of the highlights was our afternoon visit to Pompeii—amid a 90% chance of afternoon showers, the clouds parted just as we finished lunch and purchased two large umbrellas.

I did not realize Pompeii was so huge.

Visiting the city, decimated when Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D. and preserved for centuries under lava and ash, was on my bucket list and technically still is since I want to go back. Plus, although excavations began in 1748, much of the city is still unexcavated. A new discovery was made just days ago.

Just when I thought I’d reached the best day of the trip, the next morning we headed for Capri. An old gentleman with muscular hands said, “C’e’ un po’ di mare oggi” (there’s a little sea today) as he gave a gentle swishing motion with his hand. The expression, I soon learned, was an understatement. But after a little sea-sickness I was fine as we took a cab to Anacapri, the highest part of the island, and worked our way down.

We seemed to have the island to ourselves, as only one more ferry ran that day due to the wind. We visited the villa of San Michele, built on the ruins of one of the villas of the Roman Emperor Tiberius, who left Rome in 26 AD and never returned.

I ate possibly the best seafood I’ve ever had, walked on wooden slats over a church’s hand-painted ceramic tile floor, and bought a pair of handmade sandals by a cobbler in business for over 50 years. Our spirits were light under a brilliant blue sky as a cool, crisp wind ushered us from one beautiful scene to the next.

Next day we were up with the sun to travel to Paestum to see some of the most well-preserved Greek temples in the world (Greece included). They are some of the only temples which visitors are allowed to walk into. The archaeological museum on the grounds was full of pottery, carvings, and artifacts found at the site and was one of my favorites from the trip.

 

We stopped by a buffalo mozzarella farm on the way to our beach-side hotel. We settled in and watched the sun set, then sleepily made it through a delicious dinner (the hotel owner served us broccoli greens and zucchini from his personal garden). Ariel was not thrilled by her little wooden crib, which did not allow her to fully stretch her arms out. After much fuss, we finally got some sleep before our early alarms woke us to pack for the journey home. A couple miles from our hotel we stopped to visit a WWII-era German machine gun post built to ward off American soldiers in Operation Avalanche. We then headed to Naples to the archaeological museum, where Ariel saw her first mummy and a collection of Egyptian statues of women breastfeeding.

We ate a sack lunch waiting for our train, then sped home at 298 km/hr, reaching the villa in time for dinner.

March was a whirlwind. We were either on the go or very, very sick. We missed the trip to Sicily due to all three of us recovering from chest colds, it lingering the worst with Chuck. One of us was always waking up the rest with a coughing fit. I hadn’t slept so little since Ariel was first born, going over two weeks without more than two hours of sleep at a shot.

We had the best caregivers, though—the directors and staff bought or made us food, picked up our prescriptions, and a doctor famous for her work in hematology even made house calls to check on us. April 1st, Easter, marked a shift in the weather, and consequently our health.

Ariel with chocolate Easter egg

Latte e L’arte: Breastfeeding Abroad

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View of the Duomo from Palazzo Vecchio

Days before our trip to Italy, a woman in South Dakota was kicked out of a Chick-fil-a for breastfeeding. She knew a state law protected her, and said as much, but it didn’t stop the manager from asking her to leave.

Despite another controversy over a magazine cover of a woman breastfeeding, one can only hope that was an isolated event. But truth be told, my breastfeeding has been an adjustment for friends and family. Everyone has been super supportive, but some can’t help but feel awkward or shy or embarrassed (or something). I get it. I haven’t seen anyone breastfeed since I was little—and it was my mother. Before I started breastfeeding even I wasn’t sure about the appropriate way to act—do you look or not look? Engage or give privacy? Does the response depend on the situation?

Until leaving for Italy, I had mainly breastfed in the comfort of my home (usually my bedroom). I had my special stack of pillows. I didn’t have to think about the logistics of Ariel’s position, the right clothes to wear, time limits, or being discreet.

The biggest anxiety I had about traveling and teaching abroad was breastfeeding. What if we were at a museum and Ariel wanted to nurse? Or at a restaurant? Touring a church? Standing in line outside in the cold?

We’ve been living in a Tuscan villa with 33 students for just over a month. Most days we go into Florence or are traveling. I could write a Dr. Seuss book called Oh, the Places I’ve Breastfed!

Breastfeeding outside of the Duomo

The day after arriving, the program director took our group on a walking tour of Scandicci. The day before had been a crisp, sunny 50 degrees and skies an optimistic blue. This day was a soggy 45. Ariel was closed up in the stroller bouncing along contentedly until, naturally, she became hungry. In the café where we sought refuge, not only did people not mind my breastfeeding, but I was praised for it! Strangers struck a balance between encouragement and privacy, and the owners themselves were sure to make me feel welcome.

Since that auspicious start, Ariel has nursed on a bench in front of the Duomo, at restaurants, cafés, the tram to Florence, the train to Rome, in a bookstore, at a pizzeria, and in front of one of my favorite paintings—Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes.

While at the Carlo Bilotti museum to see the exhibition of the sculptor Jago (called “The Modern Michelangelo”), I sat in a room full of de Chiricos nursing Ariel. My former professor and longtime friend accompanied me into the room and encouraged me to take in “l’arte” while I gave Ariel her “latte.”

Ariel with the sculptor Jago
_Habemus Hominem_
Ariel touching _Prison_

It struck me in that moment how much a nursing mother needs nourishment, whatever form that may take—encouragement, understanding, inspiration, mobility . . .

Taking care of a baby is not just physically challenging; it is psychologically demanding as well. I love nursing Ariel in the privacy of my bedroom, but I also need to be able to move freely in public spaces without fear of admonishment or giving offense. But this isn’t just about me–it’s about giving my baby what she needs when she needs it, wherever that may be.