Shannon

Okay here is the thing that we’re going to do tomorrow. Sorry to be so mysterious about it, but there was too much else to tell you, you know? Auntie is an inveterate house-trader. I mean when she goes on vacation, she frequently trades houses rather than staying in a hotel or something. She’s stayed […]

I am taking a break from helping clean up around here for this thing tomorrow, that I will tell you about later. This morning I swept and washed down the courtyard. Let me tell you: lizard tails are hard to sweep up. They just sort of roll around and don’t want to get into the

Today we went out for lunch, made a bit of an occasion of it, with a nice bottle of wine and everything. It only took three hours. 🙂 The place we went was very “typical,” as Auntie says, which means it’s traditional, and everything is homemade, and there are no menus, and you eat a

So I went around taking a few photos. Cause that’s what tourists do, right? The door to Auntie’s pantry One of Auntie’s paintings. It’s from a photo of our family from 1954. My mom is the dark-haired girl with bangs on the left; Auntie is blonde and on the right. The parents are (of course)

Okay, yoga in Italian is weird.

We had a quieter day yesterday. I’d slept the night straight through, hooray! We had an aperitivo with the neighbor, I wrote a few blog posts (you may have noticed), and Auntie and I went swimming in the afternoon. Oh god that felt good. I wished I’d brought my goggles and earplugs, but oh well!

Yesterday we went to Padova to see my other cousin–Auntie’s younger son. It’s about a two-hour drive from here, or it would have been if we hadn’t been delayed for a Fiat 500 rally. An officious-looking man held us at a major traffic circle for like 15 minutes. I got to hear some genuine Driving

The Fire Ritual Before I left home, Auntie wrote me and said that one of her good friends invited us to a fire ritual to celebrate Equinox on Saturday night. Auntie has been to rituals at this friend’s place many times before—cleansing, purity, creativity, letting go; in addition to just regular parties and the like—and

Well I’ve been too busy having the vacation to come here and tell you about the vacation. 🙂 Which is how it’s supposed to be, right? But we’re planning on a quieter day tomorrow, Auntie and me, cause we’ve kind of worn ourselves out, these past few days. I did sleep well last night, thank

Am ded. Going sleeps now. Much to tell, but, going sleeps now. God I hope.