Moving to Italy: Winter Doldrums

Hi Newcomers: If you want to read this blog in chronological order from the beginning, you need to start with:
"Arrival" on the June 26, 2017 blog post.

During the months of January and February, George continued to look for a job.  Between interviews he used his time away from the fields to work on the next step in our on-going project to paint the house.  In spite of the newly-installed central heating, the walls felt damp as the moisture seemed to seep through from the outside to the paint we layered inside. I had asked about repairing the stucco first, but they had told me it would take too much of my in-laws’ money, and besides, that wasn’t the Italian way. The inside was much more important. And so we kept at our indoor painting project, sometimes waiting a week between coats. After the doors and windows were finished, we finally reached the walls.

Because of the high ceilings George stood on a plank between two wooden sawhorses to reach the upper half of the walls, while I painted the lower half. From his months of work around the land, George was in good shape, but for me it was tough going. Unused to the up-down motion, my arm muscles soon ached and my neck grew stiff from reaching up. In addition, the smell of paint permeated our heads and the house. I hoped it wasn’t harming the children’s lungs and brains, but we didn’t have a lot of choice. If we opened the windows to let out the fumes, the paint would never dry in the damp weather, and we would expose everyone to the bitter cold. I was learning that there is always a trade-off in life, no matter what we do. But it felt good to work with George to make the changes that we could. As my brush moved up and down the wall leaving a swath of clean color in its wake, I felt myself becoming part of the house, part of Gabi, part of the community.

Of course this was just an illusion. All we were changing was our little section of the community, of Gabi, of the house. This was never clearer to me than when we returned fifteen years later. The dampness had reasserted itself, soaking and curling all of the paint we had so carefully applied. The house and the community had been there long before we arrived, and they had survived our departure.

The doors we had scraped and repainted after years of neglect

 Our plans for supporting the family had evolved. When we first moved to Italy, we had envisioned just simply living off the land. In early November, George and Zio Silvio worked out an agreement to buy more cattle, rent more fields and work together to increase the income of the farm. Later, when we sat down to work out the actual “dollar” amounts, we realized our share of the farm income was not enough to support six of us. We couldn’t just “live off the land.”  The only way we could survive was for George to work locally to supplement our income. But he still couldn’t find work.

Maybe it was the recession—there were few jobs available—and maybe it was that George was considered “The American,” but the Italians in our area did not have employment that they were willing to give him. Although he interviewed for job after job, several as a translator at companies in nearby towns, nobody seemed to need his skills. George had left Italy as a child, and by becoming an American citizen he had given up any claim to his place as an Italian. No law prevented companies from hiring him, but there seemed to be an invisible wall that had been constructed to keep him out.

To most Italians we dealt with, the word “American” was synonymous with “rich.” Although Marino could call on his familiarity with older members of the community to get some discounts, he found prices quoted him for repairs were still higher than what he knew others were quoted.  And while the locals were eager to work for us, when it came to asking for job referrals, they simply shrugged. Family members seemed to be the only ones willing to help. Luigi had referred us to the chicken producer, and another cousin said his friend could get George a job. However, when George inquired he was told it would be “next month.” Each month that we asked it was always, “next month.”  We waited, then asked, and waited some more and asked again. Finally, we realized the job would never materialize. We couldn’t tell if the offer was sincere, or if it was social grease to keep the conversation turning. It was very difficult to convince the community that we really wanted to stay, that we really wanted to work, and that we weren't "rich Americans." We didn’t have the money to live there forever without working.

Moving to Italy: Chickens

Within a few days of my sister’s phone call, George was referred to a job interview at a chicken factory. The owner was a friend of Cousin Luigi. I went along because he had also mentioned the possibility of making our farm an industrial enterprise.

After the job interview, the owner showed us around his factory and discussed the business opportunity  He told us he had started out ten years previously by building an incubator and with a one-quarter ownership in a truck, where each person used the truck for a couple of days. He boasted that he now owned a fleet of trucks, a house in town, one in the mountains, and that he had just purchased a twenty-four-room villa near Switzerland that he was remodeling at some enormous sum. He was a good salesman.

He showed us assembly lines of hundreds of sweet little yellow chicks being shuffled into ventilated boxes to be shipped to vendors  The business opportunity he offered to us was to raise breeding chickens, collect their eggs and sell them to his chick-hatching business. The enterprise he outlined would have cost us $500,000, due in five years. Our down-payment was “only” $33,000. At a good estimate the business would have netted $80,000 a year if everything went as perfectly as they outlined—no viruses, every hen laid every day, no deaths among the birds. That was an enormous sum in 1972, but we were not so naïve as to think that everything would be perfect.  

The biggest catch was that the loan repayment per year was $92,000—twelve thousand a year more than the income. He tossed the numbers around and we listened and tried to follow along. When we got home and calculated the costs, we were sure we had missed something, but the paperwork they sent several days later confirmed that we would have to be millionaires to even think about starting this business. We didn’t have the money to support that kind of enterprise, even if George’s parents had been willing to kick in the initial costs to convert the barn into a massive chicken coop. The whole thing seemed crazy! We wondered how this deal was regarded by regular Italians. Or was this a special deal just for us “rich Americans?”

They had promised to send along the result of George’s job interview with the paperwork, but it was not included, and we never heard from them again. 

George was getting discouraged.

Moving to Italy: James in January

As we thrashed about under conflicting desires, the children pulled us, as always, back to the rhythm of the days. James turned four on January 16. He had insisted that I bake a chocolate cake for Margaret Ann and Matthew’s birthday, and another chocolate cake for his grandpa’s birthday on January 7^th.  When I asked him what kind of cake he wanted for his birthday, I thought the answer would be a given. He smiled and replied, “Vanilla.”  That’s James. He has a contrary streak that has only been refined as he’s grown older. But he also has a shy side that still leaves him a bit awkward at times. I made his vanilla birthday cake and we sang “Happy Birthday” and gave him his presents. We had bought him a zither to encourage his musical skills, and his grandma had made him some pajamas. My friend Rita had sent a gift from California, but my sister’s gift for him was still in transit. As we gathered around him in our living room at Gabi, he was too shy to open his few presents. That changed quickly when Matthew offered to “help.” He held Matthew back and said he would open them himself. Just as my sister and I had done, my children were growing and interacting and finding their places within the family. They defined their roles, even as I resisted naming those roles, trying to allow them alternative options.

James on his fourth birthday with his siblings

For his birthday that year, James received a gift that no one else did. It snowed. Although it had been cold and foggy and miserable for most of the month of December, it had not snowed enough to settle on the ground. But it started snowing the evening of January 15 and kept going for twenty-four hours. It was beautiful! The landscape that I had loved green and lush looked wonderful in white. We celebrated James’ birthday with a snow party.

George found a piece of plywood, and he added runners with some scrap lumber to make a sled. Then he gave each of the children a ride in the snow in the field behind the barn that didn’t belong to us. In the middle of winter, there was no grass to worry about flattening, and the owners of the field didn’t mind us sliding down the long slope. We all had great fun. The next day the weather warmed a little and the snow began to melt, but we still managed to build a strange-looking snow creature on the side of the courtyard.

While the snow provided fun for the children and a change in the scenery for my afternoon tea, it created problems driving up and down the hill. With ice coating the gravel underneath the snow, the road became very slippery. Even in the snow, a cold damp mist drifted around the road, screening the snow-filled ditches so that driving back up the hill to the house became treacherous. Later that month as the snow and the ice hardened, the car couldn’t get traction on the last steep slope, so George, Zio Silvio, and I tried to push the car while Marino steered. The wheels spun and the car fish-tailed as we strained, and I was sickened by the exhaust fumes of the racing engine billowing in my face. Eventually, Zio Silvio and George used an ice pick and buckets of sand to create traction for the last slippery hundred feet.

The dangerous road conditions gave me something else to worry about every afternoon as the children rode home from school in my father-in-law’s car. But we were to realize those were minor problems. Mother Nature had a few more tricks up her sleeve.