At around 11:00 on the day after our arrival, Zio
Silvio revved up his little white Fiat and backed it out from its parking space
on the far side of the courtyard. He
pulled it in front of our front door and beeped twice. We were ready to shop.
Within the next couple of hours I was to learn that most of the cooking and
shopping skills that I had painstakingly developed as a young wife and mother
in California were to prove useless in Italy.
For one, I didn’t have to worry about collecting coupons, or scouring
the grocery ads, as where we lived there were no sales, no grocery ads, and no
one used coupons.
George sat up front in the car so he could talk to
Silvio in Italian, while I squeezed into the back seat with the four children.
Silvio didn’t talk much. He had a pleasant expression on his face, but he just
didn’t seem to be the chatty type. There were no car seats, no seat belts, and
no seat springs, so we bounced a lot as Silvio drove through the flock of
squawking chickens and around the corner.
At the end of the line of houses, we eased around the
sharp upward angle of the driveway, so we could turn right and head downhill—the
same corner that had terrorized me on our arrival. Tall trees hung over the
first section of the road creating a bright green canopy above us as we bounced
along the steep ruts and gravel. Through the windshield I could see that the
road dropped sharply as Zio Silvio approached the other dangerous curve that I
remembered. I held my breath as we spun
left around that curve, and in the back seat the children and I fell into each
other in fits of nervous giggles. The car broke into sunlight and headed down a
straight section that was not quite as steep.
It was overhung with tall bushes on one side, but bordered by a sunny,
grassy orchard on the other. George
pointed out that those fruit trees were on his parents’ land., and later in the
year we would harvest apples, apricots, plums and walnuts. Another sharp, right turn and we headed down
the long slope towards the village.
On our way downhill we drove beside Zio Remo’s
vineyard. Zio Silvio honked and we all
waved as we stopped near the vines where Remo worked. He had been watching us with a smile and
hobbled over to the car, leaned in and spoke loudly and cheerfully. He
definitely was the chatty type; too
bad I had no idea what he was saying, but I smiled and nodded just as
cheerfully at him. He smiled back at me with his broken teeth and leaned in the
car window to cluck and chuck loudly at the children. They looked amazed but
charmed by his noisy greetings. Zio Silvio asked him if he needed anything from
the store, then we moved on. I watched Remo limp back to the vine where he’d
been working. George told me that Remo had broken his leg as a young man, but
he set it himself, instead of going to a doctor. It must have hurt a lot, and in one way that
was a courageous act, but in another way, crazy. The leg had healed crookedly,
and after that he needed a cane to help him walk. Like Silvio, he had never
married, and so he had coped all those years by himself. But not when it came
to harvesting the grapes, as I found out.
I turned my attention back to the drive as we bounced
past more fields, bumped over the bridge, rounded the corner, and stopped
between two buildings at the main road that ran through the center of the valley.
I realized then that access to Gabi was no more than a side road, an alleyway
off the main road.
In the middle distance: On a misty day, the dirt and gravel road
running by the orchard and Zio Remo’s vineyard. Taken from our living room
balcony.
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