I leave tonight for Italy. After I lift my heart up off the floor from having broken after kissing Ferdinand and Jonathan goodbye and try to keep it from falling again before I get through the doors of JFK, and I get on the plane and then off the plane in Rome I have a coffee. A perfectly brewed thick foamed, hair on your head cappuccino at a bar across the street from Roma Termini before I get on the train to Cortona.
And then I sleep or stare out the window at the ten sheep still grazing on the inch of grass between the tracks and the rest of the world and because it’s May, fields of poppies that roll like an ocean painted red. In Cortona my friend Caroline almost always picks me up and takes me to the commune pump at the casa gialla to buy wine for my people for the week at what could easily be mistaken for a gas pump and then to the Coop for as many groceries as I can remember and then home to Mercatale where my car is waiting. I sleep until I can wake up again and then there is Italy. Always exactly as it was.
Menu for the week:
menu for Spring in Tuscany