I must go down to the seas again

#13 Arrivederchi Italy – We’re Alberta Bound

We are in the final day of our 30 days in Italy and are relaxing poolside rather than walking 10,000 steps.

The southern sun has warmed. We’ve driven for miles and miles around villages and farmland, walked through steep hillside towns climbing to their centres and grandiose cathedrals.

Strolled through gardens and orchards with even M, a non-gardener, trying to help me identify sweetly scented blossoms.

And we’ve dined morning, noon and late at night. (A 7:30 dinner reservation is early, most restaurants don’t get guests until 9 pm.) We even discovered what Italians do when all the shops close from 12:30 til 4:30 – they go home and cook big meals and rest, before restarting their work day late afternoon.

Though we planned this day to be chill before our return to Alberta’s late spring we don’t sit still. We wander through a museum created from a restoration of La Posta Vecchia, a grand home first built on a then already ancient site in 1640! Destroyed in a fire in 1919 it evidently sat ignored until purchased and restored by the famous magnate J. Paul Getty in 1960 with the guidance of the archaeological societies of Etruria. But then, presto(!) – artifacts of all kinds, including finely crafted mosaic floors were discovered under the basement dating to the … hang on … first and second century AD!!

Trying to get our heads around that we took a beach walk along the shores of the Mediterranean. I had to pause and consider the history of what we’d just seen – trying to feel the spirits from 2000 years ago!

It makes me want to cry and be happy at the same time. Being close to works of art so ancient makes me think we have to get the most out of our time here on earth, create art, put down our iPhones, lol, love the ones we’re with, and be present for each other. It’s what we have.

As we watched the fishermen on the rocky ledge I couldn’t stop considering how I might make life at home more Italian.

I’ve decided I need to build a stone wall, install huge (maybe ancient – 1st century) terracotta planters, shine a light up my apple tree, plant a lemon tree (ha!), drink all my future cappuccinos from a pretty pink china cup, eat more bread and gelato and somehow be thin, wear pungent floral perfume and gaze at it all through popular crazy-huge black rimmed glasses. Prego. Prego. We’re soon to be Alberta bound.

#12 ‘I Must Go Down To the Sea Today’

Do you ever feel as if you’re in a dream? You’re having an experience so foreign to your everyday life you wonder how you came to be where you are? Those were my thoughts seated with M on the sunny terrace of an ancient stone farmhouse, eating an Easter Monday lunch, looking over the green hills of Basilicata, Italy, while being serenaded by the most charming group of folk singers.

I closed my eyes to absorb it all. We left that comforting lunch of vegetable lasagna, grilled meats and fresh picked oranges to drive down the ever winding roads of Southern Italy towards the sea and Apulia.

(M is getting accustomed to these Italian drivers, where they hug each others speeding bumpers until they make their daredevil passes. )

Farmhouses were on theme that day. We stayed in a romantic recovered farm property, at Masseria Montenapoleone, on part of a plain of centuries old olive groves.

The food this trip has been exquisite but made so by the atmosphere. We breakfasted on a terrace surrounded by a stunning array of geraniums, rose bushes, cacti and fruit trees and were hardly able to put down our iPhone cameras to eat our poached eggs and cream filled croissants.

Despite the beauty surrounding us we ventured out each day to hillside and seaside towns.

One day it was to visit Alberobello, famous for the funny circular peaked roofed houses (called trulli), another to climb amongst the stairways of Ostuni, stepping into the magnificent basilica. We paused at cafes to refresh ourselves with gelatos or a cool glass of vino.

Other days we traveled to the seaside towns of Monopoli and Polignano a Mare. Staring out from the stone walls at the Adriatic Sea, I felt so far from my foothills home in Calgary. It was the end part of the trip where I had a greedy need to smell more Alpine roses, enjoy more pistachio gelato, and gaze longer at the sea.

I Must Go Down To The Seas Again – Come With Me

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied
– John Masefield 1902

When I was just a kid – just nineteen years old, my parents helped me pack their car with a very big red suitcase, a stack of books and a few containers of my mom’s homemade baking, and drove me (and my boyfriend – who was just along for the ride) over a mountain range, through one and a half provinces, to board a ferry across the Georgia Strait to Vancouver Island, and the city of Victoria B.C, so that I could start my university years. My folks and boyfriend stayed long enough to help me search the newspaper’s ‘Apartment For Rent’ ads and to get me set up in a small furnished suite in what I so happily called a character house.

Wow. Life happened. Let me tick off the details for you – turned out moving away from my family of seven people, and boyfriend of two years, made me unbearably homesick. Rather than moving into university residence (my mom’s smart idea, which I ignored) I moved across the country with said boyfriend and tried an eastern Canadian university the next year. For lots of reasons – probably the strongest being that we were two young to work out our difficulties cohabiting – we left the east, zig-zagged a little bit, and found ourselves ocean side again – back at The University of Victoria. With one and a half degrees between us (I had a head start), we got married, he finished his degree, we moved home to Calgary and had a baby girl. Galloping along, we packed up a beat-up truck this time, which only broke down once when we crossed over the mountains again so that boyfriend – now husband – could get a law degree, and while he did so we had two baby boys in Victoria. A few more beat up cars and one law degree later, we returned to Calgary with – the now three-year-old daughter, two-year-old boy and new baby boy. The forth baby (girl) was born back in Calgary shortly before her daddy was called to the bar. It wasn’t religious – we just liked having all those babies. Time passed. Babies grew and grew and grew.

Now this little tale is about the good parents who drove me to Victoria to begin those cross province journeys to the ocean, back before the time of my crazy childbearing days. My parents were both raised as true Albertans, people who love a Sunday drive through the foothills and admire fields of golden grain shimmering in a Chinook wind. Yet, when they retired they chose to treat themselves to a month or two in Victoria as a late winter destination, while they waited for the season to lose its grip on Calgary. Yesterday my mom calculated this is the seventeenth year that they have spent a part of spring in this ocean side city, whose ambiance has been part of our lives’ journeys. They’ve come to take pleasure in the daffodils, tulips and frothy fruit tree blossoms, long weeks before they’ll decorate the streets of home. They trade the blue skies of Alberta for quiet treks along the shores of the deep blue ocean.

For the last several years my siblings and I have joined them at different times during their coastal reprieves. When the drive itself became too much of a chore, I’ve driven their car out, packed up with all the trappings of home to make their stay comfortable – including those tins of mom’s homemade baking. My brothers and sisters, and grand-kids and nieces have come out too, all pleased to spend time fueling their desire to see green foliage, and basking in sunny strolls (or foggy ones) along Victoria’s long breezy breakwater.

My four kids (the subjects of Text Me, Love Mom) text to see how we’re all making out, the girls from where they currently reside in Calgary, the boys from their homes in coastal Vancouver. (Is it silly to wonder if their ocean side birthplace influenced the makeup of their wee baby bones so they now choose to reside on the coast?) I text my kids back from a tea house, or a long leisurely stroll, “Grampa and Grandma say hello. We just ate the best lemon blueberry scones ever. You doing okay?” Every year my dear mom says they won’t make the trip again, too tiring getting ready, too much has changed health wise. But always we convince them to make the journey one more time – their walks are shorter, the breaks for tea time longer. For the last several years I’ve joined my parents here for the better part of a week of their month long stay. Today I’ll head home from this place where I began my truly growing up years of raising kids. Mom and Dad will stay behind for a few more weeks to revel sunny days watching the ocean roll over the rocks, and the pilot boats head out to guide ships to shore. Ah, the journeys we take for ‘the call of the running tide.’

Please click on the following links to order Text Me, Love Mom; Two Girls, Two Boys, One Empty Nest – about the ‘next stage of parenting’, when the kids leave home, come of age, and the family gets its bearings again.

Amazon.com : http://www.amazon.com/Text-Me-Love-Mom-Girls/dp/1771800712

Amazon.ca http://www.amazon.ca/Text-Me-Love-Mom-Girls/dp/1771800712

Indigo/Chapters http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/text-me-love-mom/9781771800716-item.html

In the UK at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Text-Me-Love-Mom-Girls/dp/1771800712