from Cervinia, Italy

I wake up at night and I spin, countless thoughts, tripping over each other. My crazy work schedule this semester, the bid for a new condo, I’ll be moving, everyone’s moving, I’m in Cervinia but the Law School is just emails away. I need to write more, I need to moonlight, I need to sleep.

I pull back the curtain and stare at the dark mountains, waiting for them to be light again.

And eventually, they oblige.



Oh-oh. Looks sort of partly cloudy up there. Sill, there are patches of blue...

I ask at the desk -- What time do the lifts open?
The lifts? They are all closed today.
What? I have crossed oceans and continents to be here! I want to ski. Why? Why is everything closed? A strike? (I’m in Italy after all)

It’s the wind. Very strong. 90 kilometers an hour. It’s not safe.
Wont they open just a wee little lift so that I can try my bright yellow rented skis maybe just once? I only have these two days to ski!

I get the Italian shrug.

I hover by the hotel desk and give my very best rendition of being very anxious.
Might conditions improve?

The shrug.

I consider my options. I have no options. I pace.

And, I am rewarded:
Signora, they are opening three lifts! The bottom half of the mountain, you can ski there. But it will be windy.


The understatement of the year. An hour later I exit the little gondola and I look ahead of me. Snow, clouds, drifting, blowing. A few hardy types assess the run down. I will follow them!


the bold


I can’t follow them. I have to find my skiing groove again. My groove is suffering from disuse. I hit an ice patch and I lose control. Down I go. Wrist hurts. I get up and continue.


blowing, drifting

I make it down once. Dizzy from the speed, the challenge. I get back on the gondola, more confident now. Wind? Pffft! What’s the big deal?




But at the end of the second run I am tired. I should have had the eggs and the oatmeal and the cakes and the cheeses for breakfast… I did not think I would be skiing. I did not think to store the nutrients.

I do one more run and then I stop. It is 12:30 and I am spent. I walk back to the hotel and make plans to sit in front of the fireplace for the rest of my life.

No, wait. Food first.

Cervinia isn’t a happenin’ town. There is no nightlife, no glamour. European royalty do not flock here. But Cervinia is Italian to the core and there is great food to be had up and down its one skinny street.

My lunch is richly nourishing. Reviving. Invigorating. Steaming hot.


hot and honest

I am satiated. I want to go back to the slopes. At the base, I see green lights flashing on several more open lifts. We are permitted almost to the top of the mountain! I ride the gondolas, finding a spot in cabins filled with jovial Italians. I have to ask this: how is it that an entire nation is so good at having fun?

The views mesmerize me. Moreover, I have found my groove, so that I can actually imitate a person who knows how to ski. I’m not on the top of the mountain, but I feel like I am.


nearing the summits


The run is long and I am tempted to call it a day, joining those who choose to enjoy other aspects of skiing here.


sun and laughter



...and a cigarette

But I go at it again. For the sheer torture. The challenge. The speed.

Afterwards, I can hardly walk. Thank you, hotel of mine, for having a sauna. Few have ever enjoyed a dry hot room as much as I did this late afternoon.

from Cervinia, Italy

Looking back:

I am nineteen and I have moved to the States. I am an au pair, a “mother’s helper.” I tend to a rich person’s child’s needs. In my spare time, I finish college.

Back in Poland, just before my move to the States, my friends and I develop a passion for skiing. That is, skiing in the Polish style, circa 1970: you go find a room in a farmhouse somewhere in the Polish mountains and each morning, you go out and put on your leather lace-up shoes (quaint, isn’t it…) and your carefully waxed boards. You take tiny side-steps all the way up a hill (30 minutes maybe) and then you ski down (1 minute, if you are a speed demon; we were all speed demons). And then you do it all over again.

So it is no surprise that, when I start earning au pair money in the States, I immediately think of upping my skiing experience. I purchase a subscription to Ski magazine (look at all this equipment! Choices, people here have so many choices!) and I acquire skis and real boots that snap instead of lace and I look around for an interesting place to ski.

I do not remember how I found Cervinia in Italy, but I did. At the age of 19, I take my first solo vacation, away from the little girl I am minding, away from the fascinating but so very strange liberal arts college I am attending (very American, but so un-Polish). To Italy, I go to the Italian mountains and feel that I have made it in life (I measured success differently then).

And in the morning, I look out from my bed & breakfast window onto a mountain that stands at the border of Italy and Switzerland: the Matterhorn, from the less familiar Italian angle. I stare at it for a goodly amount of minutes. I am an impressionable young thing and that mountain represents everything that is right and beautiful in my life.

In the afternoon, I ski, really ski! With lifts and my fancy skis with cute little roosters painted on the tips.

Ahhhh…..


I return to the Matterhorn again, a year later (I’m twenty now!), this time from the Swiss side. I am with a group of American college students and I want not to be a part of that particular group because, frankly, they seemed so…foreign.

Transitional years. I do not know where I will live, I do not know where I fit.

And when I graduate from college in February and say good bye to au pairing for good, I rent a room in the Italian Alps and take out my skis one more time, just me, alone, zipping down to the village, then riding the gondola up again.


That was then. This winter, I am invited to join a small group who want to do some sailing off the coast of Florida. And I think – do I really want to be on a boat, with choppy waters around me, or do I want to head back to the mountains? I haven’t skied the Alps since those college years when earnings went in one pocket and out the other (in some ways I have not changed). I need a week-end off, if only to interrupt the mad pace of this semester. Airfares are cheap, the snow is melting, melting, but still there.

I’m on my way.



One bus, two flights, one more bus, a train and a taxi ride later, it is almost dusk. I open the door to my hotel balcony and I look up at Mount Cervino, the Italian side of the Matterhorn. Where 35 years ago I woke up each morning to its splendid sun-drenched face and thought, well now, this is one pretty view and isn’t life promising?





In the early evening I walk down to the village and have my sensual moment with food, first in the cheese and salami store...




bursting with ripeness

...then in a pastry shop. Tomorrow I'll be on the slopes. Today, there's nothing left to do but eat.


easy choice for me



not for him...


...and you know what gets to me everytime I go out to dinner in these regions? The cheeses. I cannot say no to them, even if the portions here are meant for athletes and not for people who had spent the day sitting in various mechanical moving devices. Oh, but these are the things I love to complain about.



This, and the the presence of a large scale in the bathroom of my hotel room. The nerve.

would you fly for hours, take long bus and train rides, give up a night of sleep to spend the better part of two days being cold on a mountaintop?

I would.

I am off this afternoon. Where? Check in tomorrow. They promised WiFi.

Hint: the wintry meteorological conditions notwithstanding, I plan to eat very well.

Meltdown

Look at him. Tucked into an alleyway. Forgotten. Melt away, disappear. This week, we’re into daylight savings time, no time nor space for you anymore.



You don’t want to get to that place in life where you are melting away with a bunch of carrots stuck in your face, or worse.

That’s thought number one. Thought number two? No time nor space for that. This afternoon I bid on an empty shell of a box (my pursuit of the condo) and I worked. Endlessly. So that tomorrow I can take off late at night and get to the spot where I took my first solo foreign vacation. I’m sure it’s changed, but still, I want to be there and remember what it was like when I did not even know which country would be my promised land.

negotiations

About the condo...

Naïve me. I think: if I let the builder/seller know how much I want that particular condo, he will sell it to me at a price I can afford. Why wouldn’t he? I want to buy it, he wants to sell it – the marketplace will push this into my lap, right?

Instead, it is, I think, like this: seller knows how much I want the condo. I have admitted that there is no other unit in all of Madison, nay, Dane County, that comes even close to the price, size, quality of this particular place. Rather than feeling honored and puffed up by my words of great praise, I am thinking that he used the information against me when the counter offer came in ----- at a sum greater than the original asking price!

Now, some would be discouraged by this. Not me! I see this as an opportunity to educate the builder/seller in the true worth of reaching out to people like me. I want to teach him how to make things happen out there, so that all are satisfied. I owe him that much.

In the meantime, I am condo-negotiating left and right, working endlessly at all hours of the night and feeling that one more day of this pace will permanently crack me, scar me, undo me in some profound way.

Or not. Hearty Polish peasant stock here. I give thanks to my roots.

words

Someone asks you – you want a coffee?

Could this be offensive? Maybe.

I enter Starbucks this morning (still in D. C.). Large order: three drinks and two (so-called) bakery items. I wait.

Behind me, a woman (maybe a decade or so younger than me – good looking, cheerful) waits her turn. Behind her a homeless guy engages her in a conversation. There are maybe four homeless guys hanging around this Starbucks.

Hold on. Let me be clear: I do not know that they are homeless. That word has not been articulated before me. They just appear to me to be homeless.

The guy asks the woman – are you buying a coffee? She says, tentatively, yes… He asks: can I buy it for you? She answers (thinking, I am sure, as I did, that he is homeless) – I am buying an expensive one today: Venti latte with vanilla and cream... (she looks too skinny for that to be her morning drink but oh well, I want to believe her).

Then, her to him: do you want a coffee? He protests, no no, let me buy you yours. After a back and forth, with no immediate resolution (she is saying no no, he is saying yes yes), he hands over crumpled bills to the barista. A twenty and some ones. Over her head. Over my head for that matter. The barista reacts perfectly, I think. Leadership in the making. He takes one dollar out of the bunch, hands him back the bills, pours him the coffee and the matter is over and done with.

She, the customer, got pulled into this. She felt badly. She wanted to buy a coffee for the homeless guy. His pride would not permit it. All three players, the homeless man, the woman in line, the barista – all acted with honor and heart. They stayed within their roles, but they came out okay.

Nice story, isn’t it?

from D.C.

The town of controversy. Even though right now my hometown is embroiled in controversy (look to other blogs for that one: Ocean has become so sweetly benign, concerned more with distant places and current eating trends (yawn!) than with the truly more serious issues of life, death and free speech), D.C. is the place where I imagine everyone to be either an elephant or a donkey. At least in the clothes they wear and the words they utter. It is simpler that way, even though this type of division substantially ignores real people with credible ideas.

To me, the visitor, Washington is a place of urban balance. It feels like a city and, to an extent, it looks like a sizable city…

…So that this morning, I am sitting by the floor-to-ceiling windows of this warehouse-like interior, reading my law text and I see myself reflected in the vase on the coffee table. A cityscape.




Outside, the wind is unpleasantly strong. And cold. We give up on a hike down to Georgetown or the Mall. We pace the neighborhood and watch robins shiver.




Tomorrow, I return home. For an insane amount of work. But next week-end, I am taking a solo break from it all, returning to a place first visited when I was so very very young. It helps me to return. A look back is comforting.

from D.C.

Boxes, deliveries, furniture assembly. Trips to the hardware store, the drugstore, the grocery store and, unfortunately, yet again, to Bed Bath & Beyond. Nothing is as tiresome on a bright and sunny Saturday as standing in line in the basement of BB&B with a cartload of lamps, pillows, towels, knives and who knows what else. Oh, unless it is riding the subway with four sacks of the above, plus a full length mirror, precariously tucked under a sore arm.

Nothing is as uplifting as having passersby offer help as I walk the five blocks from the metro to the apartment, determined to make it without losing my grip.

At the corner, a man is selling flowers.




There are many, many same sex couples in this neighborhood and I smile at seeing one carrying flowers with his right hand while clinging to the arm of his partner with the other. Sadly, public expressions of connection and caring are rare in this country, except among those with public permission to physically reach for another (a child, a young lover). Arms entwined, hands held across all ages and genders – I associate this with Europe, not here.

Friendly. This set of blocks has people who are more curious, more chatty than anywhere I’ve seen in an urban setting. Even Madison seems aloof by comparison. It could be the weather. It makes you stop and take notice. How about that! Sunshine! And BTW, that’s an awfully spiffy looking camera. I remember going to buy a camera several years back…

Friendliness, curiosity – these are good things. Sunshine, flowers, scenes of caring. Springtime.

from D.C.

I am told the snow is falling horizontally back in Madison. That the winds are causing significant drifts. People are urged to stay off the roads.

I hear this, but I cannot fully appreciate it. I am immersed in the first days of a Washington spring.

True, I am not here to play. A daughter is starting a job and helping her move here is the reason for this brief hike out east.

South east. If ever I needed a reminder that D.C. is part of the south, the weather this week-end does that for me, emphatically.

Lunch outdoors? Sure. Outside my daughter’s apartment building, the tables at the neighborhood eateries are crowded. (Sorry, Madisonians, for you, this scene may well be months away.)



A young man sits in front of a Starbucks, with a Whole Foods bag (Be Free, it reads) at his side – a new American urban vignette. It could be any city. No, wait, any city in the south.



I take the metro back to the airport to pick up a rental for the day. Washington is the only city in this entire nation that always jarringly reminds me of the wars fought, the sacrifices made. The memorials, sure, I see it in the memorials, and on the ride to the airport, in the rows of white stones at Arlington Cemetery. And further, as we pick up passengers at the Pentagon, in the faces of people, young men, young women, who think of this current war in such different ways than you or I.




An unreal city, with real people who work hard, long hours, others who look hard for work. People with families. Sons eatig lunch with parents at outdoor cafés, daughters leaning on mothers' shoulders on the metro.

from D.C.

Such a hard week. No matter. Need to look forward. Need to board a plane and wake up and think: wow! I am elsewhere. And it is a nice, warm (ish) elsewhere.


Photos and text in the days ahead? You would think so.
Be as patient with me as I am with the Internet providers. We have our weak moments. All of us.

UPDATE:

The night rolls in, the air is balmy, wet. Rain comes in spurts. The head spins from the rapid pace of the week. I sit down (collapse?) in a warm place where the martinis are funky and the food is good...



...and then I retire. No, no functional Internet, but the bed is great, the surroundings are bold, colorful and in the morning, the shower is strong and a leopard bathrobe is hanging, waiting for me.

you put your left foot out, you put your left foot in…

If you only have five minutes to make decisions with lasting impact, you use the five minutes and move on.

That about summarizes my day.

My work continues to flood my waking hours. But in between, I have the time (measured in minutes if not seconds) to quickly, oh so quickly, create a future.

Working under pressure… I’m used to it. Manipulating time – a skill that has served me well. I think. Making changes, shifting perspectives – all doable.

Okay. Enough of this kind of writing. Tomorrow I get down to basics. I’m flying out east, snow and sleet permitting. Lots of travel ahead. Bear with me. It’ll be a month of movement in all ways.

forward!

And now comes the movement, the sprint. I’m up for it, the move, the leap, I’m ready. Polish peasant stock. Mobile, adaptable. Taking on the Badger motto: forward!



The snow is wet but firm. So is my resolve. White box, I’m going to go for it. Out of your rectangle, I will create a space that will be home. After a trip across the ocean, I’ll return to you. Here’s my address, my permanent address…

Whoa! I haven’t an accepted offer yet! One step at a time.

so what do you think?

This is it. The white box. Should I buy it? Say yes.

the afterwards

So. The storms have passed. And what do you do afterwards? Well, it depends on what the day has tossed you.

Oh, the ups and downs of life.

The toil:



The joy:



And the reality of work. Tempered by music. Or a few words on the cell. I’d like to believe it’s with her mom, but probably it’s with a friend.

it continues

Madison is under a weather siege. Attacked by winds, snow, ice and lightening. Enough to make you hide under the table.

I spend the earlier hours of the day rocking a car out of drifts (that were the result of yesterday’s opening act to this madness) and looking at bottom-of-the-heap for-sale houses. The ones that have been sitting on the market for twelve months, where the owners still don’t get it. Lower it, you fools! Someone with a small income and fix-it talents would do wonders here. Let them in!

Me - I am not such a person. I can unplug a toilet by using product. And I can fix gutters by climbing on the roof and attaching a dislocated piece with a hairpin. I have done these things, but not a lot beyond.

And so I return to the condo market, reluctantly admitting that I am pedantic and with a small budget. The worst combination.

I walk through units with mouth open and an internal calculator screaming get me out of here, get me out of here.

But I cannot leave.

A shell. I think I will buy a condo shell, a white box, they call it. A place with no interior, nothing but a rectangle with studs, posts and pipes sticking out. The interior will go in when and however issues of affordability will resolve themselves.

In the meantime, I am remembering that it is February, not a decision-making month and still, I am making decisions and moving forward ever so rapidly. It is the only way. Asking me to stand still and wait a spell is like telling a chef to hang up his or her apron and order out pizza from Rocky Rococo.

The storm is in full force. The snow is blinding, but not enough so as to make it impossible for me to see beyond the parking lot below.

winter storms

So they say it will snow this weekend. I am attuned to the weather! My camera sits waiting.

A preshot: before the storm.



But is it really before? I have been storming around Madison all week long, looking through voluminous listings of a glutted real estate market. Glutted with awful awful structures (yes, I am now broadening my span: condos and houses, but cheap. I’m into cheap. Bottom of the heap).

All these unsold houses: let’s make a deal and start all over. They were never meant to last, I’m sure. Antibiotics or fertilizers artificially kept them alive. Pufff! Out they go. Yes?

Or, if that is too costly a solution, let me suggest this: let’s get rid of the large ugly garages and let’s put in big windows into structures that seem to have way too few to allow for any sensible light. Weird in a cold state such as ours that we should keep the sun out.

Late in the evening I go to a Dar Williams concert. It will surprise no one that I cry right through half the songs.

At the end of one, she tells how she used to ask people to flash their lighters during the last bars. Gimmick? No, with Dar, it's not that. But she has been around for a decade or more and so lighters, she has come to realize, are not that everpresent. Instead, out come the cell phones – our concession to light in dark places. And so we wave our cell phones and sing Iowa and go home.

But that turns out to be not so easy. The blizzard that was supposed to come tomorrow is here. It is pouring down by the baleful! I’m giddy with the early pile up of wet wet snow. The drive home isn’t long. No, not long. I live downtown after all. This year, this month, I live downtown.



Toward th end, Dar sings “February" and so I think of house keys (handing house keys is an idea much tossed around in that song; the keys are tossed around as well. I believe a set lands in a pond which freezes over -- such a WIsconsin story) – who holds the keys to my house?

where the grass is greener

It struck me last week that I should move. That I am spending much and benefiting little from lining the pockets of my (quite nice actually) landlord. That I should worry about things like equity. That I should look forward to spring by imagining pots filled with flowers out on my nonexistent deck. That I should create a space where (frequent) visitors can disappear at the end of the day and not be on top of each other (lofts are so… open). That Madison’s condo boom has passed me by and I should jump back into the fray and be a part of the hip set.

My winter weeks have been extremely packed with work commitments, but finally, late this afternoon, I set out to look at what’s out there.

I am still reeling from that effort. Updates will follow. In the meantime, let me just say this: in the twenty years that I have been less than even marginally interested in acquiring space (looking for an apartment rental does not count) the real estate world has turned up side down. That is one crazy marketplace out there! I may shut my door to it all and never leave the loft again. Or, by season’s end, I may be downsizing and stacking boxes once more.

It cannot be said that I am not open to the idea of change.

second day without camera explained by the fact that little camera got dropped last week and big camera is too ostentatious

But who’s counting.

hatching

When you embark on the road to hatching great plans, you get easily distracted. At every indentation, every momentary pause, you revert back to hatching plans. They may not be great in the scheme of things, but there is no denying, they are substantial plans.

And so you study the possibilities, you get back on the Net, or to the drawing board, or both and you forget about the world.

Were you to remember the world, you would have remembered to take the camera and take a photo of the warmth outside. So warm that I biked to work and did not suffer. Amazing.

You especially want to remember this warm-ish week because by week’s end, it will all be over and winter will return again.

So remember. Today, it was a warm thirties plus. And I biked. Got that?

Otherwise, nothing else counts. I hatch plans and give a little boost to others who are hatching their own.

a quiet finish

If I promise a brilliant March, a month full of insightful, splendid, voluminous words and images, will you forive me as I phase out of February meekly, spiritedlessly?

Thank you.

Statement of the day: I so appreciate the thermometer inching up beyond freezing. It did not go by unnoticed. Movements in fine directions are always welcome.

Is there a photo for today? Of course. A new visitor on my eating table: