Moose in the Kitchen

Every time I read about someone’s experience with kids, my stomach travels up my esophagus to fill my throat and I hear the faint echo of someone laughing at me. I think that someone is my mother and I think she’s remembering every single day between 1978 and 1983.

Something about Italy makes children seem more manageable. Maybe it’s because you can take them to bars. If we ever left California, it would be to move to Tuscany. Which doesn’t make any sense at all, because Tuscany looks exactly like Sonoma County. And they speak Italian there, which would make purchasing both groceries and real estate far more difficult.

But it’s beautiful – and far less populated than Sonoma. And Italians love the babies. I should note here that, while my mom took marriage waffling with admirable aplomb, the second the words “Italy” and “move” were put in the same paragraph, she bristled up like an indignant rooster, making it very clear that she would consider it a personal affront if we moved even two feet beyond the Bay Area. And by “we” she meant “with my grandchildren.”

Even with the threat of Indignant Grandma Rooster – the one who would plant a bomb in our suitcase as we headed toward the airport for Italy, just so the authorities would toss us in jail and hand her the children – Tuscany is mighty appealing, and not just because they serve well-spiced boar meat.

I might be falling prey to the general romanticization of Italy and, yes, I read Under the Tuscan Sun, but there’s something very appealing about the thought of living in verdant green fields and taking naps after a large lunch of fresh pasta and mozzarella. In my head, our Tuscan farmhouse comes complete with an Italian grandma – clearly her job is to both make the fresh pasta and watch the kids while I nap. (Please picture my mother doing her Indignant Rooster impression and reaching for her phone to chew me out for replacing her with some nameless, grizzled Italian woman.)

We tossed around other reasons, more concrete than Culturally-Accepted Afternoon Naps, for the move to Italy when we have kids idea, but they’re boring and my mom’s having an apoplexy right now. Even though she knows that a good 75 percent of my plans never pan out. Case in point: I’m not married to Christian Bale.

I’ll tell you about Tuscany instead. What it lacks in well-marked road signs, it makes up for in rabbit meat and medieval alleys adorned with decapitated heads.

Because I have a bad habit of forgetting every logistical detail of my trips, preferring to focus on some vague memory of the dust mote-filled sunlight hitting my morning croissant, and I plan to refer to this post in a few years when I’ve totally eradicated the names of the towns we visited in favor of remembering my own phone number, I would like to note here that we managed, in spite of the painfully obscure road signs, to find Volterra, Siena, Chianti and San Gimignano.

I would now like my award for most incomprehensible run-on sentence in the history of blogging.

Tuscan hill towns are best at night. Most of the tourists have gone home, and the shadows cast by the medieval towers become suitably spooky. We stayed outside San Gimignano, and would head into the town center for dinner at that place, the one whose name I’ve already forgotten, see why I need the blog and the run-on sentences?, with the stunning view of the valley and scrumptious tiramisu. Every night we said we’d share. And we did share. But we shared two, because one was never enough. After dinner, we’d sit on the steps of the piazza to watch the Italian families. The parents would gossip on the steps and the kids played complicated games in the square, games that included mooning the adults.

If San Gimignano was my favorite town, Chianti was my favorite region. Mainly for the little truck parked outside the market to serve roast chicken and fried polenta to the clamoring Italian hordes. We braved the clamoring hordes, and were dipping into the greasy bag of fried polenta when I began to worry about the ominous skies overhead.

“Don’t worry. It will give us a sign before it starts to rain.”

Less than a minute later, there was a large crash of thunder and the sky lit up.

“I think that was it.”

We ran, greasy bag of fried polenta flapping in the rising wind. Rain started to fall just as we climbed into the car, so we settled in to eat chicken with our fingers and watch the storm pass over the valley.