Expatriating | Bethany Bassett

Tag: Expatriating

From Doorstops to Dishes

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 7 Comments

“The dishes!” I wail, glancing into the kitchen on my way to bed. “Why are there always and forever dishes needing to be washed?”

Dan replies kindly: “Because we use them.”

“Oh. Right.”

~~~

On Valentine’s Day, 2004, I kicked my brand new husband out of the house for four hours so I could make Chicken Parmesan as a surprise. To this day, I have no idea how a pile of chicken-topped spaghetti could possibly have taken four hours, but it’s fair to say I had no idea what I was doing. (The consistency of said chicken, which could have better served as packing material, agrees.) However, I so longed to make something beyond our standard fare of Campbell’s and Kraft. Surely, surely, with a little effort and the clucking, grandmotherly help of that red plaid cook book, culinary pleasure could be found in our dining room.

We ate Taco Bell the next day.

A lot changes when one moves to a country without fast food, though. When we first arrived in Italy, I mostly fixed packages of risotto mix and frozen chicken cordon bleu, and we picked up pizza a few times a week. However, I took mental notes each time we were invited to an Italian meal. One friend taught me how to make melt-in-your-mouth gnocchi; another gave me her recipe for amazing oven-roasted potatoes. I learned—thanks to my longsuffering husband—how to make cappuccinos, and I started auditioning new dessert recipes with his co-workers each week. I made a New Year’s resolution to learn how to cook meat so that people would rather eat it than use it as a doorstop. The next year, with a tasty repertoire of brining and braising techniques, I made a New Year’s resolution to make friends with vegetarian fare. I started jotting down menus and grocery lists for the first time in my life.

This year, my attention is drawn more toward my desk than toward the kitchen, but the process of cooking still engages my heart in a way I couldn’t have imagined six years ago. There’s something sacred in the challenge of planning meals to nourish my family’s bodies and souls while guarding our time and finances. There is mindfulness in rubbing fragrant herbs into a pot of soup, serenity in rolling pastry dough. Food preparation is no longer just a means to survival—it is a classroom, a laboratory, and an art studio. A love song. A risk, an exploit, a gathering of the usual five senses plus a few more. A thrice-daily dose of beauty to share and savor.

It is also, as reluctant as I may be to admit this, worth every single always-and-forever-dirty dish.

1Feb

Gelato Before Breakfast

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 6 Comments

When my alarm rocks me awake, the horizon is just beginning to bloom. The valley outside our bedroom window sparkles under the lightest dusting of powdered sugar, a gift from the sweet-toothed godmother of 3 a.m. Mount Subasio’s snowcap rounds out the purple sky. It is morning.

The horizon’s blush deepens, silhouetting familiar bell towers against a backdrop of vivid rose, and then pales as the sun makes her debut. One, then two, then fifty stufe curl feather-white smoke into a sky the color of lemon gelato. Hints of blue in the distance whisper of our Apennine guardians. This is home.

In a few minutes, I will finish my cappuccino. I will button Natalie up in her grembiule for school and give the house its morning airing (though I might avoid draping all our bedding out the windows as our neighbors are prone to do). The olive grove behind our house will rustle off its snow as the day warms marigold, and the local guild of songbirds will get to socializing. A typical day will be in full swing before I know it.

But at least for the moment, I do know it. Looking out over the cypresses of a 2500-year old city and in over the nuances of our Italian life, I am humbled. The expat experience is often challenging (if not downright frustrating) and requires a heaping supply of flexibility (if not insanity)… but it is the kind of long-term adventure that fills our hearts, remodels them for greater capacity, and fills them again. And at least for the moment, this sunrise—like the day it colors in, like the Etruscan stones gleaming from the next hilltop, like the adventure we wake up to every morning—is an immeasurable gift.

1Jan

Trade-In

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 4 Comments

There are two things I should say before we begin:
1) I slept until noon today, and
2) it was entirely necessary.

I would like to say this was due to our wild party-animal instincts, but the drab truth is that we saw 31 too-late nights in December and were destroyed (as we say in Italian). I am a little miffed with this holiday season for hinting at long, languid hours of relaxation when it actually meant a sort of continuous harried feeling. Gifts to be gathered, events to be attended, games to be played, food to be cooked, meaningful time to be spent with friends and family—all lovely, holiday-y things that somehow arranged themselves into a military formation in my mind. How does this happen every year, I ask? (Just to be clear, love and good cheer still abounded, as evidenced by the photo below. They just had to compete for attention with tiredness and headless chicken syndrome.)

And now it is next year. I’m a little surprised to find that I can believe an entire twelve-month span is over already; we put a lot of mileage on 2009, and it’s time for a trade-in. Besides traveling to eleven countries and over forty cities, I learned how to cook clams and braved black diamonds and started running (and stopped running… but have noble hopes to start again) and found a way out of an emotional quagmire and celebrated six years of marriage and moved houses and started wearing skirts again and cemented more than one close relationship and began teaching English and picked up piano playing again and attended weddings galore and had questions answered and spent delightful hours getting to know kindred spirits and finally found my taste for bitters and laughed more than cried. The year was richly layered with experience, and I feel comfortably full. It’s a good feeling.

As for 2010, I hope for much more of this…

…and this…

…with maybe just a wee bit more of this to go around:

Happy New Year, everyone!

18Dec

Merry and Bright

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 5 Comments

Yesterday evening, I was dusting the living room in a flurry of last-minute prep for our annual white elephant party. Sophie was finally sleeping after an asthma attack that reallocated our afternoon to doctor’s offices and pharmacies and tight-throated cuddling, and I was dashing through my list of chores when the obscene bleat of a bus horn sounded outside the window. The dust could wait; I peeked over the balcony to see what the fuss was about.

In typical Italian fashion, someone had parked a car with courageous disregard for either logic or legality, i.e. – in the middle of the road. I watched for several minutes while the driver was procured, she failed to produce any keys, and various angry motorists contributed to the solution by honking while a neighbor pushed the car out of the street. I am sorry to say this little story has nothing whatsoever to do with this entry except that while standing on our balcony overlooking our city’s hills and valleys, I noticed something: no Christmas lights. Out of the thousands of houses visible, only one or two sported a strand of red bulbs on the balcony.

Italians celebrate Christmas jubilantly and with glad tidings of tiramisu and wine, but outdoor decorations just aren’t their thing. And while I love living in this warm-hearted country, I really miss driving around on December nights to ooh and ahh over twinkling Christmas displays. I also miss parades and candy canes and gingerbread mochas and a children’s section stocked with gorgeous holiday books.

The past two Christmases here, I felt desperate to hold onto that melted-butter sensation of holiday nostalgia. I planned red and green and cinnamon sparkles into every day, but I only found exhaustion where enchantment was supposed to be. So this year, expectations have been called back from Jupiter. I’ve been up front with myself about the traditions I miss, and I’ve whittled down my priority list to the essentials. Cookies are no longer on it, nor is our Christmas Eve brunch with friends. To tell the truth, this December looks as glitzy in my mind as a rain cloud. A hormonal one.

Yet this clammy, gray mindscape is exactly where nostalgia decided to find me. Maybe I just needed to release the pressures of baking and printing newsletters and feeling holiday cheer, damnit, or maybe the gloom of the last few years was simply another side-effect of my depression pills. Either way, this coming Christmas has been a reason to seek out magical moments in otherwise ordinary days—postponing naptime to decorate the rug with paper scraps, sitting down at the piano with Vince Guaraldi, brainstorming ways to make our friends and family feel loved… belting out carols when traffic fills the horizon (“Away in the ranger” is Natalie’s favorite; Sophie’s is “Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle bells, all da waaaaaayyyyyy!”)… anticipating the daily surprise in our advent calendar… reading a story each night that leads to the miracle birth we celebrate… sprinkling nutmeg on my coffee and calling it a success.

And as it turns out, twinkling yard displays are not the slightest bit necessary for a holiday to be merry and bright.

9Dec

Rodeo

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 8 Comments

::tap tap::

Hello hello, one two three, anyone there?

I actually had to read my last blog entry to figure out where I was in life before the rodeo that is December came to town. That is acutely pathetic, I know, but at least it makes me feel good about not hosting ads on my site. Because if, say, we had to finish Christmas shopping on distant planets like IKEA and our car died and our water heater (which heats the whole house) broke and our gas went out and our car died again and our water heater broke again and it was a national holiday so no one could repair it and our utility room flooded and I caught a virus and the bathroom heater started leaking and the washing machine wouldn’t start and our car died AGAIN and we suddenly found ourselves scrambling to get all the right documents together so that we could buy a new car only to run straight up against the Italian beaurocratic system which will be on coffee break for the next three months… If, for instance, those hypothetical things were to happen, I would want the freedom to callously ignore the blogosphere until our life got itself to rehab.

There’s been so much I’ve wanted to write about though, like the visit from lovely Rachelle (and how my girls were so smitten with her that I may have been demoted to nanny), and the Paolo Nutini concert that almost had to go on without us, and the e-mails from someone Dan and I have never met who feels led by God to have us bring American television church to Italy (!!), and the thrill of Christmas shining from the girls’ eyes. There are so many of your lives I’m eager to catch up on as well.

However… All that may just have to wait until things stop breaking around here.

They have to stop sometime.

Right?

Right?

::tap tap::

16Oct

Happy Slob

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 5 Comments

Earlier this week, I went to an informal get-together with some other gals from church. Knowing Italy’s take on casual is America’s version of dress-up, I took care to look nice—my good jeans, suede boots, dangly earrings, a pretty scarf. I would have felt pretentious in the States, but here… I was just proud of myself for managing to pull off the fashionable look I knew all the other ladies would have.

Except that wasn’t the case. At all. The others were wearing designer denim, designer shoes, cashmere sweater dresses, skinny belts, chunky necklaces, crystal hair clips, perfectly color-coordinated outfits with purses to match, and makeup that put my mascara-and-Lip-Smackers philosophy to shame. I felt like a complete slob.

Sitting in that circle of fashion models with my stomach sucked in, I quickly forgot all about the Year Without Clothes efforts I’d been applauding. I pushed away the commitment I’d made to spend as little as possible this year so we can finally get out of debt. That sense of satisfaction I’d felt when resolving to forego a new pair of heels this winter? Vanished without a trace. Because not only did I suddenly need new heels, I needed new boots and a new dress and a new coat and new sweaters and new scarves and new jewelry and new eye shadow and probably a new haircut too.

There in my chair, with no provocation other than my own self-imposed notion of inferiority, I turned into a miner. You know the kind—discontented, jealous, ready to uproot their lives for the shoddy promise of gold dust somewhere in a California stream. I needed to fit in, no matter how much cashmere sweater dresses cost.

Two and a half hours later, I pulled up in front of our gorgeous house. I tip-toed up the stairs and into the warm pool of light spilling from our bedroom door, where I was kissed like a movie star by my husband. We peeked into the next room where our girls slept with arms and legs flung on top of their covers, eyelashes resting serenely on cheeks. I put away my not-designer jeans and snuggled into bed with the love of my life as far-away lights danced like pixies on the wall. Peace tucked itself in around us; the knot in my stomach subsided. Through the soft night colors, I could see clearly again that happiness has nothing to do with new shoes or new hair or new anything. And just like that, my fashion crisis was solved.

23Sep

City Mouse

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 5 Comments

The sun is warm and expansive today after a week of dishrag rain, and swallows are flirting in the treetop just outside the window. My bedroom looks down over an enormous park where cylists are riding in ellipses, the local soccer team is running drills, and circus tents swoop turquoise and white like some exotic taffy. Dan’s office is just on the other side of a second park; I can see the bar where he goes for mid-day espressos in tiny glass cups. On the opposite hilltop, our city’s ancient epicenter sprawls like a cat, the afternoon reflecting off its walls in shades of terra cotta and wheat. The view is breathtaking.

And the wonderful impossibility of this September is that I am finally starting to feel connected to this place. It’s due to a combination of factors, not the least of which is our new house. We moved from an impersonal apartment building in the suburbs to a three-family home in a vibrant little neighborhood, and the inclusive nature of community is working its magic on me. I love chatting with our downstairs neighbors as they cook supper, bumping into friends while walking Natalie to school, getting to know the Napoletan boyfriend and girlfriend who own the pizzeria down the street, buying vegetables and fresh flowers at the open market every Wednesday morning.

Not that community doesn’t come with its annoying moments. For instance, the woman at the pharmacy who schedules our medical appointments is insatiably curious about the nature of our ailments and the unfamiliar details on our personal documents, and discusses them loudly enough that the deaf great-grandfather in the foot care section can follow along. And then there is our next-door neighbor, a friend’s “crazy great aunt” (his words) who likes to ambush the girls and I just as we step inside our front gate and talk for fifteen increasingly uncomfortable minutes about her childraising theories. Both ladies have good intentions, I know, but… well, encounters with them stretch the limits of my politeness. (Probably a good thing to have stretched, in the long run.)

Crazy great aunts aside, I really do love feeling like a legitimate part of society. Beyond finding my neighborhood niche, I’m also doing my best to expand along with our home front. I finally started teaching English to some friends (once the initial paralyzing nervousness wears off, I really do love it), and we’ve been having company over so often that my head is spinning. My heart is full though. We’ve spent a very long year and a half with closed doors, and it’s liberating to open them wide, to invite people to be part of our lives again.

Of course, the country mouse in me wants to scamper back to my cricket noises and single-person hovel. Socializing comes about as naturally to me as tanning and geography; as long as I had access to a library and broadband, I would happily live out the rest of my days as a hermit. But something deep inside me knows it would wither without relationships, so I’m finding the courage to be social—a bit more every day—and as reward? The first delicious taste of belonging.

Page 5 of 6« First...«2 3 456 »