Little black rain cloud?

There's a great big grey cloud parked over the center of town, and it's been here since morning. At every little sound I hear, every rustle, every tiny rapping noise, I crane my neck toward the open window and listen carefully, hoping to hear the raindrops on the shutters. There's a humid, almost cool breeze that reminds me of early summer rain. It's dark in the house now with all the lights turned off; it would seem like evening were it not for the silence of the pausa. A truck passes under the window and for a second the rumbling sounds like thunder. How long until it rains again? How long has it been since the last time? At least a month, very likely more, possibly two months, long enough that I can't remember. The forecasts aren't promising, and there's blue sky out over the mountains, but I don't want to give up hope on this cloud just yet. Rain, cloud, rain!

Ginger Pear Muffins

I love baking, but lately I haven't been doing very much of it, for two reasons. Now that I'm pregnant, I can't really justify eating a batch of brownies every week, and it's been so hot here this summer that using the oven is madness. But every so often I have a craving for something sweet that even the juiciest peach or plum cannot satisfy, so sometimes there's just no way to avoid baking. Wednesday the temperature dipped below 35°C (95°F) and there was a breeze, so I knew it was time to bake. I'd been wanting something with ginger, and I needed a way to use some of our tiny pears, so this is what I came up with:


Ginger Pear Muffins
1 1/2-2 cups pears, pealed and chopped into small pieces
2 cups flour
1 tbsp. ground ginger
1 tbsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
2 large eggs
1 cup milk
2/3 cup brown sugar
6 tbsp. melted butter
1 tsp. vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 400°F (200°C.) Whisk together the dry ingredients in a large bowl. In another bowl, whisk together the eggs, milk, butter and extract. Add the sugar and mix well. Add to the flour mixture and blend only until the dry ingredients are moistened. Fold in the pears. Divide the batter among the cups of a buttered muffin pan. Bake for 15-18 min or until a toothpick inserted into the center of one of the muffins comes out clean. Makes 8-10 medium muffins.

Notes:
About the variable quantity of pears: I baked the recipe with 1 1/2 cups of pears and I felt that the muffins needed a little more. Our tiny pears aren't juicy, even when ripe. They produced a muffin that was delightfully chunky, but with little to no juice, the flavor of the pears was not much suffused throughout. Anyone using dry pears, like ours, will want to use at least 2 cups. Most pears do become quite juicy when ripe, though, and if I were to use ordinary pears, I would only add 1 1/2 cups.

I had wanted to use plain yogurt instead of milk, but I forgot to buy it, and it was just too hot to walk back to the store! Next time, if I remember, I'll substitute a cup of yogurt for the cup of milk.

If it's as hot where you are as it is here, refrigerate your muffins! They have butter in them and will go off if you leave them out for more than a day.

Waiting for figs

Last month, I wrote a paean to figs. I'm sad to report that ours are all gone, and that we'll have to wait until late August or September before our trees supply us with more of them. In the meantime, we've had to make do with some of the other fruit from Campo di Pere:

Apricots so sweet and flavorful that I now realize that despite having eaten vast quantities of the fruit before moving here, I had no idea what apricots were really supposed to taste like.

Red plums, frosty like grapes, whose perfume can fill an entire room. They are the juiciest and sweetest plums I have ever eaten. And finally, tiny pears that are crisp, spicy and sweet. Before I ever ate a fig, I liked pears best, and I have to admit that a single bite into one of these diminutive fruits is enough to make me forget figs. Well, at least for a while.

Love Thursday: Small sacrifices

Some of the annoyances I'm putting up with for the little fellow growing in my womb, in no particular order:

• Nausea so bad that I have lost the ability to eat even roasted potatoes
  
• Insomnia
• A bladder with ridiculously reduced capacity
• Incredibly greasy hair
  
• Giving up sweets, with the exception of the occasional slice of banana bread
  
• Not eating prosciutto crudo, of all the things I've given up, it's what I miss the most
  
• Going to a doctor who insists that the only meat I can eat must be boiled and that because I am fat (BMI of 24, for anyone wondering) I may not eat anything sweet (no sweets but also no fruit) or anything rich in carbohydrates like bread, pasta or pizza, i.e. all of the foods my upset stomach can actually tolerate
  
• Letting said doctor feel superior when he learns at my next appointment I have actually gained no weight since my last visit and mistakenly believes that I've been following his advice
• Putting up with said doctor's generally paternalistic and doctrinaire ways even though I've always been an uppity woman
• Waiting seemingly forever in lines for impegnative and lab tests, at least once a week
• Taking twice as much time to get anything done because I move more slowly and because I've begun to forget what I'm doing in the middle of doing it
• Being called la mammina by various people
  

And this is just the beginning. What will happen when even strangers notice that I'm pregnant? Will there be unsolicited advice, unapproved belly rubs, who knows what else? No pity, please, I am doing all of this willingly, and out of love. But it sure does make me feel good to vent.

Banana bread

Years ago, I found a recipe in the Philadelphia Inquirer that made the best banana bread I'd ever eaten. I used that recipe until May of 2006, when I lost it somehow in the move over here. I looked for it everywhere, but it was tiny clipping that I might easily have discarded by mistake. When searching on the internet turned up nothing, I began to experiment, because I remembered the exact quantities of some of the ingredients: four tablespoons of melted butter, one teaspoon of baking soda, and four very ripe bananas. I haven't succeeded in replicating the original, but I've stopped trying because my new recipe is close enough, and I like it very much. If you prefer your banana bread moist and fairly dense and compact, you'll like this recipe too.

1 1/2 cup flour
1 cup sugar
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
4 very ripe bananas, mashed with a fork
1 egg
4 tbsp. (2 oz.) melted butter

Preheat oven to 350° F (175° C) Butter the bottom and sides of a loaf pan. In a bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar and baking soda. In another bowl, mix together the mashed bananas, egg and melted butter. Combine the dry and wet ingredients and mix until just blended. Pour batter into the prepared pan and bake for about one hour, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Notes:
I like to eat banana bread for breakfast, so I always wrap it in aluminum foil just after it's cooled and then I put it in the refrigerator. Sometimes I'm unable to restrain myself from eating it immediately, but I think it's always moister and tastier the next day.

Yesterday I was very naughty and added 1/2 cup of chocolate chips. That's why the photo above shows a brown-spotted banana bread. Despite my sweet tooth, I've been abstaining from cookies and cakes in an attempt to provide the little guy in my belly all the nutrients he needs while not gaining too much weight. But I figured that since I'd be eating bananas with the chocolate, it would fine to indulge myself a little this time.

By the way, if anyone out there had the Inquirer recipe, please pass it on!

Minturnae

Yesterday, despite the heat, N and I decided to go for a ride to Minturno, to see the ruins there. We'd driven by the theatre and the aqueduct countless times without stopping, and I had always wanted to get a better look. We had the site to ourselves while we were there, and it was a pleasant way to spend an hour. Here are a few of the photos I took of the site:

























How hot was it? That puff of white in the distance is the smoke from a wildfire in the mountains.

Love Thursday: Becoming my mother

In these long summer days I am given to thinking about the child developing in my womb and the profound ways in which she will alter my life. I am an introvert, a solitary person. I wonder what my days will be like when the silence I have always sought and prized will be interrupted, canceled by the constant presence of an other whose every cry must be answered and whose every need must be met. Will it be the end of my selfhood, or just my selfishness? I feel myself growing more withdrawn with each day that passes, determined to guard my remaining quiet time jealously, resentful of any minute that I must spend with anyone other than my husband. I know that when the time comes, I will be ready to give of myself completely, sacrificing even the solitude that I have loved above all other other things, and that I will be joyful to have traded such a prized possession for a reward greater than any other. But while I have my time, I indulge the old way of thinking and immerse myself in contemplation.

My thoughts turn to my mother and I wonder what she thought about as she awaited the birth of my brother, her first child. She died when I was just a girl and I barely remember her. I cannot say that I ever really knew her. I hear that she was gregarious, perhaps she spent her last months before becoming a mother anxiously awaiting the cries and babbling and laughing that would finally bring an end to the silence of the days she spent at home, alone. I wonder what kind of mother she was. From the few memories I have of her, all I can say was that she was good. I cannot imagine what our relationship would be like now that I am an adult. I am nearly as old as she was when she died, and as I approach her now eternal age, she seems every day less a parent to me. She is instead a women with whom I have some things in common, who might be a friend if the circumstances were right, with whom I might talk about cooking or books or being pregnant. And in this way I relate to her more now than I have in nearly three decades. She becomes more present to me now than in all the years that have passed since she died.

When I was a child the tragedy of her death was that I was motherless. The weight of her absence dominated my life until adulthood. My thoughts of her revolved around the pain of my longing for her. She was more an unfulfilled desire than a person. I hadn't the time to grow out of this childish and self-involved view of her before she died and without her it was impossible to move beyond it. Now, as I realize that it won't be long before I'll be older than she ever was, and as I prepare to be a mother myself, the full scope of the tragedy of her dying twenty-eight years ago becomes apparent. Now capable of viewing it from her perspective, I think about how frightened and angry she must have been to die so young, after having lived only a half a life. My heart breaks at the thought of the fear and sadness she felt as she realized that she was leaving her children behind, without knowing what would happen to them.

When my child is born, when I hold her in my arms, when I look into her eyes or see her smile, when I hear her laugh, I will experience the joy that my mother felt at living all these things. And having these experiences in common with her, I will come to know her through them, and I will have found her again.

Trousers, again

On Saturday, N and I went to Naples to shop for clothes. The jeans I found last month at the mercato americano have been holding me over, but they won't for much longer. Like my fellow expat Michellenea, who came clean last Thursday, I am just over three months pregnant. I still fit into most of my clothes, and probably will for at least another month, but N and I have so few opportunities to shop that we decided to make good use of some free time and buy some maternity-wear basics.

I was looking forward to shopping for maternity clothes because I thought that my "plus-size" body would pose fewer problems, given that pregnant women tend to be large. (For those of you who haven't read my jeans post, while I am a smallish medium in the United States, I wear taglie comode, literally comfortable sizes, here.) Well, I was mistaken, but before I get into that, I'd like to recount what happened on our way to the Prénatal on Via Roma. A pigeon crapped on me. Ever since seeing a girl crying as her friends picked poo out of her hair in the bathroom of a D.C. restaurant, I've feared finding myself under a crapping bird. I reacted very well, though, better than I ever imagined I would, probably because the poo landed only on my shirt. I'm surprised at how quickly it dried. By the time I found a tissue in my handbag, it was too dry to be wiped off. Fortunately we were only about thirty meters from the shop when it happened, and I figured that I'd just buy a shirt there and change into it before leaving.

Once in the shop, I began to look through the racks of trousers, checking their hems first to make sure they didn't have tapered legs. Most of them did. I wondered to myself, "are these people serious?" I don't think pregnant women should have to hide or even minimize the appearance of their large bellies, but why should they have to wear trousers that will make them seem even larger? I finally found a few pairs that were straight-leg or boot-cut, and tried them on, together with a few blouses, a skirt and a dress. Everything but the trousers fit well. The problem? The same one as before, and honestly, why did I think it would be otherwise? They were too tight in the thighs. Looking at myself in those trousers, I imagined what I would look like months from now, my belly filling out the huge gaping front, and beneath it, my legs looking like a couple of plump sausages. Unacceptable. I looked around the shop again, picking out every pair I could find without tapered legs and in the end I found three that fit my massive legs. I don't like any of them very much, but they'll do.

At the register, when I told the sales clerk to set one of the shirts aside because I'd be wearing it home, N explained, "Because a pigeon pooped on her." I wondered if the huge green and white splotch beneath my left shoulder had already tipped her off. "Porta fortuna!" she exclaimed, as did everyone else who heard the pigeon story that day. Silly me, thinking it was just really unpleasant. I changed into the new shirt and immediately felt strange because its shape made me look much more pregnant than I am. It felt odd to be so publicly pregnant when up until then the only people who knew were the ones I'd told. It was nice, though, to see all the sympathetic faces when, bloated from the pizza I had for lunch and tired after being on my feet for a few hours, I began to walk very slowly and with obvious difficulty.

Columns

While walking in the center of town, I often come upon spoliate columns, both antique and medieval, that have been incorporated into more recent buildings. Every now and then, when I'm convinced that I've seen them all, I'll turn a corner down a street I've never noticed before, and there's a new column, different in some way from all the others. These two are my favorite:





















On the left, a truncated shaft with a Corinthian capital. On the right, a shaft with a simple capital has been combined with a very nice base, completely out of proportion.

Here are another two:




















At left, a short column engaged in a wall. On the right, a slender, leaning column with a medieval capital.

July 1, 2006

One year ago today, N and I were married at the town hall, to give me status as a legal resident while we prepared for our church wedding in October. Here we are during the civil ceremony:We're the two people seated at the center of the table. After the ceremony, we had a lunch at our house for all the relatives who came to the wedding. And then it rained. There's a saying here: "Sposa bagnata, sposa fortunata," or "A rained-on bride is a fortunate bride." Honestly, I didn't need the rain to tell me that. (But Mother Nature must have thought so because it rained the day of our second wedding, too.)