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I just want to fly

Nostalgia crept in again in the night and this morning I realized  I've been traveling in Italy not fifteen but twenty years.  Sometimes I wake up with a million questions about my life now verus my life then:  Who am I? What am I? Where am I? When will I? How will I? Why am I? Still here? 

Something about those five cloves of garlic, two onions and 100 grams of spices and a glass of red Monkey wine kept me up most of the night feeling stuck in a parochial village I wanted out of.  The dialogs from all those Westerns I watched as a child on rainy Saturdays spliced  in my head with Sugar Ray, Bob Marley and Frank Sinatra.  "This town ain't big enough for the two of us!"  "I just want to fly!" "Exodus." 

 "When I was 35, it was a very good year, a very good year for blue-blooded girls of independent means." 

My first visit to an Italian open air market took place on the Rialto in Venice.  I ventured out at noon from Ponte Accademia on a sunny Saturday in May just before the Vogalonga rowing festival began. My objective was make lunch for a group of doctors, students and professors. The market was closing and in some language other than Italian I asked for herbs to make a spaghetti sauce.  The fruttivendolo must have thought I was crazy and simply gave me every last herb she had left as by this time the market had finished for the day.  

The language of flowers and herbs is guidebook to my life so far.  Rosemary, sage, oregano, marjoram, cumin, coriander, in that order.  I mistook rembrance for wisdom while really searching for substance, joy and happiness. I recently discovered courage but am not sure how to use it everyday and have to learn to use festivity, have no hesitation with fidelity and the ever elusive hidden worth although few find it popular in Milan. 

I can plan a class down to the nanosecond but struggle with the lesson plan for life when I am not meeting up with 100 faces a day.  A Cuban exile who knew something about giving up the past used to tell me when I was thinking of leaving four job offers to follow the man of my dreams to Europe : "the more details you plan, the better it will turn out." 

About this time, I went rock climbing in the Texas hill country near San Antonio.  After, my friends and I stopped at the HEB grocery to admire and pick from the six-foot high hills of red bell peppers. Just as my friends asked "So what are you going to do with those peppers?" the automatic exit door slid open I felt a draft through my pockets.  My friends were laughing. My pants were splitting. Apparently,  my pants ripped as we crab-walked down the boulders in the hill country. 

Does flying by the seat of my pants leave you exposed? What makes a great red sauce? What do you rely on most, herbs or spices?

Day Four - Recipe four

Little round courgette by the artist formerly known as zucchini