Goodbye, Sweet Caramels!

I am alone in the house for the first time in over two weeks. Conventional wisdom says that it should be a quiet relief, but actually it feels kind of creepy.  Good thing Bella Dog is here to make me feel not completely without companionship.

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Just as I typed the last sentence, dear old Bella Dog came and barked at me that she needed to go outside. Good thing, too. It’s gorgeous, and maybe without her help I wouldn’t have gone to walk in the bright sunlight reflecting off a billion snowflakes on the fields. It’s very crisp and clear, and it makes me hope that our friends the Caramel Family might have had a good view of Alps from the plane when they flew off today. They left this morning, and that is making me feel wistful, too.
I think we’d all nearly forgotten what a beautiful thing it is to have a friend to jaw with, without thinking of vocab and proper verb tenses and even aside from grammar, just knowing that you have likes and dislikes in common and you can chat and discuss them all over again. 
Well, we hadn’t actually forgotten what that was like, but we’d been stoically doing without.
Then we had two wonderful weeks of chatting with friends and hanging out and playing in the snow and feeling loved without trying. It was a much needed antidote for what ailed us.
What ailed us was fall and sinus infections and bronchitis and dark early mornings and school and no friends and dark evenings and work schedules and tricky Swiss logistics and discouragement and Everything. Maybe you noticed that things got rather quiet here on the blog for a bit. 
Anyway, there I was, and then God sent us some friends to be with us. And they truly just wanted to be with us. They didn’t even want to sightsee much, which I had a really hard time comprehending. (still do – I always want to See Everything!) We did take them on a little sightseeing tour which I’ll post about, but otherwise the Caramels seemed very content hanging out in our little village, living our life with us, playing in the snow and eating LOTS of Swiss chocolate. It was so encouraging.
And now they’re gone. They left on the early morning train with Zeus, to relieve me of driving to and from the airport on the 7 inches of fresh snow that fell yesterday.
I determined this morning not to be glum, but to find solace in the housework to be done, in the details of putting the house back together, in order and routine. On the white board in the kitchen I wrote, “23 Days Until Christmas!” in big letters to remind all of us of that big holiday we can look forward to. Hermes and I cooked up pumpkin and smooshed it through the food mill for future pumpkin pies and muffins.

Then we went outside and made snow angels in the fresh snow.



While they were here, the Caramels helped us celebrate Thanksgiving. What a great holiday! Totally and completely American. One of the kids’ teachers asked me, “So does that replace Christmas for Americans then?” Um…No.  A girl in Marina’s class said to her wistfully, “Oh, I’ve always wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving, but my family won’t!”  ???  Odd, but had we known ahead of time, maybe we would have invited her over.
We celebrated on Sunday afternoon since the kids had school and Zeus work on Thursday as usual.  We roasted two chickens because I wasn’t sure where to find a whole turkey, and I was pretty certain a large one wouldn’t fit in my ‘cute’ little Swiss oven. (The ovens were cuter when I didn’t have four children to feed.) Mrs. Caramel whipped up delicious stuffing from scratch (!) and made her very yummy sweet potato casserole with marshmallows that I had found here once at a rather extravagant price and tucked away.

I don’t think of myself as very traditionalist when it comes to food, but I must say this meal (chicken standing in for turkey notwithstanding) tasted like Comfort. Yum!

On Tuesday we took the Caramel Family for a little walk in the forest. My girls were at school but the boys had had fevers the day before. I bundled them up well and made them get 15 minutes of fresh air.

The forest was so pretty, and this was before our most recent snowfall! People keep saying how unusual it is to have this much snow this early, but I don’t know if quite believe them. I do feel like I should have been better equipped with more snowboots and parkas for all. Hmmm.
Anyway, the forest is deciduous and so very different from the PNW Evergreen forests that I am used to, dark and mysterious. This one is lighter and brighter, especially with all the snow on the ground.

And finally, a couple of introductions:
A petit bonhomme that Artemis made in cooking class. Isn’t he sweet? He is very seasonal for St. Nicholas Day coming up on December 5th, and he and his friends are showing up in local bakeries. This one showed up in our kitchen on Wednesday afternoon. We took pictures and then he got gobbled!
 
And lastly…I just got a new fangled thingabob called an iPhone – don’t know if you’ve heard of it yet?  It is very sleek and shiny…but felt almost slippery and potentially fragile, and since I wasn’t about to start wearing it around on my belt and since I am not always the gentlest on phones, Zeus got me: The Defender Case. I wasn’t sensing red or hot pink, so he ended up getting me white. Which I like…but…its boxy whiteness kept reminding me of something...  Finally I put my finger on it! A Storm Trooper!
But Storm Trooper didn't seem like a good name for a girl's phone. So, I started calling it “Stormy.”
So everyone, meet my new friend, Stormy. or Stormie? or Stormee??  She follows me everywhere…

Hunters in the Snow

More snow is falling. We’ve had several inches, more is now coming down in the middle of the night, and the forecast for this week predicts even more. Here is what it looks like outside the windows right now (well, not right now, because I am writing at night.)

It makes me think of Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow. One of the houses even has the same shape. Today on the way to church, we really did see a Hunter in the Snow. But he was wearing bright orange, and his dog was white with spots.

The neighborhood sledding hill with a small neighborhood sledding person. Our kids have spent a lot of happy time out there.

 

I always suspected that every twig of this tree was beautiful. Now I am certain.

In the orchard in back of our house.

A few apples still left on the tree. I really wonder if this is what inspired shiny red Christmas tree balls.

icicles. because they are so pointy and frozen.

At the end of last week we celebrated Artemis’ 14th birthday. With Legos and a bottle of nice ol’ wine.

The Caramel Family is here visiting and they helped us celebrate. It has been a wonderful morale booster for us all to have visiting friends.

Saturday we had a girls’ outing to Belfort in France. We did a little shopping and beret purchasing…

and then we restored ourselves in a French cafe.

 

My treat – too pretty not to take a picture of, but not too pretty not to eat!

Back in our Tracks

It’s been a little quiet here on the blog, and I’ll tell you why. Coming back to Switzerland, to Boncourt, after the unreal sunny warm visit to Sardinia was hard. A very cold snap arrived at the same time we did, and we stepped off the plane to cold and foggy gray. Being near the sea had brought us associations with Puget Sound and home, and somehow, it seemed that we should board that plane and get off in Seattle. It was rather shocking when we didn’t.
The return to school for the kids last week was also hard, the mornings that much darker getting up, school and language still a puzzle. And now Zeus is away working long days, and we miss him. I spent a lot of time last week missing the simplicity of homeschooling and agonizing over whether or not this all was a good decision.
Fall is a time for hunkering in, building fires, reading good books, game nights, cooking savory meals – in short, for enjoying all the comforts of Home. But when you are far from one home, and don’t yet feel like the place you are living is home, then you feel a little lost and homesick. And that is what we are all feeling.
Towards the end of the week, the Lord prompted me to take myself by the scruff of the neck and do a little shaking: late October is like this, even when you’re homeschooling, don’t you remember? You need some exercise! Cease overthinking, stop pondering how you feel about everything, count your blessings, and do the next thing.
So I got a little exercise, worked on some house projects I’ve been procrastinating about, and tried not to Ponder Everything. God is my Home, and my loving family is around me. Yes, I am homesick, but wallowing around in it doesn’t help anything much. There was a song we sang at church on Sunday with good words in French that were something about being and growing and rejoicing wherever God has put you.
This week has been better – no school-induced tears, I think (although maybe I shouldn’t say – the day is not over yet), and there were some encouraging academic reports coming in: a German test with only 1/2 of the answers wrong instead of 3/4 wrong!  Progress!
So that’s about where we are.
And here are a few pictures to help tell the rest of the story.

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Will Easy Jet pay me for the Advertising?

First of all, because it’s just not something you see everyday: the Alps from the airplane. The rest of Switzerland is buried under a sea of clouds.

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Happiness is a warm crock-pot

Remember my trip to Basel and my fruitless search for a crock-pot? Well, even before I wrote that, for my birthday a few friends had gone together and got me an Amazon France “Cheques-cadeau” with which to purchase one. Here it is – Mmmm!!!!  

I’m not sure why, but the thought of spending this year without a slow cooker brought me great feelings of anxiety. There is great security arriving home from church, or a soccer game, or just an afternoon of errands knowing there there is hot food waiting and ready to go. The first Sunday I got it fired up with some chicken cacciatore, I immediately felt the desire to invite a bunch of people over for lunch – that’s what a crock pot does for me. I’ve used it at least once a week since. Thank you, friends!
At the moment this photo was taken, it was full of pulled pork, which is a favorite of everyone in the family – 6 out of 6 – amazing! Our small village store had no BBQ sauce, so I had to make some, morphing several recipes that I found online.  It turned out okay – sweet and sour and a little too tomato-y. If you have an easy and good bbq sauce recipe that doesn’t require a bunch of unusual ingredients, I would love to have it!

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Memories of the Beach

The week we got back from vacation, we bought Hermes some new fall shoes. They came in a shoe box. And shoes boxes, as you know, are meant to be made into dioramas!  I love dioramas, and I love making them with my kiddos. When Artemis was in kindergarten, we made a lovely one of the solar system with all the planets hanging in space. I used to think of that homeschooling year as a failure, but now I know that if we were making dioramas of outer space, it can’t have been too bad.
This one is “Underwater Sardinia.” One of the stores here – the Migros – has started passing out a pack of fishy stickers for every 10 francs you spend. You are supposed to collect them in a special book, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t even realize they were stickers at first. I just thought, as they lay there next to the empty shoe box, Hey! This could keep Hermes busy for a little while!
And it did! He was very happy as he watercolored the sides of the box blue and the bottom yellow (for sand). The rock is a real Sardinian one which seemed to have fallen into my bag somehow.(!) And the shells are also real ones we brought back that Hermes painstakingly glued into place. Before it dried up a bit, the parsley looked very much like seaweed – that was Athena’s idea – she is so wise.

The fishy on the string has a different fishy on the other side, so you see both when it spins in the breeze.
And, yes, just so you know, I do know that the proper word is ‘fish’ and the plural form is ‘fish’ lest you think otherwise. But now that we’re all sure about that I’ll go back to ‘fishy’.

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Jazzy Dog Car

Zeus has spent the month of October working hard at his new job, faithfully commuting back and forth while we played on the beach. Upon our return, in order to facilitate a commute to Basel that is an hour each way instead of two hours each way by train, we bought another car. It is not at all new but had really low mileage. Er…kilometerage? Apparently it really did belong to a little old lady who only drove it to church on Sundays. Or something like that.
It is a Honda Jazz. Which Zeus Mr. Carman tells me is called a Honda Fit in the States. A Honda Fit sounds like a granola bar to me, so I am glad it is called a Jazz. Only when he first told me, I thought it was called a Jazzy. Which made me think of my cousin Christy’s dog Jazzy.
Now Jazzy Dog, who has since passed on to a fluffy couch pillow in the sky, wasn’t exactly what you would call a “friendly” dog. She was a little Yorkshire terrier, and when I met her, she was already advanced in years and pretty set in her ways, perhaps much like the lady whose Honda this was. Anyway, Jazzy Dog didn’t like to be pet by anyone who was not part of her family, and if you tried she would bite you. But her hair was so soft and silky that it was hard not to try anyway. If you were very quiet, snuck up gently on her from behind, and petted her softly she would think you were Christy and you could get away with it for a little while. Until Christy came in the room and Jazzy saw her. Then she’d look startled and whirl around on you. Caught in the act!  Arf arf arf arf arf!!! 
A n y w a y….. the point is that when I thought the car was a “Jazzy”, I started calling it the Jazzy Dog. And it kind of stuck.  Zeus is not very pleased that the car is named after a crotchety little ol’ dog, but I can’t help it. When he is around, we try to use the other name we hurriedly drummed up instead: The Silver Bullet. Now that has a speedy ring to it, doesn’t it? But we all know that it’s really The Jazzy Dog Car.

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The Vista ~ La Vue

And then there is a morning like this one, and when we’re cold and tired and fussy about the kids having to leave at dawn, and then we open the door and stop in our tracks because of The Beauty. This was the view from the front door, about 7:45 a.m. a few days ago. Not for the first time, I wish I were a painter.

A little more Sardinia

When we went Fishy Peeping the other day, all while I enjoyed watching them grazing seaweed off the rocks, somewhere in the back of my mind was drifting the thought, hey Fishy, you seem very fresh…I bet you would be tasty.

I felt kind of bad about that, but when I confessed, Katie told me she often has similar thoughts underwater. We haven’t had fish in a while…Fish sounds nice!

So Saturday Paolo went down to the fish market and got some nice fresh mullet. This was especially interesting since this was one of the kinds of fish I had seen seen swimming around and about which I had my tasty thoughts. Paolo baked them on a bed of salt, covered with more salt. It was simple and delicious!

 

Here they are, our hosts, Katie and Paolo, Diego, and Anita.

 

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A Visit to Antonica ~ Antonica is Katie’s neighbor, a genuine older Sardinian lady, complete with braided bun and long black skirt. We ran into her in the street one day, and she invited us for coffee the next day.  She has a typical Sardinian house with the front door right on the street and a courtyard garden in the back. 

She made us delicious espresso and we chatted, Katie translating for me the gist of their conversation in Italian. She told us how she met her husband of 44 years who passed away last year. His mother had passed away and he lived on his own, but his sister came every day to keep house for him. Every day on his way to his work with the cows he passed her house and said, “Bon Giorno” and “Buona Sera.” Finally he had one of his friends tell her he was interested. Apparently her reaction was positive, because she said he was ready to marry her the next day! His sister was tired of keeping house for him, and he needed a wife! 

Signora Antonica said that maybe they weren’t very wise, since they hardly knew each other when the got married, but that she couldn’t complain. He had been a good husband, and they had had 44 good years together.

 

After our coffee, Signora showed us the traditional Sardinian baskets she has woven. They are made from beach reeds and raffia. She is saving some of these for her 7 year old granddaughter who has already asked for them and staked her claim.

She was very welcoming and friendly and offered to let me try on her traditional Sardinian costume to take a picture. Unfortunately we didn’t have time that day.

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And now, a few more views of the Sardinia we have been enjoying:

twilit road with pampas grass

an artichoke farm

prickly pear cactus

 

cacti along a village road - people use them for hedges

sheep making milk to make Pecorino cheese

volunteer cactus in the neighbor’s gutter

in Katie’s garden

feeding the horses that live across the road

the gang on a windy-day outing 

because we are both blond, everywhere we went people assumed Katie and I were sisters. No, but good friends for nearly thirty years!

a natural arch that we went to see just before the rain began pouring and we sought refuge in a cafe and hot chocolate  

dinner time – why are we all raising our hands? I can no longer recall

Apollo bored enough to start reading on the Kindle

a Signor on his bicycle – unfortunately I was too shy and slow to take the photo from the front – he was quite impressive and robusto!

traditional looking lady with head shawl –  shh…don’t tell Zeus I took this one while driving – I did slow waaaayy down

Pimpe the Gato found a sleeping boy warm & cozy

town square – Piazza Eleonora – in Oristano

 

some of the ubiquitous trash that has been thrown along Sardinian roadsides

Unripe oranges hanging over a traditionally built wall – constructed from handmade mud bricks

Pampas Grass Parade

  

late afternoon haystacks - made me think of Monet

me and my tribe – tomorrow we head back ‘home’

in addition to beaching and visiting, we’ve almost finished reading Percy Jackson aloud and the kids have played several games of Monopoly – the Italian version – so when Diego wasn’t playing, I had to give them my best guess of what the Imprevisiti (Chance) card was saying:

Andante in prigione direttamente e senza passare dal <<Via!>> -- Go directly to prison without passing Go.

And now it’s time to go and the Sardinian bird says Arrivederci!