tease

so let me tell you a little bit about the farm. it is run by an american woman named edith who came to italy 35 years ago as an art history doctoral student. she's been here since. la fonte ferrata is half organic farm, half retreat 'place,' and edith herself follows a modified verson of st. benedict's rule for hermits. she is delightful.

edith has several cats, one of which got half its face ripped off by a fox or boar on the day i arrived. while it convalesces, the kittens that belong to it have been adopted by a surrogate calico. the little ones often...how to put this - meld their three miniature feline frames into a single sphere, which they then roll up next to the calico flank. it's impossilbe to tell which tail, ear, or muzzle belongs to whom. cute is a word too brief to describe this.

the adriatic sea is about 5 km away, and saturday night i found the perfect spot to view the sunset. next to the olive grove, there is a big fig tree and two long rows of lavender. the lavender looks like something out of dr. seuss. it is beautiful, but simultaneously so spiky and purply alien that i actually got a little freaked out thinking a sneech or lorax would materialize over my shoulder. but, for better or worse, we stayed this side of whoville and nothing more spectacular happened than the slow dunk of the ripening plum-sun into the sea. it was a fierce orange against the lavender, and the cypresses in the distance were silhouetted...I was like, dude - can we spread this out a little bit? can we donate 5% of this beauty to the krispy kreme parking lot at the corner of jefferson and 15A?

i do a lot of solitary work, but a couple times a week some neighbors come over to lend a hand. danielle is quebecoise, and has been living in italy for 8 years. french is her native tongue, and her english is excellent, but in trying to negotiate all the different idioms she sometimes makes these mistakes which are made more hilarious by the general context of fluency. above all, these instances make me feel better about being an amateur language user here myself. today, she tried to ask me if my time in italy is part of research for a dissertation or a thesis. and there, right at the end, she fell back on an anglicized version of the french 'la thèse' and ultimately came out with, 'so, are you here for a tease?'

i laughed. yes. i am. sunset with a side of cypress and lavender - that is a tease. whatever i will be able to accomplish doing research on dante or translating short stories, it's just a tease for what's really out there in both areas. more broadly, i think danielle hit right on it: thinking about the best essays i've read, the thesis - the main idea, the point - is so often just a tease. all the detail and example and description is so much more delicious than the summing up. the idea? that's great. the experience? better. let me rephrase. the idea of 'surrogacy/adoption' is beautiful - it means you can have more than one family. but the idea is nothing compared with a ball of kittens warming themselves at the breast of a strange cat.