T-Minus 15 Days Till Departure.
Still waiting for my independent worker visa, which in all its heavy paperwork glory, sits somewhere on some civil servant's desk at the DC consulates office at the Italian Embassy in Washington. Living dangerously, I have booked my flight to Florence for February 17th. My friends and future roommate, (who is three weeks ahead of me on the Great Florentine Escape Plan) keep asking me "Are your excited???????
To be honest....I don't think I can be anything at the moment because everything I feel is mixed and simmered together like some half finished risotto. It is as if I am on autopilot this feeling of do, do, do, go, go, go, pick up dribbles of old dusty drawers, old keys and safety pins, green glass candle holders dropped in the trash because lord knows they won't sell at my upcoming fire sale and I've a mountain of sh*t to dissolve and discard before I can build again. I'm trying to absorb everything, (and ignore the upcoming separation from the two most important people in my life) but like the rice....there is only so much one can take in without time and patience.
This trip has been so long in coming the biggest sensation I feel is apprehension. Fear that all my memories, sewn into the sinews of my fibre like the tough rope of sailboat rigging, will not be strong enough to carry me past my foreignness and safely into this new harbor, I want so desperately to feel at home in.
It isn't the language, or the work that I fear, these things I have enough confidence in. No my fear comes from worrying about how I will manage away from my kiddos and the fact that I want so badly to feel I have "come home" and a piece of me skeptically worries if I will always be cursed with my wanderers soul or at least that is what I have chosen to call it. That feeling that I will always have that sinking suspicion that I am outside of everyone else's looking in. Always creating, in my slightly off-centered mind, a world of rose corals just better, a days walk from where my itchy feet seem stuck in cement.
All I know, is that if I ever felt myself even remotely content and without wandering feet, it has been smelling the warming chestnuts baking in Milano on cold grey November evenings, or the simple hand of god, painting not fine canvases, but simple ochre coloured houses or shaping the cobbled curve of a street with sun beamed bicycles, dropped outside kitchen doors, garlic filled and coolly inviting.
Ruth Orkin once photographed a girl walking hurriedly past a series of appreciative men, taken in Firenze, not far from the hustle of the train station. she captured this girl in all of her rapture and fear, an image of her alone and scared, yet strangely committed to making her way in Florence, alone yet admired and head held defiantly high. she has always reminded me a bit of myself, and now like her, I am about to be "An American Girl in Italy".
a presto,
~sparrow
To be honest....I don't think I can be anything at the moment because everything I feel is mixed and simmered together like some half finished risotto. It is as if I am on autopilot this feeling of do, do, do, go, go, go, pick up dribbles of old dusty drawers, old keys and safety pins, green glass candle holders dropped in the trash because lord knows they won't sell at my upcoming fire sale and I've a mountain of sh*t to dissolve and discard before I can build again. I'm trying to absorb everything, (and ignore the upcoming separation from the two most important people in my life) but like the rice....there is only so much one can take in without time and patience.
This trip has been so long in coming the biggest sensation I feel is apprehension. Fear that all my memories, sewn into the sinews of my fibre like the tough rope of sailboat rigging, will not be strong enough to carry me past my foreignness and safely into this new harbor, I want so desperately to feel at home in.
It isn't the language, or the work that I fear, these things I have enough confidence in. No my fear comes from worrying about how I will manage away from my kiddos and the fact that I want so badly to feel I have "come home" and a piece of me skeptically worries if I will always be cursed with my wanderers soul or at least that is what I have chosen to call it. That feeling that I will always have that sinking suspicion that I am outside of everyone else's looking in. Always creating, in my slightly off-centered mind, a world of rose corals just better, a days walk from where my itchy feet seem stuck in cement.
All I know, is that if I ever felt myself even remotely content and without wandering feet, it has been smelling the warming chestnuts baking in Milano on cold grey November evenings, or the simple hand of god, painting not fine canvases, but simple ochre coloured houses or shaping the cobbled curve of a street with sun beamed bicycles, dropped outside kitchen doors, garlic filled and coolly inviting.
Ruth Orkin once photographed a girl walking hurriedly past a series of appreciative men, taken in Firenze, not far from the hustle of the train station. she captured this girl in all of her rapture and fear, an image of her alone and scared, yet strangely committed to making her way in Florence, alone yet admired and head held defiantly high. she has always reminded me a bit of myself, and now like her, I am about to be "An American Girl in Italy".
a presto,
~sparrow
posted by ~Sparrow | Monday, February 03, 2003
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