Roots

Two years ago today Mabel and I said goodbye to L.A. and hello to Florence, Italy, when we boarded the plane for our flight to our new home.

Leaving Los Angeles, one last ride in our car

I worried about her traveling for so long in the cargo hold below me: the noise, darkness, items shifting about.  After all, my brother's dog, Sparky, made a similar flight from L.A. to Brugge, Belgium, a few years earlier.  He went deaf from the flight but enjoyed the best year of his life living in Europe.  A dog's life is pretty good here because people in Europe welcome dogs to go almost everywhere.  No need to leave them behind anywhere.


Mabel is a real trooper.  She acclimated immediately to her new environs.  Never will I forget the picture I keep in my head when two airport employees hand-delivered Mabel to me, still in her crate, at the Florence airport.  She was pert and alert.  In the taxi ride to our new digs, Mabel rooted her tushy to the seat of the car between the taxi driver and me as she extended herself as tall as possible to look over the dashboard and out the window at all she would soon get to explore. She quickly spotted sights and smells centuries old that she filed away for future exploration.  

Jetlagged, Mabel naps with her baby after arriving to Italy

Mabel is a lucky girl.  Everyone does their part to spoil her, and she is adored by all.


It can be an exciting and scary adventure to uproot yourself from everyone you know and everything that is familiar and comfortable and transplant yourself to a different country with a foreign language. To move to and live in a city that welcomes thousands of tourists every day makes getting close to the locals even more of a challenge because the locals measure their roots by generations, not days. Why invest in a friendship with people who come but do not stay?


Not every day is la dolce vita (the sweet life/the good life), of course, but the obstacles and challenges are, for me, worth the deeply felt gratitude, joy, and happiness I now experience. Sure, I continue to find my way here.  Slowly and con calma, everything begins to fall into place.  The life of the expat has its own process and rigors to endure -- many days present new and different challenges -- but its objective remains true to our passion: to arrive safely on the other side of the wide chasm that separates our past lives from the future we envision and strive to create.

Radici (Roots)

My roots grow deeper as I make Florence, Italy, my home.

How I spent Christmas Eve

A picture tells a thousand words, and this blurry photo best describes Christmas Eve. Words like movement, energetic, chaotic, kinetic, conductive, dramatic are a few that come to my mind.  Let me try to explain.

It is Christmas Eve. We are three American women. Being in Italy, we invite an Italian man. He is brave because more than just American, we are all empowered California women. Sasha (photo) is our host. Her monolocali studio apartment is the scene. Her entire kitchen is what you see in the photo. Two electric burners with not enough space between the burners to use both at the same time if the pot is too large and about six inches of counter space and a sink. Basta and nothing more. The apartment is not designed to throw five-course dinner parties for more than two people. For those of you who do not know, you cannot blow dry your hair and run the washing machine at the same time without blowing a fuse.

Sasha is a chef and famous baker. Watching her cook is like watching a symphony conductor. With passion and emotion, she creates what she wants, what she sees in her mind.

The table is decorated creatively, with typical Italian food ingredients: a bouquet of Italian parsley, plum tomatoes on the vine and lemons that divide the eating places and more including votive candles, and bottles of cracked pepper serve as candle holders for the stick candles. Resourceful. Antipasto and crostini are served and next homemade ravioli stuffed with ricotta cheese and lemon in a sage-butter sauce is our primo piatto. Oops! The electricity goes out. By candlelight Sasha prepares a salad of Belgian endive, radicchio, fennel, and Gorgonzola cheese. Eventually, the proprietor returns from his Christmas Eve dinner to turn on the power. While preparing the mussels and clams to open in water to be added to the garlic-tomato-red wine sauce and fresh pasta, the electricity goes out again. Without electrical power the rest of the night, somehow dinner miraculously comes together. And of course, there is dessert and coffee and a digestivo. Every bite is delicious.

Such a small space -- if you need to pass another, everyone has to file out of the way -- with no counter space, losing main ingredients, losing electricity twice, having the Duomo "crazy" church bells peal every 15 minutes so loud we cannot hear each other, there are many obstacles to overcome. It is difficult to paint the picture of what it is like, but it is crazy!

We overcome all the obstacles. Without electrical energy, there was plenty of electricity and energy amongst us.  It is a special Christmas Eve dinner. We are together. No one is alone. We laugh. We share. We make new memories. We agree that this Christmas Eve is unlike any other any of us has ever had, and that no one of us will ever forget.
-- Josslyn / 'Giosalina'
Florence, Italy