UNCERTAIN TIMES
After a week of tearful goodbyes, we left our Tuscan home at dawn; no looking back over the garden gate, just the long pulling away, watching familiar landmarks slip by as we headed to Florence airport in total silence.
How do we measure time? Ten years of living on that farm has floated away and is now replaced with life in London. People ask us if we miss Tuscany and we say, “No.” And as we say that, I wonder how can that be possible? Ten years of medieval beauty – gone. Ten years of speaking Italian – gone. Ten years of living on a farm – gone.
I remember writing in these essays – many years ago – how I would never live in a city again. I preached about the need to return to nature; to breathe fresh air; to revel in open space and solitude. How many times in life do we speak with such certainty, so convinced that today’s truth will hold forever?
I do miss the ping-pong table, bought in the summer of 2020 when, during the pandemic, we were grateful to be living surrounded by thousands of acres of farmland. We played year-round, even on the coldest winter day, donning hats and gloves. In the early months we’d be in stitches, laughing at our lack of skill. Over the course of two years we got pretty good. Yet while we continued to enjoy playing, we laughed less: there is a price for everything. There is a kitchen knife I miss, the way it fit in my hand and every once in a while, am surprised that I didn’t bring it with me. And now and again I catch a glimpse of Donna Beatrice, the 19th Century bust of a prayerful soul who sat atop the wardrobe next to our bed, guarding us through all those nights. I thought about bringing her here, many times, but in the end, I felt she belonged there.
Much that I once thought I’d miss – even thought I couldn’t live without – turns out not to be true. An example would be the 2 acre Mediterranean garden that I created over the course of 9 years. What started as a creative endeavour became a burden I could no longer do justice to. I could never have imagined then what a relief it would be to now to have just a small terrace with 3 pots of jasmine, climbing hydrangea, and winter clematis.
Over the course of our last month there, we watched art disappear from the walls, books and dishes leave their shelves, all packed for London. What I had imagined would be a sad process in reality felt like an unburdening. Objects collected and placed with love suddenly became unnecessary. It was at once a relief and disorienting.
Two days before we left the moving van arrived and in 3 hours, what had taken us 3 weeks to pack was loaded and driven away.
We arrived in London with 2 suitcases of clothes, which is precisely what we left New York with 10 years earlier. And thank goodness that’s all we had to unpack until the moving van would clear customs, because we were emotionally, physically and mentally exhausted. However, what we had thought to be a well-organized, easy transition turned out to be fraught with Murphy’s Law. For 4 weeks pretty much anything that could go wrong, did, from leaking boilers, burst pipes, failed deliveries, a failed dental implant, 2 weeks of crippling back pain and finally, both of us coming down with a respiratory virus which knocked us out for 2 weeks, cancelling plans for New Year’s Eve and a catered dinner for 24 London friends which I had been planning for months and which was to have been the opening celebration of our life in London as well as the closing scene in the documentary about us, filmed throughout all of 2022.
When I was a little girl, my mother scolded me for getting a small stain on my white dress. I remember being surprised to learn how differently she and I viewed the world. She saw the stain as ruining the perfection of the dress. I saw it as the thing that made the rest of the dress more perfect. The opening month of this new phase of our life certainly didn’t go as planned and yet the adversity only made us more certain that we’d made the right decision to be here. Sure, being sick brought disappointment but it also brought 2 invaluable gifts. One was that we had no choice but to finally stop; to surrender to much-needed rest. The other, most precious thing it brought us was the kindness of friends. One of the reasons we left Tuscany was the lack of community, the lack of support during the awful months of my injury and recovery, as well as being an hour’s drive from a hospital one never wanted to be in again.
When we emailed our friends that the dinner party was cancelled several showed up over the next week bringing us home-cooked meals and one of them took Joel to a nearby hospital to get his lungs checked out. These acts of kindness, of friendship, were qualities the absence of which no amount of Tuscan beauty could make up for.
As I write this essay, I am sitting by the fire in our living room. I look out the French doors and see that night has fallen. Joel will be home soon from our exciting new studio, a 5 minute walk from here. I made my first drawing of the year there while the filmmakers were birthing their first child, just 15 minutes away.
When I opened my journal to begin this essay, it opened to this page:
I have travelled with the same suitcase since we left America 10 years ago. Its luggage tag has carried 3 interchangeable addresses labels, one each for New York, London and Tuscany. Now there are 2. This one I decided to keep along with the last 2 roses in the garden as a reminder that life is full of endings. That what seems so certain today, may not be so tomorrow. Perhaps letting go of the need for certainty can allow us to rise up more easily to greet today’s possibilities.
I hope these January days have been treating you kindly.
With love
Maggie
