It takes a village

or a small town, at least.

Prologue

At the end of 1970, my parents and my sister and I landed in Rome. I was seven, my sister was four, and my father spent most of the next year and a half travelling the world for work. My mother didn’t speak Italian and didn’t drive. There were no cheap flights, no cheap phone calls, no TV in English. Over the next decades, we went “home” to Glasgow every two years or so, and some of our aunts and uncles and cousins came out to visit, although it wasn’t until my daughter was born at the end on the 80s that my grandmother visited. My sister and I missed growing up surrounded by family: we had so many cousins, and rarely saw them. I am so grateful that my only-child daughter is so close to her cousins; talks to them all the time, sees them several times a year, loves them as though they were her siblings. I am always, but particularly this year, so grateful for family - the ones who live in the same town as me; the ones who are a plane ride away, and who have been here constantly this year, whenever they have been needed; my cousins and aunt and almost cousin always in touch, my chosen family both here and not here, also constants. We came here as a tiny nuclear family unit, but we came to a country where family and community are everything, and it has let us thrive.

Wednesday

Wake up before 5. Decide not to try to sleep more, so stagger into the kitchen to make a cup of lemon and ginger tea, and a thimble of black coffee. Remember I oiled all my work surfaces and everything is now piled up on the kitchen table. Put them all back in place while I wait for the kettle to boil.

Shower: oh, the glory of a summer shower! My bathrooms are so cold that winter showers are a feat of endurance. Before 7 I leave my flat and start walking to the house. My 90 year-old mother has a pre-op for an operation no-one wants her to have , and my son-outlaw is taking her into the hospital in Rome. Before his death, my father’s god-daughter used to work for him a few hours a week, taking him shopping and illustrating the books of family stories he was working on. Now she comes five days a week to be with my mother every morning, get her shopping, and sort out all the medical visits, prescriptions etc that come with living a long life. My mother’s back is in pieces, so although she can get herself up and dressed and make a cup of tea, she’s not up to cooking and is in constant pain; she needs someone to make her lunch and help her do whatever she wants to do that day. It works out perfectly: we know she is loved and taken care of when we aren’t there, she has company, and the goddaughter was also trained as a nurse so asks the right questions of doctors, checks the ingredients of medicines and is just generally a lovely human being. Plus, she has an elderly mother of her own, who has been my mum’s best friend for over 50 years, so when both old ladies are up to it they can spend the morning together. She isn’t here today, but has brought over the wheelchair which will make the hospital visit easier.

As it is July, I (teacher) am on holiday, as is the (teacher) son-outlaw but my (non-teacher) daughter is still working. Normally, at this point in the summer, my granddaughter and her father would be at the lake every day, but she fell over on the last day of school and split her chin open so the lake has been off-limits (until this afternoon!), which has meant extra time with her for me. Last week I was there when she woke up one morning when her father had to leave early to take the car across town, so she and I have agreed that today we will do the same: I will be the one to wake her up, she will get dressed spit-spot! (we are fans of Mary Poppins) and we will go for breakfast at the pasticceria. As it happens, she is already awake, and considerably more lively than anyone else in the household. I dissuade my mother from taking her umbrella (Scots can never really believe that it might not suddenly rain, even in the height of Italian summer, and the fact that we had a big summer storm one night last week has made my mum hyper-alert to this possibility), pack her into the car and they set off. While my daughter is getting dressed Ella and I work on getting her dressed as well (I suggest things, she rejects them), and we hit the road before 8: she has her baby strapped into a carrier on her chest, and we are both wearing blue sun hats (“Matching!” she says happily, young enough to think that wearing the same thing as your grandmother is a good thing). We stop off at the pasticceria, where everyone cries, “Buongiorno Ella!” as soon as we enter, and I don’t even have to think up my own order, as they already know it: black coffee for me, frothed milk in a coffee cup and a flower-shaped biscuit for Ella.

We count the stairs going up to my flat (51) and as soon as we get in shoes and doll are discarded and we decide our priorities - do we immediately start making banana bread, or build a castle out of magnetic tiles? We opt for the castle. I saw the kids at school playing with these tiles, and thought how much I would have loved them as a child, and so immediately foisted them upon my available child. In the beginning she mainly oversaw me building things, but she’s a dab hand at the castle-creation herself now which means that I have an excuse to keep adding to our stash, and quite honestly, I could happily play with them all day.

The hospital appointment drags on: the blood test and ECG are quick and straightforward, so my mother, who normally has her first breakfast before dawn, finally gets her cappucino and cornetto mid-morning, but then the systems are down, there’s a delay to see the anaesthetist and when they do finally see her there are phone calls to be made to the hospital that referred her, and everything takes longer than it should.

In the meantime, Ella and I make banana bread. “Chop the bananas up really small!” I say, but she soon gets bored of that and recklessly cuts them into generous chunks and hurls them into the bowl. In the end all the ingredients are kind of assembled and mixed, I put some almost-mushy blueberries into the bottom of the tin, we decorate with toasted walnuts, and into the oven it goes. When it is ready and cool enough to cut, we test it out - delicious! - and then go and read on the sofa. I’m loving the new interest in being read to - normally she is an active co-reader, speculating on the action, sounding out words - but when she asks for A Necklace of Raindrops, she likes to lean against me and just listen.

We raid the fridge and make up a big bowl of salad and salmon, with the idea that it will be lunch for everyone, but end up having to eat our share before my son outlaw comes to pick us up (the 10 minute walk between the house and the flat is fine early morning and late afternoon, but not to be attempted when the sun is high). When he arrives we pack the remains of the salad the majority of the banana bread into a bag, and take the whole lot with us. We feed the weary travellers downstairs in my mother’s flat, and then she goes for a rest and we go upstairs to sit on the sofa watching Bluey until it is time to get ready to take one of the dogs to the vet.

The town where we live has a one-way system operating in the centre of town, set out in a square. Along the first side of the square as you drive into town there are a few shops, and then you are in the piazza. Just off the piazza there is a decent restaurant ,and the world’s best artisanal ice cream shop. The road continues to the left, and now you are on the corso, the main street. This is where all the shops and things are, including the pizza a taglio place. If you follow the one-way system, you turn left at the little roundabout, and the next side of the square has no shops, but it does have the vet, and this is also the street where I live. At the bottom of this road you turn left to complete the square, passing the pasticceria on your way. There are, obviously, many other little streets and places off the main drag, but this square is the main hub.

So we leave early for the vet, in order for some people to get ice cream. Ella, her father and dog go to the gelateria, and I go to pick up a parcel in a shop set into the side of the church. This was once a place that sold sensible underwear and bedding and unexceptional clothing; my daughter went to elementary school with the owner’s son. Now it is where you go to change your phone plan, charge your phone - you could in theory buy a blanket, as they still stock them - and you send and collect parcels. For the uninitiated, the whole set up looks like chaos, but for the old hands you know to walk in and greet everyone loudly so that your presence has been clocked, and you then know to go straight to the back room where you can quickly eyeball the correct chaotic pile that your parcel will be in, even though the actual counter is at the other end of the shop, and there will invariably be people waiting to send money orders, or cancel their wifi. Despite all this, you can be in and out in a matter of minutes. Or, considerably longer sometimes. Luckily this is a quick one, and I put the parcel in the car so that son outlaw and dog can carry on to the vet, and Ella and I can sit on the bench outside the ice cream shop while she finishes her cone. We amble to the vet on foot, I collect my parcel from the car and take it upstairs (I live in the building behind the vet’s) while they wait to be seen. Then they drop the dog at home and go to the lake for a swim and dinner later; my daughter will drive there straight from work.

In the early evening I walk back to the house to make some dinner for my mother. I leave her watching TV, the others will close up her shutters when they get back from the lake. I walk home, eat my own dinner, read in a tepid bath for a while, and barely hit the pillows before I’m asleep.

Exceptionally good banana bread