It could have been here

Stefania and her husband, Marino, are ordinary people. He is an architect. She’s a clerk. They have a son, Giorgio, who recently turned 15.

They are not and have never been well off. For years they have put all their energy and money into a modest house in the medieval town of L’Aquila, in Abruzzo, Italy.

At 3:32 a.m. on April 6, as the ground shook in the worst, deadliest earthquake that country has seen since 1980, Stefania shouted at Giorgio to stand under the door. The frame above it fell into his hands. He set it down and ran downstairs. The stairway held until the family got out, and then the whole building turned to ruble.

Stefania, Marino and Giorgio are alive. But they lost their house and everything in it. Photo albums, memories, letters, furniture, clothes. It’s all gone. They are not the only ones. The earthquake left more than 20,000 people homeless. 

What would you do if you lost everything but the clothes you happen to be wearing in the middle of the night?

Stefania and her family are currently waiting to be assigned a sort of container where they will be living for a few months (and we hope not years.)

This family is not an anonymous story that took place somewhere far away. Stefania is the sister of one of Luca’s best friends, someone he’s known for more than 20 years.

If you would consider sending money to Stefania and her family it will not be lost in a bureaucratic labyrinth. It will go directly to a family in L’Aquila who would like to start over with a bit of dignity, and who is not ashamed to admit that they need all the help they can get.

I know full well life can change in a second. I know too that second can be in the middle of the night.  I do hope that if I lose everything, someone out there will find it in their heart to help.

Donations (even 5 dollars would be tremendous) can be made with Paypal to  luca_penati@hotmail.com 

Luca and I will be matching donations up to $1,000.

 

I will never tire of talent shows.

The ability to embed this has been "disabled by request". Do me a favor and click on this link.

Bigger small steps

As outlined in perhaps excessive detail in past entries, we have taken all kinds of steps towards being more environmentally responsible. We always have cloth shopping bags in the trunk of our hybrid (and hardly ever request paper or plastic or any kind of shopping bag anymore); have turned off our sprinkler system and water by hand only when absolutely necessary (we haven’t watered at all in over two months because of the rain), and buy mostly local and organic (which, all debating aside, I think tastes better.)

There are five things we are embarking into in 2009 that require a bit more involvement that I thought I'd share.

1. The first has to do with putting things I own and never use into the hands of people who need them. Here is a partial list:

If you have shoes in your closet that you never or seldom use  (and don’t go telling me you don’t) check out souls for soles.

I found a place that takes eyeglass frames in case you have a few that are no longer the right prescription (or that make you look like you belong in the 80's.) 

Every time I travel on business, I throw the beauty products I like the most into my suitcase, until it dawned on me that I had more lotion, shampoo and body wash than I'd ever need. So I dropped them off  here.

If you have books you've read and won't read again, ship them off to someone who wants them. Bookmooch also lets you donate points if you don't want to bother with the swapping.

2. The second step we've taken in our effort to go green is composting, to reduce the amount of waste we put in landfills.

We finally found a composter we felt was right for us and have been experimenting with it for a few days. I’ll let you know how that goes. For now, I feel virtuous every time I go out and dump in my banana peels (and Luca has become a eco-sergeant.)

3. In honor of my brother Pedro who's a water conservation expert, we’re looking into installing a rain barrel in our backyard to collect rainwater to use later for our plants. This might be something we get around to doing before the next rainy season because we didn't move fast enough this time around.

4. We also think it would be really fun to plant our own vegetables (specially since, as a result of composting, we’ll have lovely, rich soil in our hands). We need more time to really get this one going, though.

5. Finally, we looked into how much solar panels would cost but based on their price and the money they would save us (in relation to our current energy consumption) we’ve decided to wait. Getting a personal assessment is free so I recommend you look into it (because price and the money you save is related to where you live, what direction your house faces in, how much energy you use, and a lot of other variables.)

I'll keep you posted on progress (and try not to bore you) and am really interested in hearing anything you’ve been doing.

Waste

I might have been the only one who believed all of it you and me like blood our lives intertwined forever we were instead inane prone to rapid disintegration in the place of a broken memory carefully preserved painful precious there is nothing a nuisance a hairline fracture on a crystal pitcher dirty dishes piled in the kitchen sink what a waste loving you turned out to be

Photo: www.potterybarn.com

Patience

Patience is an alien quality does not swim in my blood does not pool around me in the mornings I have to coax it breathe on it to keep alive the little bit that I have try it on play dress up practice walking with it so that it looks genuine I want to perfect it I wish I could take a daily dosage a patience vitamin it would get stuck in my throat 

Truth

Instead of staring at the universe straight on I will squint from now on stand upside down I want to be deliberate when I distort my view of it because I know that by purposefully jumbling what I perceive it will be no less accurate that when I claim to see things clearly

Photo: www.realsimple.com

Who's hair is it anyway?

I’m going gray.

I’m not sure what to do about it.

I never thought these two sentences were worthy of a blog entry but once I started poking around on the subject I realized that To Color Or Not To Color was a big, politically charged issue with far-reaching, philosophical implications.

Consider that the first book that comes up on the subject on Amazon is “Going Gray: What I Learned about Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity, and Everything Else That Really Matters”. And that there are a ton of whole blogs – not just entries – dedicated to this. I even found an article in Time Magazine titled “The War Over Going Gray”.

Yikes.

And I thought it was just about hair color.

I have never dyed my hair (except for a single unfortunate highlighting incident in the mid 80’s which did not seem particularly unfortunate at the time.)

While there are exceptions (and it’s quite possible I might be one of them), I think women who go gray look beautiful. My mother-in-law is a shining example – she has never colored her hair and is gorgeous and classy. And, what about Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada?

Besides liking the look, I feel quite reluctant about spending valuable energy on a battle I already know I will lose.

I was fairly certain the matter of my own hair color was up to me, until my usually only moderately pushy hairstylist was so insistent on “doing something about it”, even after I said several times that I wasn’t ready, that I got up and walked out.

Because, come on. Esthetics aside, shouldn’t it come down to a woman’s right to choose?

 

Photo: The Devil Wears Prada