Free Every Day in Tuscany by Frances Mayes

yearns for the sun .
    The Romans respected their lares and penantes , household gods of the hearth, pantry, and food. The presence of ancient spirits appeals to one who chooses a house as a spiritual haven. Bramasole always has seemed to me, even when empty, more than a house. This is spooky; a house has an anima , a soul? When I am away, I miss it as I miss a person I love. I miss the house’s colors, what the old painting manuals call polvere di mattone , brick dust, rosso arancio , blood orange, terre bruciate , burned dirt, giallo caldo , hot yellow. I miss the platters on my kitchen walls and the pear and almond tart cooling on the counter. I miss the fireflies, who make the best dinner guests. I miss the girasole terrace when the giant sunflowers face the audience, the whole dance corps gazing fondly down at our admiration. I miss the balcony when the jasmine, lemon, and tigli , linden, scents collide and seem to emanate from the moon. I miss the valley below, that pays homage to all greens, and the dark-hearted cypresses along the road, and my earnest coral geraniums escaping from their pots, joining with clematis and trailing down to meet the old roses below. I miss, in winter, the early dark, which comes suddenly, like a stage curtain let down with a velvet thump.
    I don’t need a celestial paradise; I’ll take my immortality here.

    T ODAY IS W EDNESDAY . Twelve-fifteen by my watch, whose face is obscured by moving stars and a crescent moon. I must shake my wrist to see the minute and hour hands. The pretty watch Ed gave me always reminds me of two kinds of time—this minute and the overriding mega-time of past and future. Maybe the designer intended such a connection. Time, the big breadbasket we fill, raid, fill, and empty.
    In Tuscany, I learned to take time . Take time to have coffee with the one-armed man in my neighborhood, who tells me how he drives his stick-shift Panda with his dog in his lap, and how as a child he ate bread dipped in red wine for breakfast. Dividing the snarl of iris bulbs and replanting them around an olive tree takes time. I find that I have it. Time: reading until three, then sleeping until ten, if I choose; sharing a glass of sour wine with a farmer who walked back from Genoa after the Italian surrender in World War II; cooking with Gilda, who’s incredibly efficient without ever using a processor or microwave. She came to work for us when her sister-in-law, Giusi, left to open her agriturismo . We learned from Giusi, a close friend, and we will be learning a long time from Gilda. We learn from Placido, who came over three afternoons straight to help us lay a stone path, who walks the horse so that my grandson can ride, who searches the woods all day for a basket of porcini mushrooms.
    Time—that’s what it takes for the slow tomato sauce, stirred until reduced to an essential taste of summer sun, for tying lavender in bunches and hanging them from beams to dry, for learning the imperfect tense, for checking the reddening pomegranates every day as they ripen, ripping open the leathery skin to reveal the juicy red hive within, sprinkling the fruit over a salad of field greens and toasted walnuts. Living well in time means taking back time from the slave-masters—obligations, appointments, the dreary round of details that attach like leeches in a stagnant pond. During intense periods of work, restoration projects, family crises, health scares, I want to wake up at first light, pull on hiking boots, and set off for an hour while the birds are still practicing their doxologies.
    Wasted hours—they were mine; I meant to use them before they slipped through the hourglass.

    A T B RAMASOLE , I often recall raising the big sail called “the genoa” on the boat my former husband and I owned. The genoa was suited to copious wind and when it reached the top of the rigging, suddenly billowed grandly and the boat seemed about to levitate into the sky. The memory parallels the rushes of