Tuscany

(Repose)

Stefan is waiting for us when we get off the train at Rassina. For some reason I’m surprised that he’s here. Despite months of planning and a recent spate of emails, I’m still struggling to believe that complete strangers are willing to welcome a family of four from the other side of the world into their home.

With difficulty, Stefan opens the side door of a beaten-up white van. Hives and boxes, a ladder and various other bee keeper’s tools take up most of the available space. We shove our packs into spaces they don’t really fit, rubbing them against spent honey frames and intensifying the humid sweetness in the van. Then we sit, passive and shy, as Stefan manoeuvres through the town.

Rassina is somewhat disappointing. There’s not enough weathered stone, no piazza fed by narrow cobbled lanes. Black bitumen leads us past concrete buildings and light industry – the shops are closed and some are fortified. It’s Good Friday, but there’s a sense that half these stores will never open. A nondescript bridge carries us over the river Arno, which limps between silted bends. It’s not Rome, I have to admit, but I refuse to be disenchanted. When we overtake one of those tiny three-wheeled utilities, its tray filled with boxes of vegetables, I realise that this is where we stop being tourists and start being … what? Intrepid travellers? Volunteers? Farmers, perhaps? Or something else entirely? The possibilities send a tingle of excitement through my entire body, and I hug myself to keep it contained.

A few minutes out of town, concrete is beginning to give way to green fields watched over by houses built for function not form. Stefan asks about our journey. We tell him about the Colosseum, and the Trevi Fountain at dawn. When we run out of words a comfortable silence settles between us. We lean into a corner, leaving the main road behind. Aidan whispers in my ear that he’s hungry.

‘Will we be stopping for gelato soon?’ he wants to know.

Aidan was quick to agree to four months off school, but he’d wanted some assurance that his cooperation on this family adventure would be rewarded. What, he asked, did Italy have to offer him that he couldn’t get in the Adelaide Hills?

‘Let’s start with the Etruscans in 600BC …’

With misplaced excitement I began to tell him of Italy’s rich history. I saw an opportunity to introduce him to Italian culture, its architecture, its food traditions. Thirty seconds into my three-hour seminar, Aidan stopped paying attention and started examining the contents of his right nostril.

Recognising another failed attempt to inspire my eldest son, I changed tack.

‘Gelato,’ I said.

His eyes locked onto mine, the booger’s journey towards his open mouth momentarily suspended. I had his full attention and I hadn’t even raised my voice or threatened to take his Nintendo DS away. I wanted more.

‘Every day,’ I continued.

He let the booger drop to the floor and beamed at me like I was the best mum in the world. I live for these moments. I took the opportunity to seal the deal, to trick my twelve-year-old homebody into leaving the sanctuary of his room – drawers full of Pokémon cards and precious Dungeons and Dragons paraphernalia – for the unknown pleasures and hardships of a working holiday in Italy. Making a mental note not to tread on the booger in my bare feet, I launched my final play.

‘Twice a day! After lunch and dinner!’ My voice had risen to an hysterical pitch, but Aidan was jumping up and down, clapping his hands and actually telling me, in real, audible words, that I was, indeed, the best mum in the whole wide world. He couldn’t wait to go to Italy.

Gelato is his weakness and I exploited it, shamelessly. Within seconds he’d calculated the exact number of gelatos he would consume over the four-month period. He wanted to know if they would be one, two or three scoops, and whether we would have access to gelaterias when we were on farms. I began to calculate the cost of two gelatos a day times four people. When it reached four figures, I reached for a loophole.

‘In the unlikely event we have to walk more than an hour to a gelateria, then you’ll need to settle for some other treat. But this is Italy we’re talking about, they have gelato on every corner.’

When he isn’t eating ice-cream, Aidan is imagining himself as a character in Lord of the Rings. On our first day in Italy, the ancient architecture of Rome furnished his imagination so vividly that his sword was perpetually unsheathed. Where we saw history, he saw one of the ancient cities of Middle Earth – orcs and goblins a constant threat. By day two, his imagination could no longer sustain him. Aidan needed something more tangible to justify the hours of wandering. Without it, he had every intention of spending the day with his books and DS, venturing to the bar downstairs only after lunch and dinner to order his favourite green apple gelato. I’d let out a frustrated breath, which Shannon recognised as a precursor to an argument.

‘Did you know that somewhere in Rome you can buy Pokémon flavoured gelato?’ Shannon said.

Within minutes of receiving this gem of information Aidan became our co-conspirator. The search was exhausting, if not exhaustive, but as we failed to find our holy grail, Pokémon gelato now hangs like a carrot in front of us, and we’re committed to chasing it across the country.

~

The van climbs ever higher, and the road has become narrow and broken. Rassina is meant to be just a half-hour drive from the farm, but we’ve already been driving for forty-five minutes. The last gelateria was at the train station. When Stefan pulls off the road and the van stops in a roughly cleared patch of forest, my heart begins to race. His calm demeanour takes on a sinister edge, his suggestion that we should get out of the van seems suspicious. I look to Shannon, but he’s oblivious. Standing with our backs to the shadows of the forest, I gather the boys in.

How could we have been so foolish? Getting into a stranger’s van, putting our children in danger? Stefan gestures towards Shannon, an abrupt instruction to follow him to the back of the van. I try to protest – thinking of backpackers in the Australian outback – but Shannon is under a spell. The sweetness of honey, the warmth of the smile, the hypnotic drone of bees. Come into my parlour said the spider to the fly.

Imagine my delight (and mild shame), when Shannon emerges from behind the van looking like a stormtrooper from Star Wars. It only takes Aidan a second to join the men, and soon all three are heading off down the track to check the hives Stefan keeps in this part of the forest. When Aidan bounds back to me ten minutes later, his easy smile bodes well for our stay with this enigmatic bee keeper.

‘… then he cut the branch off the tree and the bees just stayed on it, like a big ball of jelly, all wobbly and rippling. He knocked them into an empty hive, but they’ll only stay if there’s a queen, so he’s going to put them in the van with us and take them home …’

Riley and I begin swatting at invisible bees. Aidan, who has thwarted all my attempts to teach him anything about Italy, has just absorbed something. What a relief. Now I can justify his long absence from school.

A symphony of drones becomes the soundtrack for the rest of our journey to the farm. I pull my gaze away from the hills and look towards the man driving.

Stefan has a similar build to Shannon: lean, the definition in his forearms suggesting a wiry strength. He and his wife, Ulrike, moved from Germany to Tuscany thirty years ago. They worked on a farm, and after a while decided that the lifestyle suited them. Twelve years ago they settled high in the Tuscan hills with their five children. They began keeping bees and hosting wwoofers.

I’m now quite certain that Stefan means us no harm, but I’m still on first impressions: greying hair and sun-browned skin, a weathered face rendered beautiful by a frequent comfortable smile. He’s attractive, and it occurs to me that Shannon might look similar in fifteen years. I turn back to the hills to hide my blush.

When we first started talking about this adventure I googled wwoofing to see how other families had done it. I was hoping to get tips on travelling with kids and an insight into what to expect from the farms we worked on. There was very little, mostly travel blogs written by young men or women, but there was one written by an Australian family of four. Their favourite farm had been in Tuscany. Among descriptions of the stone house, the swimming pool, the work tending bees and baking cakes, there was the fact that the wwoofing family had been comfortably housed in an apartment. It sounded more like a country retreat than a working farm. The perfect place to ease us into our wwoofing life.

Now, we’re nearly there. The forest closes around us as we negotiate the dirt track. I’m looking forward to settling into the apartment, putting our few things in place and making it home for three weeks. And I’m hoping we’ll become friends with this family. Until now, I’ve never contemplated the alternative.

But the real anticipation is for what we’ll do here and what we’ll learn. I imagine a field of flowers, hives dotted around, the four of us collecting honey. Instead of wearing white overalls and a protective hood, I’m looking splendid in a sundress that I didn’t actually bring because I could no longer fit into it. I can’t sustain the fantasy and decide I’d rather be elbow-deep in curd, or perhaps kneading a sourdough loaf. I’m picturing an afternoon with Stefan showing us how to make the beeswax candles I saw in the back of the van, when the forest suddenly loosens its hold.

Wisteria-encrusted villas nestled into fertile slopes have furnished our preconceptions of the farms we would stay on. We tried to prepare ourselves for something more prosaic, but we knew we’d be disappointed if we travelled to the other side of the world and ended up with a magnificent view of a housing estate. When the van stops, we tumble out. There’s no wisteria, but we see an old stone farmhouse and there’s a collective sigh of relief. Clichés are inevitable when describing Il Mulino – it’s a travel poster made real. The house dominates one side of the track we’ve come in on and a promising curl of smoke rises from its chimney, drawing the eye to the hills behind. The other side of the track, which disappears into the forest again, is occupied by a clutch of equally beautiful buildings. They look over the valley to an olive grove. Stefan tells us they include a studio and two apartments, and I couldn’t be more pleased.

A girl of about thirteen – long blonde hair and the slight, androgynous frame of pre-adolescence – comes running up to the van, gesticulating towards a nearby cherry tree. A stream of German words reminds us of this family’s heritage.

The source of her excitement is a swarm of bees, hanging like a giant gyrating fruit from an upper limb. Stefan removes the ladder from the back of the van, dons his stormtrooper headgear and begins the process of capturing the swarm.

Calm is needed around bees, and Stefan is its embodiment. With a smoking rag in one hand he scales the ladder to its highest rung. When it’s clear he still can’t reach the swarm, there’s no frustrated shake of the head or German expletives. In one fluid movement he’s perched on a higher branch. In another he’s laid out along the limb supporting the bees.

Back on the ground, I’m fretting. He’s not large, but neither is the limb. Marta, his daughter with the long blonde hair, keeps talking to him in a tone that reminds me of when the boys are telling me about their day at school while I get the dinner ready. I want her to be quiet, to let him concentrate. If I was up there on that limb with a swarm of bees, a few swift entreaties to ‘hush’ would be the limit of my conversation.

Dulled, eventually, by the smoke, the bees allow themselves to be knocked into a box. Stefan will rehouse them later, along with the bees that have travelled with us from the forest. Now, it’s time for introductions. There is a beautiful young woman named Simona, Stefan and Ulrike’s fourth child, and the toddler in her arms is her daughter, Amalie. Simona explains that her brothers, Giovanni and Herman, live on other parts of the farm, and that her sister Eva is studying in Florence.

Marta, so animated before, now hides behind her mother, her greeting muffled by the hand she holds constantly at her mouth. Mirroring her, Aidan and Riley fall in behind my skirt, mumbling something resembling ‘hello’ at each introduction.

Farm kids are essential to the success of this journey. As volunteers, Shannon and I will be working many hours a day. We want the boys to have friends and an opportunity to learn the language through play. Marta, who is a year older than Aidan, is the child we’re pinning all our hopes on at this farm, but this level of shyness could mean three weeks of skirt dwelling.

With our offspring doing their best to avoid eye contact, Ulrike and I exchange one of those looks that transcend language and culture. In a practised move, we both bend our heads and whisper similar things in different tongues. All three children shift incrementally out of the shadows cast by their mothers. It’s a start.

‘Follow me,’ Stefan says.

I have my fingers crossed for a view, but he turns us in the other direction and leads us up a goat track strung on each side with a makeshift washing line. We trot to keep up, passing the chicken yard and a small field dotted with hives and humming with bees (but devoid of flowers). When we get to the edge of the woods we stop. Stefan is holding open the door of a small log cabin, waiting for us to go in.

The ‘woodhouse’ hasn’t been used since the previous summer, when Simona and Amalie had to vacate their apartment for paying guests. It’s dark and dank and very cold. Stefan tells us that during the warmer months the apartments are a source of income the family can’t afford to sacrifice. At this time of year there is usually one free, but at the moment they have relatives staying from Germany.

The whole space is about the size of a double bedroom. There’s no kitchen, nowhere to sit, and the alcove that I initially assumed would contain a bathroom is piled from floor to ceiling with a mess of clothes and toys and boxes. It would be difficult living here with a baby, and this thought puts my initial disappointment into perspective. After all, it’s not as if my children will be crawling around, eating the bugs that I’ve just noticed falling like snow from the damp ceiling – are they caterpillars? Yes, tiny caterpillars, all over the floor and the pot-belly stove and the two single beds.

Just two singles.

‘Is there another bed?’ I ask.

Seconds pass before Stefan replies. From his expression I think he may consider it an impertinent question. ‘Maybe there is another mattress. I will look at Giovanni’s house.’

Shannon stays in the woodhouse to help the boys make up their beds while I follow Stefan further up the goat track to the home of his eldest son. Giovanni lives in a yurt. It’s round and ramshackle, and if I wasn’t so desperate to find a double bed resting under its eave I might consider it a beautiful thing, nestled into the Tuscan hillside the way it is. Giovanni isn’t home, so Stefan lets himself in and begins a thorough search.

Nothing. My lower lip begins to tremble.

The problem is that I don’t know what’s expected of us, or what I can reasonably ask for. And I can’t decide if Stefan’s calm response to everything is a sign of peace or callousness.

‘Here.’ Stefan has stopped to look under the yurt. On his hands and knees he begins to pull out a double mattress: slightly damp, but otherwise functional. My enthusiasm for this marvellous find must reveal more than I intended. Stefan returns my grin and punctuates it with a gentle reassuring laugh. ‘You will sleep better now,’ he says.

The mattress covers most of the free floor, but there’s enough room to walk between the beds, and I’m satisfied no one will get trodden on during night excursions to the toilet. Stefan explains that the toilet and the shower are back down the goat track, past the house, past the apartments, around the corner, past the honey room and just at the top of the slope leading to the herb garden. Then he leaves us to unpack.

‘It’s quite an adventure isn’t it, boys? Like camping, but way more comfortable.’ They don’t need convincing, and now I’ve said it out loud, neither do I. We’re not tourists any more, we’re farm hands. Shannon puts his arm around my shoulder and gives it a congratulatory squeeze.

~

Once we’ve sorted out how we’ll sleep, shower and shit, we have to figure out how we’ll eat. As volunteers we exchange our labour for all food and board. For this reason, and because of a complete lack of thought, we haven’t brought any food with us. Not even an apple.

By one o’clock in the afternoon this seems remiss. Like orphans in a Dickens novel we hang around the steps leading to the kitchen door, hoping to detect signs of food. If Ulrike happens to throw scraps out of the window for the birds to fight over, I think Aidan and Riley will enter the fray without a second thought.

The boys’ shyness is inherited. Neither Shannon nor I can summon the courage to walk up the steps and ask that our children be fed. We hover, we distract, we lie on our damp bed and read aloud from the Roman Mysteries by Caroline Lawrence, we follow the track into the forest and discover a river. We return to the steps below the kitchen and hover some more.

By two o’clock we can wait no longer, I climb the stairs to the main house and knock. Ulrike is standing at the sink washing a lettuce – promising. I ask if I can help, thinking that as an insider I’ll gain more knowledge. She puts me to work cleaning and chopping carrots, and soon reveals that lunch will be ready at about 2.30.

We’re ravenous when we sit down to eat, but it takes me a moment to respond to the offer of stew. There are twelve of us, sat snuggly around an ancient wooden table in the middle of a kitchen in a stone house in Tuscany, and we’re about to have a long lunch. I pinch myself. It’s real.

Shannon and I pile our plates with stewed vegetables, lettuce, and the most delicious homemade rye bread. Aidan resists. He’s never embraced rye bread, doesn’t eat lettuce and balks at stewed vegetables – he gets all three regardless, and I’m hoping he’ll try it just to be polite. Riley has already consumed a slice of rye and is reaching for a second. I tell him to mop up the stew with his bread, but he wrinkles his nose. I let it go; the table is too crowded for a food fight.

We’re given the afternoon to settle in and explore the farm, and at half past nine in the evening we gather in the kitchen to eat again. It’s three hours past our usual dinnertime and two hours past the boys’ bedtime, so we’re less inclined to draw this meal out. We fill Riley up on more rye bread and manage to get Aidan to eat a few leaves of lettuce. When the plates are empty we wash up and say our goodnights to the family.

In single file we follow the path that takes us around the apartments and past the honey room. When we get to the top of the slope that leads to the herb garden, we stop. The bathroom is a shower, a sink and a Turkish toilet. The boys complain about squatting over a hole in the ground, so Shannon tells them to pee into the stinging nettles that surround the doorway. A joke hangs in the air, but we’re all too exhausted to claim it.

I’m the only one who straddles the porcelain hole, and I regret not having stronger thighs. By the time I straighten up, the energy required for a shower is beyond me. We stumble up the goat track in silence and fall into our beds.

Riley falls asleep almost immediately but Aidan is still hungry, so Shannon digs around in his pack for the chocolate eggs we’ve been saving for Easter Sunday. He lets him eat three. Aidan is easily pleased by chocolaty treats and his humour is instantly restored. With relief, we blow kisses towards his smiling face and watch his eyes close on this unusual day. Then we snuggle down to debrief in whispers.

‘Mood enhancer,’ Shannon says, passing me a chocolate egg.

‘What are you suggesting?’ I say.

‘Well, it’s been a big day, a strange day, and I noticed there was no wine on the table at dinner.’

‘Yeah, I noticed that too. But you’ll be pleased to know that I didn’t need it.’

‘You’ve never needed it.’

‘I didn’t want to worry you, but if I hadn’t been able to fill one of those huge glasses with shiraz at the end of the day I might have started playing the pokies or googling cat videos or watching I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. I needed something to quiet my mind.’

‘Reality TV? I didn’t realise how serious it was.’

‘It shouldn’t have been,’ I say, a little ashamed. ‘Nothing about my work is particularly important in the grand scheme of things.’

‘Was important – it’s not what you do anymore.’

I laugh. ‘It doesn’t seem quite real. But now I think about it, there’s something liberating about spending the day with nothing to worry about except food and shelter and fitting in. That stuff really does matter.’

‘And look at us – fed and sheltered and on the way to fitting in’.

‘No red wine sedative required.’

‘Here’s to that.’ Shannon raises his chocolate egg in the air and I raise mine. We tap them together then pop them in our mouths.

~

We wake on the first morning to a biting cold that we didn’t expect of an Italian spring. The mountains are keen to hang on to winter for a little longer, and we’re forced to wear most of our clothes to stay warm. Aidan wants to stay in bed. We can’t convince him otherwise so decide not to push it. Riley offers Shannon and me a hand each, and we swing him down the path towards the house.

Ulrike has prepared a large pot of porridge for breakfast. Honey is a feature of most meals at Il Mulino, but it is best suited to breakfast. Riley, who must be a distant relative of Winnie-the-Pooh, spoons huge amounts into his bowl, and ours. It magnifies the oats, turning them sepia.

People come in and out of the kitchen. They fill bowls, slice bread. Some sit, others take their breakfast with them. Shannon and I pat ourselves on the back for adjusting to our new circumstances and marvel at how accepting the boys are – the rebellion we’ve been waiting for might not come. When Stefan sits down at the table, the porridge pot is empty, so he takes a thick slice of bread. I wonder briefly what Aidan will have for breakfast and make a mental note to ask about eggs.

Stefan tells us about the schedule of work. Actually, ‘schedule’ is too rigid a word. Life at Il Mulino is much more organic, and activity is dictated by need: if the grass is long it will be cut, if the walnuts are falling they’ll be gathered, if there are weeds they’ll be pulled. It’s as if the industrial revolution never happened. The only activities that have a regular rhythm are associated with eating, Amalie or the bees – and we don’t need an alarm to be reminded of those.

‘What are you smiling about?’ Shannon asks.

‘Alarm clocks. I’ve always hated ours, but I’ve never realised how perfect that name is.’

‘How so?’

‘It alarms me,’ I say, spooning porridge into my mouth and recalling the small panic I would wake with, then the lingering fear. ‘Remind me to get rid of it when we get home,’ I add.

On our first day I get to know Amalie and all her lovely little ways, while Shannon accompanies Stefan to check on hives.

Babysitting isn’t quite what I had in mind when I committed to volunteering on organic farms, but it’s the perfect activity to ease our family into a wwoofing way of life. I can include the boys in whatever I’m doing with Amalie, and they make babysitting a whole lot easier than it might otherwise be. Riley gets more pleasure out of playing with squeaky balls than I do, and when I tire of reading Dieci Coniglietti (Ten Little Bunnies) the boys can take over. It’s win, win, win – Simona gets to earn some money attending to the needs of an old woman in a nearby village, Ulrike can get on with baking and washing and tending her greenhouse, and the boys and I learn how to count to ten in Italian.

With Amalie on my hip I have an excuse to wander into the kitchen whenever I like. The loaf left on the kitchen table tempts us, and Riley and I snack on slices of rye all morning. Aidan snacks on nothing. At lunchtime he leaves a plate of brown rice and vegetables untouched, and drinks three glasses of apple juice. He’s tired, he says, so I suggest an afternoon nap.

Once I’ve handed Amalie over to her work-weary mother, I begin weeding around the lettuces in the greenhouse. Marta and Riley have been playing table tennis nearby for the best part of an hour, and every few minutes I hear Marta’s stilted English declaring the score. She is winning, but not by as much as she could be, and when I hear them laugh I’m grateful that this quiet girl is willing to share her home and her time with my quiet boy.

The product of my afternoon’s labour is two buckets of weeds. I empty them on a compost pile then take the track up to the woodhouse to check on Aidan. He’s been resting a long time, and I suspect some sneaky DS play. I compose my lecture: it’s light on reproach and heavy on enticement – table tennis should draw him out without fuss.

Aidan isn’t on the DS. He’s lying on his side and staring at the wall. I walk around our mattress and sit on the edge of his. Vomit has stuck to his chin.

‘Aidan, what’s wrong?’

‘I don’t feel well.’

I get him up and hand him a drink bottle, but he needs to be sick again. We hurry out the door and he retches into the scrub beside the cabin. The stuff is liquid, slightly yellow – not a scrap of half-digested food. Not quite the protest I was anticipating. I have no way of reasoning with this.

I realise that Aidan hasn’t eaten properly for two days and has filled his belly with water, apple juice and a tiny bit of chocolate. We’ve been so preoccupied with being good wwoofers that we barely noticed. His pale face and bile are my reproof – I never did remember to ask about eggs for his breakfast.

I put my arm around his shoulders and lead him down the path to the kitchen. I don’t know what I’ll feed him, but feed him I will. In the end it’s Ulrike who comes to the rescue. She’s just made an apple cake. Aidan eats two slices then bounds out of the kitchen, all smiles, to find Riley and Marta. This is his superpower; the physical and emotional insults of life just don’t stick to him. It’s not a trait he inherited from me.

I slide into a chair and let Ulrike cut me a thick wedge.

‘Sometimes Marta refuses to eat my bread, so when I go into the village I usually buy some white rolls,’ Ulrike says, walking over to a large wooden chest. She lifts the lid on her emergency stash. ‘Please, give to Aidan when you want.’

I feel less like a stranger.

~

The next day is Easter Sunday. No work, just feasting and a walk.

The family mostly eat vegetarian, but Ulrike has swapped some honey and potatoes for a goat from a nearby farm. It’s to be the centrepiece of an Easter feast that includes cake for breakfast and a chocolate egg hunt for the children. The tortellini with sage butter and crostini with pesto are a hit with Aidan and Riley, who eat more at this meal than in the entire first two days on the farm. But the goat is what we’re all waiting for. Having seen it enter the kitchen, head and little white tufted tail attached, we’re curious about how it will end up on our plates.

It comes out in pieces, nothing fancy. It’s not a ‘dish’ – deconstructed, reconstructed, ‘pulled’ or served with a suspicious looking ‘smear’ for presentation on social media. It’s food, real food, to be shared in real time. For this family, eating meat is a celebration, and we spend a surprising amount of time talking about the goat – its origins, its age, what it was fed. I think of how casually I’d throw a vacuum-sealed cut of meat into my shopping trolley back home, crossing my fingers it wasn’t fed with hormones, but in too much of a hurry to bother with the fine print.

‘Would you like to see where the goat came from?’ Stefan asks me.

‘Yes, we’d love too. Is it far?’

‘Not so far.’ He puts Amalie on his back and leads the way to a forest track.

Not far, he said. Two hours later, after much huffing, puffing and a fair bit of stopping ‘to look at the view’ (even when there was no view to look at), we arrive at a farm perched on the top of a ridge.

‘There is the daddy,’ says Stefan, pointing to a huge goat clearly intent on connecting its horns with anyone fool enough to come close to its enclosure.

‘Don’t tell him we just ate his kid,’ says Aidan. But it doesn’t translate, and only we laugh.

The farm is beautiful: only a few acres of land, with vegetables and goats and an old horse. Like Stefan and Ulrike, the owners probably have access to the chestnuts that grow throughout the forest, and I’d bet my life there’s an olive grove on the other side of the ridge.

‘We could do this,’ I whisper to Shannon.

‘I reckon we could,’ he whispers back.

‘And if we get goats, we could have our own milk as well as meat, and I could make goat’s cheese.’

He exaggerates a sour face.

‘You’d get used to it,’ I say.

‘If you can get used to waking at dawn to do the milking, I promise I’ll get used to goat’s milk.’

How will I do that without an alarm clock? I think.

The walk home is mostly downhill, and I have breath for conversation. This whole region is dotted with villages perched precariously on hillsides, all stone and slate and terracotta. I can imagine renting one of the stone houses – just me, a notebook and a pile of novels – having amusing misunderstandings with my neighbours and flirting with the young mechanic who fixes my moped after I break down in the narrow lane behind the olive grove. But the reality, according to Stefan, is rather less romantic. Many of these villages are being abandoned due to a lack of work and a move away from subsistence farming. As more and more families leave, the local schools are closing and only a few villages still have a post office and store.

‘They don’t look abandoned,’ I say.

‘No, city people buy the old houses and renovate them, but they don’t have time to stay in them, so usually they are empty.’

My moped mechanic disappears, and I realise I have imagined, more or less, the storyline of Under the Tuscan Sun. Not very original, Shannon will say, when I share it with him later.

~

It’s almost time for lunch on our seventh day at Il Mulino, and Amalie and I are both waiting, desperate to see Simona’s little car emerge from the woods. Until it does, Amalie is willing to cling to me, legs draped around my right hip, her head in the hollow below my collarbone. She’s a bird child, and I’m a temporary nest.

Over the past week we’ve discovered just how much work the good life can be. As well as helping Stefan with the hives, Shannon has been spending his time reclaiming the overgrown herb garden and cutting back grass in hard-to-reach places. Back home, grass is the bane of Shannon’s life – unfortunately, it just keeps growing. Stefan has a similar relationship with it, and he displayed uncharacteristic enthusiasm for Shannon’s experience with a brush-cutter. Cutting grass has become Shannon’s thing.

My thing, in the mornings at least, has been looking after Amalie and helping Ulrike in the kitchen. Aidan and Riley lost interest in Amalie after a couple of days, so babysitting has become more of a chore. The boys would prefer to be down at the river skimming stones than reading Dieci Coniglietti. Amalie insists on it, and I’ve begun counting rabbits in my sleep.

We hear the engine at the same time. Amalie raises her head from my chest and points towards the car. When it comes to a stop I put her down so she can toddle towards her mother. Twin smiles, like magnets, pull them closer together.

In the afternoon Ulrike and I sit side by side amongst the raspberry canes. We’re like passengers on a train, gossiping to pass the time as we make the slow journey from one end of a row to the other, pruning some canes and tying others. We sit in the dirt, two metres apart. When I shuffle along, the odd thistle spikes me, and when I reach with secateurs to snip new growth I’m stung by the nettles lying in wait. I’m getting used to the nettles, though I’m not immune like Ulrike. She can grab great bunches with bare hands; I’ve insisted on gloves. Yesterday she had me collect a bag-full. Some went in our dinner, while the rest is drying and will be used for tea.

Ulrike is telling me about other wwoofers, about a couple who were meant to stay for two weeks but disappeared after a few days when paying guests arrived and the pair were asked to move from the apartment to a small room above the toolshed.

‘They did not work too hard; they had a car and spent much time visiting other towns. The day after they moved from the apartment they went for sight-seeing in the afternoon and never came back,’ Ulrike smiles and tilts her head in a bemused way. ‘We were worried, of course, but when we checked their room it was empty – they had packed up in secret.’

‘I hope they’re the exception,’ I say.

‘Some wwoofers just come for a holiday, they don’t want to do real work. Others want to experience something different – it doesn’t matter what. They often don’t know very much, and at first they are a lot of work because they don’t know what is a weed and what is a tomato. But they all learn eventually, and if they stay a while it is good for us all.’

We’re neither of these, I think, pausing in my pruning while I wait for Ulrike to continue.

‘It is unusual to have wwoofers who live on a farm,’ she says.

I thought we might be in a category of our own. I lean forward and snip several canes, one after the other, just a little pleased with my efficiency.

‘Stefan is so happy to have Shannon here,’ Ulrike says. ‘He knows how to use the equipment and does not have to be watched. Even with the bees he is learning fast. Already Stefan talks with sadness about him leaving. He is making Stefan’s days easier.’

I nod, agree that Shannon is wonderful and wait for her to go on, but she doesn’t. She has nothing else to say. Or perhaps she’s just thinking how to say it. Trying to translate her praise for my skills from German into English without it coming out too soppy. I keep up my rhythm, increase my pace, snip, snip, snip, barely a twinge when the nettle gets me. Then she stops her pruning and turns to look at me.

I’m nodding, though she hasn’t actually said anything yet.

‘The way you are cutting the canes,’ she says.

‘Yes,’ I keep nodding.

‘I have just noticed, you have been cutting the wrong parts.’

‘What? But I thought …’

‘It is a common mistake the first time. It won’t matter much, we always have too many raspberries.’

Ulrike stays with me until she’s certain I know what to snip and what to save, then she leaves to get dinner ready and I travel the last hour alone. I reach the end of the row as the light is fading. My back is aching and the scratches on my arms from the fine raspberry hairs are beginning to swell and itch, but behind me is a long row of raspberry canes, neatly tied, with a barely noticeable patch of over-pruning. Despite a fleeting loss of face, I feel I’ve accomplished something worthwhile. When I drag myself across the threshold of the woodhouse it’s almost eight. Dinner is probably an hour away, so I grab our toiletry bag and a towel and head back down the track to the shower.

Careful not to step into the toilet, I close the door and hang my towel on the hook above the window. Just thinking of hot water falling down my back unties a knot or two, and it occurs to me that I rarely feel the ache of a good day’s work, or the satisfaction. Which isn’t to say I’m free of aches and pains. I could sponsor a small village with all the money I’ve spent at the chiropractor trying to release my neck and shoulders from the pain of sitting in front of a computer all day. For the past few years I’ve rarely been without the tensions of my job, and when they stop me from sleeping or cause me to move like C3PO, there is nothing satisfying about the sensation. The ache I have now feels more like I’ve climbed a mountain. It’s exhilarating, and my body, I decide, will get used to the labour.

Naked, I step into the shower, both hands cupped like a beggar’s, reaching for the warm water.

‘Shit! It’s freezing!’

Five minutes later, the water is still freezing. I put my dirty clothes back on and drag myself up the track to the woodhouse. I ignore the boys, still playing on their DSs three hours after they should have stopped, and fling myself onto the bed. I feel less like a mountaineer with every passing minute, but then a moment of clarity shames me – Shannon is still out there, despite the fading light, cutting grass or chopping wood. He’s been at it for ten hours. That’s the downside of spurning the clock and following nature’s cues – the lengthening days of spring and summer encourage farmers to work longer. Shannon will come back, stinking and tired, and when he finds out there’s no hot water he’ll shrug it off without complaint.

I’ll put on some deodorant and pretend it didn’t bother me either.

~

Stalls are already up for Arezzo’s monthly market, their owners arranging produce or wares. Stefan helps arrange the trestle table and the small marquee, then leaves to check hives in a forest somewhere. He has over one hundred hives, scattered over as many kilometres, and much of his time is spent checking them. He’s particularly vigilant after having lost most of his bees two years ago to a nasty little mite aptly named Varro destructor. It devastated their business and they nearly gave up this life they’re sharing with us now.

‘I will be back at midday to help pack up,’ he says.

We have four hours. Ulrike’s stall is near one end of the longest market I’ve ever seen. The centre of Arezzo is at the other. Jars of honey are lifted from boxes and placed in rows on the table, gradations of gold depending on when it was collected and what trees were in blossom. Acacia honey fetches the most money, and it glints in the sun as if it knows its worth.

We walk the length of the market – two kilometres – without stopping once to taste cheese or marvel at the varieties of pasta. When Stefan suggested we come to Arezzo he spoke of the market, full of the flavours and colours of Italy, and the medieval town centre. We agreed enthusiastically, but coffee, not sightseeing, was the real reason for our excitement. We had grown accustomed to an early morning, mid-morning and afternoon caffé while living in our Roman apartment, but coffee is not part of life at Il Mulino. Stefan and Ulrike don’t drink it and Shannon, quite the addict, suffered terrible headaches for the first few days of our stay. Arezzo means cafes, and cafes mean real coffee, well made. We practically run those two kilometres.

Three women in matching pink aprons are crowded behind the counter of the first alimentari we come to. Their arms are elastic as they reach up and down and around to fill baskets and bags with loaves, cheese, olives. We wait – this prelude to coffee like delicate foreplay. When it’s our turn, we order two caffé and two flat, white rolls filled with mortadella and provolone cheese. Our pleasure is quick, and we’re back on the street before the boys have taken two bites of their breakfast.

Now we can concentrate on Arezzo. We head to Piazza Grande and sit on the steps of the old Tribunal Palace to consult our guidebook.

‘On the first weekend of every month a huge antiques fair takes over Piazza Grande.’ Shannon reads. Our timing is perfect.

The sloping piazza is protected on all sides by a collection of aged buildings that stand like books crowded on warped shelves. Stall holders are arranging their wares, adjusting their awnings. A few people browse, but it’s still early. The piazza is just the beginning: the stalls spill down streets and lanes. There are wardrobes and chairs, old doors and sideboards, boxes full of treasure and trash.

We weave the boys past curiosities large and small. Five euros each to spend on whatever they like. They choose Pokémon cards, found in a box with some old comics. The words are Italian, but Aidan and Riley know the characters and find they can translate the text. Beyond the antiques we wander past a palace and along the ancient city wall. The boys begin to complain about too much lingering, but a large slice of potato and rosemary pizza has them following us in silence. We take a chance and enter the Basilica di San Francesco.

There’s something so moving about a church filled with 700-year-old frescos. It isn’t the subject that stirs me – representations of Mary, eyes downcast, not a single line on her brow to indicate she was up half the night with a colicky Jesus. Or the other Mary, on her knees and cleaning the feet of a man old enough to do it for himself while other men look on. What my eyes devour are the colours and lines that spread across the fractured stucco, barely illuminated by the sixty-watt bulb hanging from the vaulted ceiling. I probably shouldn’t, but I can’t help tracing a finger over the fading colour and imagining what life was like for the people of Arezzo in 1455, when Piero della Francesca painted these frescos.

Retracing our steps, we explore the weekly market at a leisurely pace. We walk past produce stalls crowded with rounds of cheese, the sellers passing us slices to taste on long, slender knives. My poor Italian cripples my intent to buy: there’s so much choice but I can’t read the descriptions, and since few of the sellers speak English, asking what kind of cheese this is, or how hot the salami might be is pointless – I can’t make sense of the response and wind up staring back dumbstruck. I learnt in Rome that dolce means sweet and is used to describe a mild cheese. I say ‘Dolce?’ and the ruddy-cheeked man with the knife grabs a round of cheese and cuts me a wedge. We’ll eat it with mortadella, which I thankfully recognise, and crusty white bread when our stomachs can no longer wait for the call to lunch.

Then I see something else I recognise. I point and hand over five euros. In return I receive what looks like a charred ball of dung. It demands to be sniffed, so I rub my nose against its rough surface. I’m a slave to some smells – ground coffee closes my eyes in pleasure, jasmine draws out a smile for the approaching summer, coal smoke conjures an English infancy I can’t recall and pizza is a mouth-watering promise that has only ever been delivered in Italy. Truffle has one of those top-shelf smells, too expensive to satisfy. In the Adelaide Central Market it can be found at the Mushroom Man’s stall, behind glass in a straw-lined box. I sometimes sit at Lucia’s, the Italian cafe opposite, and imagine I can afford to buy it. But I can’t so I settle for truffle oil – which, as I’ve recently found out, usually doesn’t contain any truffle at all.

Eyes closed, short frequent breaths, a low moan: I must look like I’m having an orgasm. Shannon recognises it and suggests I give up my prize – he actually tries to take it from me. No words, just an odd tussle as I try to bring the truffle closer to my nose and Shannon tries to extract it, while at the same time shielding our children from their mother’s fetish. Shannon wins. He puts the truffle in his daypack, and in a moment my head is clear and my eyes have refocused. I start to think of what I will do with my ugly lump of fungus, and we walk on.

Ducks and chickens, alive and dead, give way to T-shirts made in China, with English slogans that will be meaningless to those who’ll wear them. I’m surprised to see whitegoods and curtains, and realise that this market is the equivalent of a department store. Everything is here and everyone comes.

Back at Ulrike’s stall, she smiles and asks if we liked what we saw. I tell her about the frescos and she nods; she knows how good they are.

~

I never thought we’d get used to the woodhouse, but we have. Everything we own has a nook or cranny, and it’s become familiar, even comfortable. I’m a little bit proud. The only thing that has eluded us is hygiene – we stink.

It’s been more than a week since we last bathed. The long trek to the bathroom has failed, repeatedly, to result in a hot shower. Only today I found out why: water at Il Mulino is heated by a wood fire, sporadically lit. With no idea of when the boiler got fired up we’ve somehow managed to time our showers with the off-days, when the water has cooled to just above freezing.

But we haven’t been completely feral. We made ourselves an ensuite bathroom from a tap that leaks mountain water onto a mossy stone just beside the woodhouse. Ferns and grasses lend it the exotic character of an air-freshener advert – mountain pine, it would be called. It means we’ve had somewhere to brush our teeth and wash our hands after we’ve hidden in the undergrowth for a wee. The woodhouse is surrounded by undergrowth. It’s a tangle of noxious weeds and ferns that have escaped Stefan’s brush-cutter and become a breeding ground for ticks. I only know this because a tick the size of my fingernail burrowed its head so far into my thigh during a recent squat that not even Ulrike’s expert hand could dislodge it. She assured me it was not the paralysis kind, but I immediately shifted all ablutions to the Turkish toilet on the other side of the farm.

My first hot shower since arriving at Il Mulino is such a profound pleasure that I’m actually glad for all the days of deprivation. Hot water travels down the length of my spine like the fingers of a masseuse, expertly working away at every point of tension. A long exhalation and I throw my head back to soak my hair.

‘I hope you left some hot water for the rest of us,’ Shannon says when I step out and he steps in.

‘It doesn’t matter if you didn’t,’ says Aidan, ‘I don’t mind missing out.’

Their drenching is short but effective. We leave the bathroom in a fog and glide towards the goat track. I feel reborn. My thinking is clearer, my body stronger, I must be more beautiful. I’m trying to think of a way Shannon and I can keep the boys out of the woodhouse for an hour or so when Stefan stops us.

‘You can move this afternoon,’ he says.

At first I think we’re being asked to leave, that we’ve used too much hot water and violated the conditions of our stay. But as my post-shower euphoria wanes, Stefan smiles his gentle smile and continues.

‘You can move into the apartment.’

It takes a second to realise that my recent affection for the woodhouse was just a story I told myself. I want to drop to my knees and kiss Stefan’s feet, but instead I let out an indiscreet whoop and turn to high-five the boys. They seem less excited, perhaps even put out. Maybe they really are comfortable in the woodhouse or – an unsettling thought – maybe they don’t like change.

The apartment has a sit-down toilet and functional shower, and it’s quintessentially Tuscan. It occupies the ground floor of a restored stone house, and the shuttered windows open on a view of terraced gardens and olive groves. The picture inside is equally authentic, with whitewashed walls, tiled floors and a print of Michelangelo’s Genesis above our double bed – the one where God is reaching his hand towards Man, who seems just out of reach and, in my opinion, a bit reluctant. For Shannon and me, the thick stone wall and wooden door separating our bedroom from the lounge room (and the boys’ fold-out double bed) is a secret cause for celebration, but out loud, Shannon nominates the stove and little coffee pot as his favourite improvement. The boys vote for the fridge and its capacity to store cheese and mortadella, and I claim the reading lamp and armchair, where I’m determined to transcribe our days in comfort.

We’re soon in a comfortable routine that reminds us a little of home. We still work about ten hours a day, but now those hours seem a doddle. It’s easy to imagine staying for the whole summer.

~

Amalie is strapped to my back and we’re negotiating the steep path down to the herb garden. Shannon is intent on revealing long-buried paths around the beds, spreading them with mulch to retard the growth of weeds. I recognise the industry of his movements, each action bringing him closer to a satisfactory outcome. For years now, I’ve longed for this. So much of my work as a social scientist has been spent on infertile soil: months developing a research grant that gets rejected. Not always because it wasn’t good enough, but because there were so many others applying for money from such a small purse. The last grant and the one before that probably weren’t good enough. I’m no different to Skinner’s rats – without reward my enthusiasm began to wane. I started out with a noble motivation to contribute to the greater good, but found myself, twenty years later, concerned more about the money and less about the cause. And then there was that seminar.

I was presenting the findings of a four-year study of people’s experiences living on the outskirts of four Australian cities – no jobs, poor public transport, nothing for teenagers to do, isolated mothers blah, blah, blah.

‘Your findings are exactly the same as those from a few studies conducted in the 1960s and ’70s,’ said a slouching sociologist who looked like he’d been there at the time.

‘And why do you think that might be?’ I responded, a little nervous because I should have known more about those studies but had never made the time to read them properly.

‘I think it might be because boxes on hillsides are easy money and infrastructure eats into the profits. It’s good research, but it didn’t make a difference forty years ago, so it probably won’t make a difference now.’

‘Well, I’d better pack up and go home then,’ I said. He clearly thought that would be absurd. If every academic lived by that rule our tertiary institutions would be half empty.

It took me a while, but I finally did pack up and go home. And now I’ve decided I want to do work that’s meaningful and enjoyable, that treads lightly and responds to natural cycles and real need. I want to get dirt under my fingernails, plant things and nurture them, then pull them out of the ground and feed them to my kids. This would satisfy me. This would be rewarding toil. But I’m a child of the clock. There’s a lot to undo, and a lot to learn.

Shannon crouches, puts a finger in his mouth and blows up his cheeks. Pop! Amalie giggles and reaches her arm towards him. I obey.

‘Mulch, Amalie, is the key to any efficient garden. Without it, you’ll need to do so much weeding and watering there’ll never be time for all the important things in life, like …’ His finger reaches again into the recess of his cheek, Amalie raises her own. Shannon pops, Amalie slides her finger in and out, unperturbed by the silence of the action. I’m not sure who is more delighted. Probably me.

The boys are sitting on the grassy slope, their school books open for the first time since leaving Australia. We’ve struck a deal. If they complete one page of maths and one of English, they can spend an hour on their DSs. We’ll check their work when we stop for lunch.

‘Dad, what’s an acute angle?’ Riley is looking down the slope. The old limbs of a chestnut reach over his head, stone buildings shadow his back. Shannon pulls an un-popped finger from his cheek, but I get in first.

‘It’s smaller than a right angle. Think of it as small and cute.’

The boys have learned not to ask me maths questions because I can rarely help without looking something up. In that frantic time between getting home from work and putting the boys to bed, looking something up was an inconvenience.

Riley looks to his dad for confirmation and receives a nod. He returns to his workbook. Shannon returns to his mulch. I sit on a rock at the edge of the garden and let Amalie play with my hair.

This is a moment. One I want to preserve for its balance and grace. Each of us doing something small but meaningful in the same space, not bothered by the passing of time. We’ve shed our outer garments and they litter the bank that is the boys’ classroom. Spring is asserting itself and I feel myself relaxing into this life.

~

Simona is in the apartment upstairs, resting. Amalie is finally asleep. The soundtrack of the film that inspired her name leaks through the floor into our apartment. We’ve shared lunch and Ulrike is having her ‘repose’. This is the word she always uses as she rises from the table after lunch.

‘I am going for repose,’ she says.

Each time, I’m tempted to translate and make her aware of the more commonly used ‘rest’ or ‘lie-down’. Repose, though, is perfect. Ulrike is seeking quiet solitude. From the moment she wakes until the moment she goes to bed, she’s occupied with the labours of the farm, her children, her grandchild, wwoofers. A tranquil hour in the middle of it all is the pivot on which her day rests. It sustains the calm dignity that moves her from one task to another. I’ve already started to imitate her slow pace, though with enormous difficulty. Where I come from, there aren’t many external rewards for going slow. I decide that from now on, I’ll divide my days with repose.

But I’ll have to start tomorrow – today there is school work to check. Shannon is exploring fractions with Riley and I’m trying to explain to Aidan why apostrophes matter. The time for repose passes, and Ulrike, refreshed, calls for me to come to the kitchen.

I recoil slightly at the sight and sour smell of the grey gunk Ulrike is adding to a small amount of rye flour in a very large plastic tub. It’s bread starter, a bit of bread mixture left over from her last baking day. It’s full of bacteria, apparently, and has been reproducing itself in this way for years. She adds warm water, I stir it into the flour, and for now that’s it. I was hoping there’d be more to it, that I’d get to spend the whole afternoon pottering in the kitchen. But, unlike the dried yeast I’m used to, this dull grey mass needs a lot of time.

‘Tomorrow,’ Ulrike says, ‘it will be bubbling with the life.’

~

Ulrike’s bread has made a deep impression – Aidan shudders at the mention of it, but the rest of us find solace in its sour taste, the al dente resistance of sunflower seeds, the hint of coriander. For me, it’s the centre of everything at Il Mulino. It’s as if all the hard work is only possible because of the sustenance it provides, and every meal is drawn out around the extra slices we each take when our plates are empty. It’s the staple that holds everything together and makes life on this farm particularly good. I’ve been looking forward to this day all week.

The kitchen has become so familiar. Its worn wooden table and heavy mismatched chairs where we gather to eat three times a day, its heirloom cabinet full of plain cracked crockery, a small bar fridge with broken shelves, the new oven and ancient sink. And, right at the back, near the fireplace that bellows black smoke inside and out, a threadbare two-seater lounge where Ulrike sometimes retires for her repose. There has never been any reason to move beyond it, until today.

The house is built on sloping land and solid timber stairs lead internally down from the kitchen to a cellar, which has its own access to the garden. The cellar is full of bottles and jars and junk. As well as producing honey, Stefan and Ulrike distil olive oil, juice apples and make honey vinegar. Hundreds of litres of each stand uniformly on crowded shelves, or haphazardly on the rough concrete floor.

On a table just inside the cellar door there’s a small electric mill. Ulrike shows me where to get the wholegrain rye and the coriander seeds, and then instructs me in the art of milling. It’s slow, even with the modern twist of electricity. Grain needs to be added to the mill in small batches and occasionally encouraged towards the grinding mechanism. It’s a task that requires patience. She gets me a chair and suggests I might like to put it just outside the door, where I can see the garden. ‘A time to think about other things,’ Ulrike says.

I approach the mill with the same desire for time efficiency that dogs every other aspect of my life. The first small batch of grain falls like sand through an hourglass, a thin stream of flour slowly filling an old honey jar. It’s excruciating. The second batch is a little larger, and I agitate it with my finger to speed up the process. The third batch fills the reservoir almost to the top. I add a regular shake of the mill to the finger action and perceive a slight increase in the volume of flour falling into the jar. I’m pleased with my progress, but wondering when I’ll get to sit on the chair and contemplate the garden.

Overworked, the mill strains and coughs. Ulrike tells me it has overheated and needs to rest. She redirects me to the laundry to iron sheets. As I walk past the chair I kick it in the leg.

An hour later, I turn the mill back on and fill it halfway – there will be no hurrying this time.

Milling the rye, I realise, is an opportunity for repose, so I pull the chair further into the sun. It bears me no grudge for the kick and takes my weight with grace. I can see the three older children playing on a swing hanging from the cherry tree. I can’t remember when I last sat to watch the children play. Aidan is standing on a chair so he can start from the highest point possible. When he jumps, the chair falls back with the force of his take-off. Marta quickly removes it from the path of the swing, and Aidan undulates his body to gain more and more height. The branch is very high, and the rope is terribly long, so Aidan flies – like Peter Pan, I think. My heart pounds with the thrill and the fear of it; any moment now he might leave that swing and either crash to the ground or fly to Neverland.

My last bowl of flour is ready to be taken to the kitchen. I’ve lost track of time but decide not to look at my watch (I’d like to take it off and pack it away, but its hold on me is still tight).

Ulrike is not the territorial kind. She’s quite happy to sit back and give vague instructions, not fussing around the bench or scrutinising my quantities. The bread starter has grown, and its sourness hits a more pleasant note than before. Milled flour and coriander go in, sunflower seeds and linseeds, a few oats (‘however the amount you like’), salt and warm water. There is mixture for seven loaves of bread, enough for the whole week. I’m nervous about getting it wrong. When I ask if I should add more water, Ulrike does one of those sideways shakes of her head, not a yes, or a no.

‘Maybe. You want it not too wet, just sloppy’.

What’s the difference? In the absence of disapproval, I keep guessing. When my arms can’t stir anymore, Ulrike pulls a heavy electric cake mixer from the cupboard and attaches a dough hook.

‘It makes better bread, and it is easier. It was worth the money.’

I agree, and my arms agree. Working in small batches, it takes nearly an hour to mix the ten kilos of dough to the right consistency. I half-fill seven large bread tins with the sloppy – perhaps slightly too wet – mixture, cover them, and take them out to sit in the sun for four hours.

‘Sit with them,’ she says.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ I ask

‘Yes, now is a good time for tea.’

The blackened bread tins are already warm when Ulrike and I place our mugs of tea beside them. Until now, all our conversations have been about the farm and the work we’re doing. Occasional forays into our children’s lives have focused on school and how it’s possible to take the boys away from it for so long. She seems shy, or perhaps guarded. I’m trying to imagine what it would be like to have a constant stream of wwoofers through your home. The effort of keeping up social graces during every meal and activity for months at a time would wear me down. When do they argue? When do they cry? When do they muck around and do things you only do in the privacy of your own home? Ulrike has closed her eyes and tilted her head towards the sun. Repose comes so easily to her. I stop thinking and follow her example. Our tea goes cold.

Ulrike doesn’t mind cold tea. She’s happy to sip and sit a little longer, happy to talk. She tells me about the last time she and Stefan went on holiday, and I realise she’s not so different to any woman I know. It was a surprise for his birthday, a cruise, a week away from the hard work of the farm that she had saved a long time for. She made him wear nice clothes, and he hated it.

‘I wanted to do something special. I need to do nice things sometimes, but he is happy here. He doesn’t need anything else.’

We have one of those conversations I have every now and then, sitting in a cafe with a friend on my day off, just after we’ve dropped the kids at school and before we do the shopping. Ulrike and I are laughing, at ourselves and the men we love. A small shift seems to have occurred and I feel like I’ve been invited in.

‘Is there anything I can do to help with lunch?’ I ask.

Ulrike is taking our mugs back to the kitchen. ‘If you can pick two lettuces from the greenhouse and wash them. We will have lunch at two.’

It’s an easy job and I have two hours to do it. I follow Ulrike into the kitchen and put the kettle on to boil again. I’m feeling confident that another cup of tea will not be seen as malingering – that was my work ethic, not hers. This is baking day, I realise: as long as a warm loaf graces the table at the end of it, I can spend the rest of my time as I wish. I fill two cups, and head down to the herb garden to sit with Shannon.

Eventually seven warm tins are brought into the kitchen, and Ulrike is telling me they’ll need about one-and-a-half hours in the oven, maybe more. She’s going out for coffee with a friend and will be away for the rest of the afternoon. I’m surprised. First that she’d trust me to cook the week’s bread, but mostly that she has coffee with friends. For some reason it’s a relief.

I put the first four tins into the hot oven and check the time on my watch. I have at least three hours to do nothing other than take these loaves out of the oven and put the remaining loaves in. The boys are with Marta down by the river, Simona has taken Amalie with her to work and everyone else is busy doing other things in other places. I have the kitchen to myself. Even here, it’s a delicious thought.

I retrieve my notebook. It still feels new, full of possibility. There are a few half-page accounts of whole days, snippets of thoughts and barely formed ideas. I’ve been gathering recipes in the back and the odd gardening tip. I turn to a clean page, always a small thrill, and write the date in the top right-hand corner. Aidan on the swing flies onto the paper, my freshest memory.

This is my version of repose, I’ve decided. The capturing of moments and marshalling of thoughts calms me, and the hours ahead feel like a gift. The oven hums in the background and I lose myself to the flow of words. Then something stops my pen. There’s a change in the atmosphere that I can’t quite put my finger on; there’s no commotion outside, and no one has come into the kitchen. It’s perfectly quiet. Too quiet. The oven has stopped humming. I look at my watch; just half an hour has passed.

I get up to check the oven, unable to calm the rising anxiety that a week’s worth of bread, all that effort and ten kilos of good-quality grain, might be wasted because of my incompetence.

Nothing I do will turn the oven back on and a frantic search of the kitchen drawers fails to reveal the instruction manual. What were they thinking, putting a wwoofer in charge of the bread? A cake, maybe, we could all live without afternoon tea, but their daily bread?

It’s my fault. ‘I bake at home,’ I told them. I wanted so much to be useful that I convinced them I would be. I talked myself up like any would-be candidate for a project management job. I press more buttons, turn more dials. Still the oven stays silent. I’m reluctant to open it and lose whatever heat it holds, but some irrational part of me is hoping the loaves might be cooked. They’re not, how could they be? An hour and half, Ulrike said. They’re as pale as when they went in and the consistency of playdough. I need to find Stefan.

Luckily for me, he’s not too far from the house. He and Shannon are stripping bark off the trunks of felled chestnut trees to make fence posts. As I approach I hear their voices, taking turns. Whenever Shannon speaks, Stefan turns to look at him, his hands still in motion. I’m loath to interrupt (and I’m reluctant to admit defeat), but I have to.

If Stefan’s annoyed, it doesn’t show. We walk towards the house, more slowly than I’m comfortable with, but when we get there he has no idea how the oven works.

‘It’s new,’ he says.

I don’t think that’s the reason he can’t use it, but his ignorance takes the edge off my panic. We’ve tried everything and have ended up doing what anyone would do in this situation: standing side by side, our hands cupping our chins, looking at the oven and waiting for an inspirational idea or a miracle. It works. The oven turns itself back on with no intervention from us, and I have an undeniable urge to hug this man who has shared my ordeal. I lean in but suddenly feel shy and the hug is aborted. There’s an awkward moment, then he goes back to stripping chestnut.

Every half an hour or so the oven repeats its temperamental shut down and reboot. It completely messes with my timing, and leaves no room for repose, but I no longer think it will defeat me.

After two hours I start testing the loaves, tapping the bottom, listening for the hollow sound that apparently indicates the loaf is cooked. I’ve never really known what that ‘hollow sound’ should actually sound like, and many a hollow-sounding loaf has ended up in the compost. Stefan frequently returns to the kitchen, uncharacteristically concerned. If I fail, he’ll have to endure Italian white for a whole week.

‘I don’t think the colour is good,’ he says. ‘A bit pale. Maybe ten more minutes.’

This is how we pass the afternoon, through two batches of baking. When Ulrike returns from town (a loaf of white explained away as a treat for Marta and Aidan), there are seven variously cooked loaves of rye bread filling the kitchen with their glorious aroma. Some are paler than others – they could have done with a little extra cooking – but it’s decided that time will dry their doughy centres and they’re put aside to be eaten later in the week. I take a slice from the best-coloured loaf and hand it to Stefan. His grin warms me, and declares the whole experiment a success.

~

A few days later honey spills, a slick translucent gold, all over my lap and shoes. It creeps under my chair and across the floor, towards a pile of broken sheets of yellow wax.

My job, earlier today, was to melt each sheet of wax, ever so gently, onto a rectangular frame strung with fine wire. The frame will eventually end up in a hive and become a scaffold for honeycomb, but first it had to be assembled. Ulrike showed me how. She was clear and unhurried, and the task took less than ten seconds. All I had to do was lay a wax sheet on the wire of a frame and heat the wire with a small electric current until the wax sank, just a little, onto it. That was the theory. But ten sheets of wax melted straight through before I began to get a feel for it. And after I got a feel for it, I still only had a success rate of around 60 per cent.

The good frames, where the wire had been swallowed by the wax but not spat out the other side, were placed one on top of the other, ready to become receptacles of sweetness in the hives. A growing sense of achievement spurred me on, my production rate increased and the bench became crowded with high-rises.

Now I have a new job in the honey room and it’s another shaky start. Ulrike is smiling, her head bobbing from side to side in that way I’m beginning to think means ‘don’t worry’.

‘The honey is warm,’ she says. ‘It will pour very quickly. You must release the valve only a little, like this.’ She takes an empty jar and holds it under the valve of the fifty-litre vat, then barely releases the wing-nut. Honey ribbons out. The jar fills and just before it reaches the top Ulrike stops the flow.

Again, honey spills from my jar, but I see an opportunity. I summon Riley.

‘Feel like a bit of honey, honey?’ I say.

Small expert fingers excavate the sweet veneer on the table, odd jars are put beneath drips, the pool of honey in my lap is spooned up and swallowed. Ulrike tells him he can keep the honey he collects, so he makes a concerted effort to scrape every last drop off my trousers and arms. I try to think when I last washed either, and make a mental note to weed that jar from the collection.

‘Can I stop now? I’m feeling a bit yucky,’ Riley says eventually. He has filled four small jars and consumed just as much. I picture the flush of colour rising up his neck as a wave of vomit. There’s already enough to clean up in here, so I deliver a quick instruction to run along and get some fresh air. He takes up his treasure and leaves me with a mop and sponge and a sweet feeling that has nothing to do with the honey still on my lips.

I hold the wing nut, and take a deep breath. The smallest twist and honey bulges through. I catch it. After a few jars I feel I’ve tamed it. A few more and I barely need to think about what I’m doing; my mind is free to wander. This is it, I think. This is what a good life looks like. I’ve spent the day as busy as a bee but still available for whatever joy presents itself. I’ve put lots of honey in lots of jars and in a few days Ulrike will take these jars to market and people will buy them. They’ll spread the honey on their bread, stir it into their porridge, eat it by the spoonful and it will sustain them in body and in soul. I feel like I’ve been part of something real – I want to bottle it and take it home.

By the end of the day my sticky clothes are soaking, and Simona and I sit on the steps leading up to the kitchen. We’re talking about birth while we wait for dinner.

‘I was alone,’ she says. ‘Stefan and Ulrike were in Germany, I was here with no one, it was snow everywhere. A neighbour drove me to hospital.’

I have a crush on Simona, a desire to be around her, to impress. My middle-aged self wants her to grab hold of my hand and pull me back to my youth. It’s a bit pathetic, but most crushes are. Simona was twenty-two when she gave birth to Amalie. Motherhood bridges the age gap, but it’s a narrow bridge. The more I know of her the more I admire. Over the past week I’ve noticed her patience – with Amalie, with the work that tires her and disagreements with her parents or siblings. Italy has woeful welfare provisions for single mothers so she works harder than a young mother should have to, but she always has the energy to talk, to run along the trails through the woods, to go out with friends. Twice while we’ve been here, she’s changed from the clothes she cleans and cares in, darkened her eyelids and left Amalie with Marta for the night.

‘I go dancing in Rassina,’ she says. ‘Do you like to dance?’

‘I do,’ I say, ‘I used to be in a belly dance troupe.’

Simona looks genuinely impressed and her whole body turns towards me, ‘Maybe, after dinner, we can meet in the woodhouse and you can teach me.’

That wasn’t the response I expected and I’m caught in a trap of my own making. I have an image of myself the last time I danced with my troupe, seven months pregnant with Riley. I was huge and prone to sciatica unless I wore a wide elasticated stabilising belt around my pelvis. A bare midriff was clearly out of the question, so I’d more or less cut a hole in a huge square of green velvet, put my head through it and tied a belt around my hips – sexy? Definitely not. The stabilising belt wasn’t up to the exaggerated figure eights I had to perform in order to accommodate my velvet tent and belly overhang, and I needed help coming off the small stage set up for that particular festival. An unworthy end to a truly liberating pastime. And really, that’s all it was. My little troupe was short-lived, and we danced mainly at fetes, for free, but it was transporting. I can’t believe it’s been nine years.

Simona is looking at me like I’ve danced for the queen of Egypt.

‘Well, it’s been a while. Since the boys were born I …’ I can’t bear to say no, not because it will disappoint Simona, but because, right at this moment, I know it will disappoint me. ‘I’d love that,’ I say instead. Then I excuse myself, saying I need to check on the boys, and I spend the half-hour before dinner practising hip drops and belly rolls and wishing I hadn’t eaten so much gelato while we were in Rome.

The woodhouse is as we left it, though there’s a dank smell that I think might be coming from the mattress we dragged from under Giovanni’s yurt. We haul it up and lean it against the wall. The space is small, but there’s room to dance.

Simona has brought her CD player, a few scarves with coins sewn around their edges and enthusiasm. In leggings and a bikini top, she’s lovely. I’m feeling like mutton dressed as lamb. I’ve worn a long skirt and tied my t-shirt in a knot just below my breasts, a little closer to my belly button than I would like to admit. She hands me a scarf and the tinny jingle stirs my hips into a gentle sway – they have a memory all their own.

Simona is a good belly dancer, and I feel a bit foolish trying to teach her new movements. If she’s disappointed that I’m not better she masks it by politely asking me to repeat instructions. Her stomach is taut, with no sign it’s carried a baby to bursting. I show her how to do belly rolls, my skin trembling above the muscular wave that moves beneath it. I used to be good at this, and before Aidan came along I sometimes imagined winning the applause of a sit-down audience. After Aidan came along I considered it an exotic workout. Now, I’m straining with the effort. Holding my stomach in is probably adding an unnecessary degree of difficulty, but I’m too vain to let it go.

There is no trembling in Simona’s skin. Her belly roll is smooth and undulating, like a clean sheet hanging on the line, caressing a passing breeze. The lesson ends. Tum tum tucka tum, the beat of an Arabic drum fills the woodhouse. We dance.

It’s close to midnight when I trip down the familiar path to the apartment. Muscles I haven’t used for years have warmed and woken, and memories of myself before motherhood have been roused. It’s as if I have come across something I’d forgotten was lost. I’m so pleased to have it back, but not quite sure where to put it amongst the clutter that has accumulated since.

~

Friends and family gathered around a large rustic table laden with food – this is the image that drew us, like pilgrims, to the Italian countryside.

Since arriving at Il Mulino we’ve sat around a rustic table three times a day. Friends and family pass around Ulrike’s bread, her pasta or stew, salad picked fresh from the garden. We talk in three languages about the small things that matter – how to prune raspberry canes – and the big things that don’t – Berlusconi’s latest scandal. We reveal ourselves in increments. After only three weeks, we know each other, and I think we might know ourselves a little better too.

That is what eating good food with other people can do. Multiple courses and second helpings make us linger, and they lubricate the tongue. When we share food we indulge more than one appetite – we’ve sat around this kitchen table and shared knowledge, solved problems, generated ideas, relieved anxieties and confusions. The only thing left to simmer is the stew. So many people only get to experience this at Christmas, where the feast would not be complete without some social rupture that leaves the food uneaten and the cook crying into her napkin. But I wonder if that sort of thing would happen if the feasting was more regular, the problems and resentments dealt with bit by little bit?

On our last night at Il Mulino another feast is planned, one that Ulrike will not have to prepare. It’s her fifty-fifth birthday, and Simona and Giovanni have spent the day making pasta and cooking venison and chicken in the wood-fired oven beside the house. We’re looking forward to the protein.

Twenty people will gather to celebrate, so the outdoor table and an old door on a trestle are brought end-to-end on the lawn below the cherry tree. Every plate and fork in the kitchen is needed, and it’s my job to gather them up and put them in their places. None of the cutlery matches, and few of the plates have escaped injury over their long lives. For three weeks I’ve been filling a cracked plastic salad bowl with lettuce every night, and mopping up the pool of water left behind when I clear the table after our meal. If I’d had my way a few weeks ago, that bowl would have found an alternative home in landfill then been replaced by something more durable and undoubtedly more expensive. But as I lay out each chipped plate with a mismatched knife and fork, I embrace the challenge of finding the perfect place on the table for the salad bowl: somewhere that will contain the leak rather than send it dripping onto someone’s lap. I make a small internal adjustment and admit something I’ve been wilfully ignoring for a while now: the good life is messy and chipped, and if we do it properly there’ll be no place for the aesthetic order I drool over in Country Life. But the compromise seems worth it; for the good food, the time and the company, a few chipped plates can be tolerated. Another lesson is noted and stored away.

At dinner Ulrike is at the head of the table, diminished by the folding chair that sits her lower than the rest of us. She knows how to relax, and I see none of the restlessness I usually feel as a host when I’ve been relieved of my duties. She sips from a glass of wine, the first I’ve seen in her hand in three weeks. I’m already on my second and hoping the few bottles on the table don’t run out before I get to my third.

Simona is trying to explain to Aidan what meat makes up the ragù on the pasta she’s piling onto his plate. His mouth gapes in horror as a childhood memory is spliced with the rich smell of meat sauce.

‘“Bambi”, I think you call it.’

Now he’s laughing and shouting across to Riley, ‘Guess what’s on the pasta?’

‘Bolognese?’

‘No, Bambi!’

I look over at Stefan. I’ve poured my third glass of wine and the night is lit by the orange glow of candles. At times like this, I’m prone to fancy. He looks up and catches my gaze like he would my hand – courteous, but with a gentle caress, imperceptible to the observer, but deeply felt. I will miss him.

~

The next day we stand expectantly, arranged more or less as we were on our first morning.

Stefan has agreed to take us to the station at Rassina where we’ll get a train to Florence, then to Rome, then to Naples. But first we have to say goodbye.

After three weeks, Marta, Aidan and Riley have become independent of our skirts, but they’re still shy about speaking each other’s languages. Riley’s been making a conscientious effort, trying the sounds of new words and asking how to say important things in Italian, like ‘football’ and ‘cricket’. He even found an old Italian–German dictionary on the bookshelves in our apartment and began translating the few Italian words he knows into German, occasionally trying them out at the dinner table. Marta would respond with one of her half-smiles and a few whispered words to her mum, before turning her gaze on Riley – the reward for his efforts.

We’ve worked hard during our stay at Il Mulino, far more hours than the wwoofing guide suggests. At first it was because we were never told when to stop and had assumed that meant we should keep on going. After a week we realised that we could probably stop any time we liked. But whenever we saw Stefan and Ulrike, they were working. We felt obliged to help them out, simply because we could – there was no housework to catch up on, no bills to pay, no phone calls to return or meals to organise. We were time rich, and so we donated some to the cause of Il Mulino. Initially it was out of obligation, then out of a desire to make the hard lives of these good people a little easier, and finally because it felt good.

Stefan takes Shannon’s right hand with both of his own. He doesn’t shake in the usual sense, just holds.

‘If you need anything, if you are in trouble or stuck, you call us. We are like your family in Italy, we will help.’

It’s hard to believe we’re leaving. Just before going to bed last night we all agreed that we could easily stay for months. We’ve become comfortable, each with our own routine intersecting with the others’ throughout the long days, not just at the beginning and the end. Even the boys, with nothing in particular to do, have found some natural rhythm to replace the imposition of a school day, ‘I could live like this forever,’ Aidan had said. But plans have been made: another farm is expecting us in a week, and there are volcanos to climb and ancient cities to explore.

Ulrike and I hug. This reserved and guarded woman, who I’ve grown to admire and relate to in so many ways, says she will miss me. I know she doesn’t say this to all her wwoofers, and I hold her tighter and longer than she probably feels comfortable with. The space this family will take up in our story will be far greater than the space we take up in theirs. We’re just four people out of a hundred that they’ll host over the years, but they’re our first. You always remember your first.