Our trip to Italy last week confirmed two things.  We are still passionately in love with Italy.  And we really need to learn Italian.

I have been taking classes on Tuesday nights at the Italian Athletic Club (yes, that’s its real name) in San Francisco’s North Beach.  I log on to Rosetta Stone when I have time, which seems to be almost never.  And right now there are orange stickies all over the house with the Italian names for things on them, so when I need a refrigerator, I will know to ask for un frigorifero.

But it is going slowly.  I feel like I am starting to understand a few more words and phrases, but when I open my mouth to say something, nothing comes out.  It is really frustrating.

Fortunately, there are a few words I feel I have down cold.  Seven, to be exact.  And as I was able to use them last week, I felt pretty darn good about myself. Here they are:

1. La macchina: Literally, the machine, this also translates to the car.  Obviously, this is a very important word when you are traveling around looking at homes in the Italian countryside.

2. Mio marito:  Another very important word, this is the person who was kind enough to drive la macchina  all over creation, also known as my husband.

3. Cattivo: This is an excellent word.  Google translates it as naughty, and in class we learned it as a word to describe terrible weather, or something evil.

I had the good fortune to use all three in an exchange with the little old lady who lives across the street from where we were staying.  We had had a bit of a hard time getting out of our driveway and onto the wet, narrow road one morning and found ourselves sliding down her grassy hill towards her barn.  No farm animals were harmed, but we flattened some grass and dislodged a large stone before gunning it back up the hill and onto the road.  The next morning this tiny, weathered old woman approached me on my walk and I was foolish enough to say “Buongiorno,” which, incredibly, prompted her to begin speaking to me.  Rapidly.  I had no idea what she was saying but she was pointing to the tracks and the newly replaced rock and then muttered, “Cattivo.”  I don’t know if she was referring to the trespasser or the weather, but I nodded and pointed to our car, “La macchina…mio marito.”  ”Si si.” She smiled. “Mio marito…cattivo!” said I, throwing my husband under the proverbial bus.  She seemed pleased with my confession and happily went on about her day, as did I.

4. Carta: I learned this word from Rosetta Stone.  It means paper. And  when you are working on plans for renovating a home, you go through a lot of it.  We came equipped with a few tablets, but our sweet friends, The Beck’s, must have drawn up 3 or 4 floorplans a night, and my husband was going through almost as much.  Plus, we were getting to the point where we needed graph paper and transparent tracing paper, to fine tune the plans.  So we headed into town one morning in search of some transparent tracing paper. The task seemed fairly daunting. But I couldn’t believe it when I spotted the sign: Cartoleria.  Yep, it was a stationary store,  tucked away from the main square, filled with tracing paper, graph paper and any other kind of paper we might have wanted.  I felt like I had won the lottery.

5. Quindi: So, quindici means fifteen, which is a word I felt pretty confident about.  But every time we met with another architect or builder, they used the word quindi, over and over, at which point the person translating for us would stop, and not translate the word. I was getting pretty confused. I wondered if it was a slang word for fifteen, and wondered why everything we were talking about took fifteen days, or was fifteen meters, or cost fifteen dollars, and why no one was translating that for us. Turns out, it simply means so, or as Google says, then or therefore.  I must have heard it quindici times a day.  But now I know it.

6. Il tulipano:  Really.  This is the best way to learn a language.  I will never forget that the word for that beautiful red flower blooming courageously in our yard is tulipano.  And now, neither will you.

7. Tettoia.  Actually, my husband learned this one before I did.  He kept pointing to the overhang above our porch and the architect would nod, and say, tettoia.  And they used tettoia when we pointed to the eaves out back, and they used tettoia when we pointed to the canopy by the bedroom and the shed out back.  Quindi…..we know exactly where our tettoie are and what they look like.  We just don’t really know what the word for all of that is in English.

As soon as someone who is learning another language turns to me and says, “Oh gee, I forget the English word for ….” , they lose me.   It is as bad as coming home from a year in London with an English accent.  And here I am, after only 7 words of Italian, getting obnoxious.  But I am pretty proud of the 7 words I can use.

I think I may be getting ready to actually learn a verb.

The first day of spring is a perfect day to ponder the wisdom of trees.

I confess, I had forgotten about trees, the tallest of living things.  So many years in cities, in offices and on airplanes had turned them into blurs on the distant landscapes. But this last weekend, I walked beneath the redwoods and was astounded again by their beauty, their simplicity and their strength.

The air was tangibly different as we entered Muir Woods.  Mostly, it felt cooler, but it was far warmer where the sun broke through the branches, and the scent of pine needles crunching underfoot worked to comfort me like a kind of aromatherapy.  Sounds were muffled and the impact of the other visitors was muted by the trees. Somehow, we felt like the woods were there for just us.  I imagine everyone there felt the same way.

We walked along Redwood Creek into the Bohemian Grove. I stopped at a particularly large tree, and touched the velvety bark, curved and sculpted like a Frank Gehry building.  I felt a thrill at its undulating grace.  Looking up, the sunlight filtered down through the tender green branches that towered above us.

We came upon a cross section of a tree that showed rings that had formed throughout its lifetime.  It was a sapling in 900 AD, and little arrows along the cross section marked dates, like 1492 when Columbus discovered the new world, 1760 when the Industrial Revolution began, and 1969 when man first walked on the moon.  What stories could these trees tell?  What had they seen? What will they see, yet?

Ancient forests like these covered much of the Northern Hemisphere 150 million years ago, before a changing climate forced their retreat.  Now, only a narrow strip of redwood trees remains on the West Coast from Big Sur to Southern Oregon.  They can grow to be 370 feet tall, and up to 2,000 years old. Giant Sequoias, some as much as 3,200 years old, can be found in small patches on the western slopes of the Sierras, and while they are larger in diameter than these coastal redwoods, they still do not grow as tall.  Nothing on earth grows taller than a redwood tree.

Our famously foggy climate is exactly what a redwood needs to thrive.  Born in a region with little rain, the trees collect water from the fog as it condenses on their needles.  As the water drips down, it serves as a built-in sprinkling system.  I remember driving last summer from Santa Barbara to San Francisco and noticing the oak trees dotting the hillsides.  In the midst of brown, rolling hills, each of these trees stood in the middle of a round patch of green grass.  They had the same sort of sprinkling system, catching the moisture from the morning fog in their leaves, and releasing it into the ground throughout the day.  Ingenious, trees!

Redwoods have even evolved to include forest fires as a benefit.  Fires clear out the forest floors so that the tree’s seeds can reach the soil.  Fire kills the bacteria and fungi that can harm the trees, and the ashes can actually add nutrients to their soil.  I think of times in my life when I have been threatened or harmed, and I only hope I can find the same ability to turn those difficulties into riches.

My grandmother, Min, was not a fan of California.  She much preferred Washington, where she lived because, as she said, Washington had “the real trees.”  I wish Min could have been with us last weekend.  In spite of herself, I think she would have felt very much at home.

As did I.

This is our bedroom. If you look up, you can see the stars, not through a skylight, but through the holes in the roof. The wood beams are probably a century old, and the stones that haven’t crumbled away completely will need to be repointed and reinforced. I try not to think about how many spiders and other creatures are living here now.  But someday, I  will fall asleep here.  And in the meantime, I crawl into my warm, safe bed in my warm, dry San Francisco home and dream about falling asleep in Italy.

As you can see, this is not a summer project.  Or a one year project.  This is going to take some patience.  Unfortunately, patience is a virtue I do not have.  At all.  I want to make a list, take it to someone who knows how to make roofs and walls and bathrooms, tell them to get started, then go buy a bed and some pillows and sheets and a new toilet seat and move in.  This is not going to happen. I don’t even know how to say roofs and walls and toilet seat in Italian.  All of which makes me slightly crazy.

What I do know is that if we didn’t get this house when we did, we never would have had a home in Italy.  So it is a first step.  I am taking Italian one day a week.  And I now know how to say the days of the week.  Oggi e domenica, for example.  And next martedi we will learn colors.  I am not sure when we are supposed to learn about toilets.  These are all steps.  Itty, bitty, piccolo steps.  But steps nonethless.

Still, I do find there is some value in having a bedroom to dream about. I picture a warm summer evening, and imagine sitting on our patio, chatting with friends and family, drinking Italian wine, having grilled some wonderful meal, listening to the birds and watching the sun go down behind the distant Alps.  I see a million stars appearing in the skies overhead.  Then I picture me coming inside and climbing the old stone steps up to our room, with the views of moonlit valleys that stretch for centuries before me, slipping into the soft sheets of my very own bed, in my very own Italian home.

I know, it is only a dream.  But this is one dream I firmly believe will, someday, come true.

After talking about it for years, we finally did it.  We bought a home in Italy.

Actually, it is more of a rock pile than a home right now.  But if we can find a way to rearrange all those rocks and add a roof and some landscaping, we will have a home in what is just about the prettiest place I have ever seen.

The road to Roddino.

The Piedmont is, as the name suggests, at the “foot of the mountains,” those mountains being The Alps.  It is in the northwestern part of Italy, the area we fell in love with on our honeymoon two years ago.  We went there again this fall and confirmed that we love it today just as much.  The town of Monforte d’Alba is the perfect Italian hill town, old and cobblestoned, small but with four or five incredible restaurants.  The people are wonderfully sweet and gracious with us awkward Americans.  And the entire area is focussed on wine and food, as are we!  A mile or two outside of town is the tiny hamlet of Roddino, which is where we found our rock pile, surrounded by vineyards, overlooking a valley full of truffles, looking out towards the distant Alps.

Still, we have a gargantuan journey ahead of us. We don’t have the money we need to do what we want, our Italian is still at the learning-to-count-to-100 stage, and we live 5,000 miles away.  But we’ve been boring our friends for years with talk about the home we might find in Italy someday, and we finally realized that if we don’t at least try for it now, we never will.

I don’t know where this winding Italian road will take us.  Our dream home may turn out to be better as a dream than a reality. But it will certainly be fodder for some good stories along the way.

I admit it. I am a groupie for Karen Brown. Of the dozens of charming inns and hotels her books have recommended to me, every single one has been either lovely, interesting, or absolutely amazing.

She has a series of books, 17 of them now, with straightforward names like France Hotels or Tuscany & Umbria, that are all part of her Exceptional Places to Stay & Itineraries series.  I first discovered them when I was living in Paris in the early 90′s, and wanted small, charming places to stay on our weekend jaunts.

She has never once let me down.

Karen Brown introduced me to the Colombe d’Or in St. Paul de Vence in the south of France, which to me is still one of the most amazing places in the world to stay.  Part art museum, part gourmet relais,  it is historical, charming and beautiful all at once.

She is the one who pointed me to Villa Beccaris in the Piedmont region of Italy, where my husband and I honeymooned, and it was, in a word, perfect.

Her books have even guided us to charming inns in the United States, like the unforgettable Castle Hill on the Crane Estate in Ipswich, Massachusetts (where we had the best lobster I have ever eaten, hands down) , and several other small hotels in the same area, whenever I wanted a weekend getaway.

I have about 7 of her books, and they are all dogeared and underlined to within an inch of their lives, and they are the first thing I pack when I am about to move.  I have never planned a trip anywhere without first checking to see if she has a book about it, and if she does, it becomes my bible.

The really odd thing is, when I was at my high school reunion last fall, I was talking with one of my friends about what he was doing, where he was living and such, and it turns out he is married to Karen Brown!  He could have told me was married to Mick Jagger or Cheryl Crow and I would not have been more excited.

So, when we were touring around looking for a place to live this summer (her books in my suitcase, as always), we met up with my friend and the lovely Karen Brown herself for breakfast at the Seal Cove Inn, which she and her husband once owned.  She was as wonderful as I thought she would be-warm, funny, pretty, smart, and kind.

I bet she had been a hell of an innkeeper.

Karen Brown now has a website, karenbrown.com, which is helpful and quite extensive. But I think she could have, should have a TV channel of her own, or at least a TV show of some kind.  She has made my life so much richer.

I mean if Martha and Oprah and Rachel Ray can do it, she certainly could.