A 💌 to the garden (and to oneself) from afar.

This season slipped by while I was elsewhere. Not far in the grand (worldly) sense, but far enough that the days blurred together and the months whizzed past and I found myself silently ‘observing’ the Fritto Misto Orto mostly through my small iPhone screen (thank god for @frittomistocommune on socials and the lively, rowdy, digital-world of @roaminggraciously) at a small kitchen table, set for one. It’s a strange thing to feel both deeply connected to a place and yet so physically removed from the pieces that make it real* — hands so dirty that you hesitate to eat a sandwich (but a couple of river-cold camparini would be absolutely fine), the subtle shifts of light on the cement paths, and the slight shock every time one of those big fish jump.

I’ve been thinking a lot about distance lately. How it grows quietly when you’re not looking, and how easy it is to let a whole season pass without standing in the spaces you care about most. Next year, I want to shorten that gap. I want more hours between the beds, more evenings listening to the water, more of the small, grounding work that makes a project feel like a living extension of yourself rather than something you just peek at from afar.

In this moment of redefining how I exist in Italy, I’ve also been letting myself dream a little (and then on the nightmare side, we have the Questura). I’m yearning for something bright and upbeat for next season, something that feels like expanding into myself. I would really like to see a “Paint the Orto (Primavera) creative day-retreat”. I want to arrange flowers in large urns for small, intimate events. I have a reoccurring vision of jars of plum jelly cooling on the long ledge in the Garden Shed. I think that shared afternoons where the soundtrack is nothing more than the river moving over stones would be just dandy. I find myself holding onto these images, not out of obligation or planning pressure, but because they feel warm. They pull my stubborn and heeled-in @$$ forward. It’s no surprise that in this short and dreary stretch of the year, those warm days in Fritto Misto Orto feel like home.

Lately I’ve also been reflecting a lot on how a garden teaches you what abundance actually is — and what it absolutely is not. There is a moment in every season when a plant is showy with flowers and then heavy with fruit, when you can point to something tangible and say: There. That’s the work. There is the beauty and grace and strength. That’s the proof…

But if we mark those days of flourish in a 12 month calendar we realize that, in reality, that moment is short. A flash, really. The rest of the time the plant is developing in quieter ways, enduring the droughts and the windstorms and the insect pressure (Questura?) and everything else that comes with an exposed life. Let’s not forget that all of these are amplified when growing in a non-native climate and foreign soils**.

And yet we never look at a healthy plant, out of season, and call it a failure. How good of us, no? We don’t ask it to bloom in January or offer fruit in the middle of a cold spell when the days are short and dormancy has been well earned. We simply allow it to be what it is in that moment - resting, preparing, holding its energy.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to extend that same grace to ourselves?

Maybe this season of distance isn’t proof of anything other than being out of season for a while. And maybe next year (with the river nearby, and the garden closer than a phone screen) there will be its own kind of quiet fruit, ready in its own time.

* Did you sense that I am not referring only the the orto here? If my father is reading this (Hi, Dad!) he will understand.
** You catch my drift?