4.9 Time for an update. On Monday I managed to arrange to pick up my beautiful new car, well, beautiful used car. New to ME. A 2005 Opel Meriva (pronounced MerEEva in real life, but MERiva in our house because we love “Brave”) diesel 5 speed. Not my dream car. Only gets about 22 mpg out on these mountain roads. Oh well, it’s only for 10 more months. It’s easy enough for Mamma to get in and out, it’s big enough for carpool, and it’s easy to drive. I’m over it.

But naturally this being Italy nothing is easy. I had to go to Pellegrino first, and made the mistake of asking Anna the GPS Girl how to get to Parma from there. Anna believes solely in shortest distance to travel. She sent me over the scariest road I have yet encountered. There were places where I couldn’t look at the road more than 10 feet in front of me for fear I’d get vertiginous and drive over the sheer drop on either side. I’m sure the views were spectacular. I most sincerely did not want to know. But sure enough, though I cursed Anna with hitherto-unthought-of curses, we presently emerged at the entrance to the freeway into Parma. You don’t realize how much you love going 70 mph on a straight open four-lane-each-way road until you’ve gone 12 mph on Death By Sheer Drop Roads for 45 minutes.

I dropped off the rental and they informed me that because I was late I had to pay an extra 235E. I opined that I had already paid 80E through the broker who got me the car in the first place. They opined that they didn’t know anything about that and didn’t care. Paid the 230E. (Happily, a relatively nasty email to the broker got me about 210E back. Not worth fighting further.) Then I got to the car dealership, and realized I had left all the insurance paperwork at home. Fortunately that, at least, was in my email, so they let me check email and print it out. Huzzah! A car! (Only relatively simple thing I’ve done all month!)

Monday evening the vigilio (local policeman) came by to check and make sure that all three of us really did live in the house, that we were only three, that everything I’ve been weeping about in bureacratic offices all over the province of Parma was actually true. He’s very sweet, really, sort of a junior Santa-type, fat and cheerful and with a short brown beard. He showed me the paper on his clipboard that now had a check mark, a signature and a date next to my address. The Comune, at least, has been relatively easy to get along with.

Tuesday the cleaning lady came. She worked for 5 hours and I must say I could only tell that the beds had been changed and the stairs swept, but whatever. She also gave me an hour massage, so I guess at the end of it I didn’t care as much about the cleaning ☺ and of course, since the house was now at least theoretically spotless and neat, what has to happen? The boxes finally arrive, of course! Barely 2.5 weeks late, so really, where’s the issue. We got 4 of the 11 unpacked that night, but of course the house was awash in stuff when my very neat-conscious, put-everything-away-NOW mother arrived.

So I’m doing all this in anticipation of the advent of my mother for 2 months. Well, that and panicking about the arrival of my friend Margaret, whose husband was coming to Lyons for a conference and they decided they’d see a little of northern Italy while they were at it. I got the dates confused: I thought Mamma was coming in on Tuesday and Margaret on Wednesday. But Mamma was coming in on Wednesday. Turned out that that would be better anyway – they’d just flip 2 of their other plans and stay with me here Tuesday night before Mamma even got here, and no one would thus overlap.

Except.

Why is there always “except.” ?

 Margaret’s plane left Dulles something like 40 hours late. So they weren’t getting to Besozzola until like midnight Wednesday night. Which is gross for someone who has actually experienced the thousand-foot drops on either side of the mountain roads in daylight. I suggested perhaps not. But they did end up getting to Salso.

Meanwhile Mamma was have adventures in flying of her own, as her flight from Asheville to Atlanta was CANCELLED IN JULY and no one ever bothered to tell us about it. I thought that was pretty groovy on Delta’s part. (I learned all this later.) So she was having to have all her flights rearranged so she would still get into Milan when I was expecting to have to go pick her up. She arrived, exhausted, weepy, with an Italian woman named Simone carrying her things. Seems Simone had totally adopted her during the Paris-Milan leg and had made herself responsible for delivering elderly American lady safe to her daughter. Praise the Lord – poor Mamma was so disoriented from the various schedule changes and the absence of sleep that she had totally panicked when she realized I couldn’t come in to baggage claim to get her. (*I* hadn’t, just because Linate is a tiny airport and the only way to leave baggage claim is through the one door where I was standing, so she couldn’t go anywhere without my seeing her, but she was too tired to process this.)

The drive to Linate was easy – must remember to tell people coming to visit, come in through Linate not Malpensa, which is another hour north of Milan. On the way there, I passed the Castell’Arquato, which was very cool looking and about which more presently. I got a little turned around on the way home, but Anna as usual gave me a serviceable, if less than direct, route home. We stopped at the panificio and got focaccia and gnocchi; I remain hopeful that Mamma will one day learn to pronounce them. The man dishing them up said “Quattro porzioni, si?” Yes, I said, and watched amused (and Mamma, horrified) as he scooped up enough for four portions if that is all you are getting to eat today and possibly tomorrow. The girls, it turns out, are unregenerate heathens and won’t eat the fluffy clouds of spinachy-potatoey delight, so Mamma and I get them all. (It took 5 days for us to eat all of them. Mamma does not believe in the size of pasta plates that Italians do.)

Thursday Mamma slept most of the day, and I took off down to Salso to see Margaret, David and Daniel, who is my godson and on whom I have not laid eyes since he was 4. We had a lovely walk around the baths and the park in the middle of town, found Margaret some Parma Violets perfume that she wanted (it’s apparently a very old perfume recipe, early 19th c., none of this “Goop By JLo” type crap), got nice lunch (and subjected Daniel to actual Italian pizza, to which he eventually objected because it had all the “wrong” cheese on it!) and sent them on their way to Venice. Not as long a visit as we had planned, thanks United, but at least I got to see them.

Weekend update coming soon.