Six kitchens, two states, three countries

As we sat there in the villa, friends from three decades who don’t see each other often enough, it hit me that we have had wonderful discussions over wonderful food in six kitchens (Boston MA, Jamaica Plain MA, Portland ME, Waldenboro ME, Geneva, Switzerland) and now we were together again in Collodi, Italy, a small village in Tuscany.
Perhaps we are wiser, we are definitely older, our children the ages we were when we first met give or take a year.
Although we are in varying degrees of fitness, even the marathon runner among us inched her way up and down the steep grades of slippery stone walks in the medieval village to get to that house that holds the kitchen that added more wonderful meals and more wonderful conversations to our memories. These will be taken out in the future and smiled over. Because of their infrequency they are even more precious.
We passed our time, visiting local spots of interest, checking out cathedrals and piazzas, historic sites which I had only read about. Standing in the centre of Sienna, visiting the hospital from the 1300s, I had to pinch myself to believe I was really there. And when I looked at a room full of medieval musical manuscripts with delicate flowers decorating the parchment in shades of rose and blue interspersed with gold leaf. I could imagine monks labouring over them and then the book holding them, a third my height on a stand in the choir, being used by other monks whose voices rose to the top of the cathedral as they stood leaving the choir seats up with their carved backs visible. I also imagined a monk who spilled ink on a finished page and thought unholy thoughts.
And there was the pleasure of getting there, manoeuvring in a place where I did not know the language beyond simple words like spaghetti and lasagne, and the people not speaking any of the three I have a chance in understanding directions, sussing out the train system when three trains left at the time as mine was, none mentioning the destination where I was going. Victory is mine sayeth the DL when I arrived in the hugs of friendship.
But the real joy was once again finding the three of us in the kitchen with good smells coming from the stove, and just being.
(Anyone can take photos of the famous sites, but the following photos are moments that caught my eye that will bring up far more good memories of special minutes or even seconds. The haikus encapsulate the seconds of experience)