Postcards from the Edge

A lifelike rendering of yours truly

When I arrived in Italy, the markets were brimming with your basic wintertime flora and fauna, Italo-styles: fennel and cavolo nero, romanesco and artichokes. Even the supermarkets, which carry a little of everything all the time like in the states, reflected, first and foremost, the time of year in its produce department. Now that spring has begun to peek through the knitted cloak of winter, these invernal offerings are receding to make room for zucchini flowers and asparagus and fava beans. Another load of lambs was sent to slaughter last week which means that we'll have more milk, and beginning this week we will go from roughly two makes to three, which is mind-bending considering that as it is, finding space for all of the cheese we're currently making is a goddamned infuriating Tetris game of stainless steel racks and plastic mats.

It's strange for me to be so removed from the workings of the farm and the animals, to know that kidding season is just beginning in the States and I won't be there to play doula to my ruminant friends. Don't get me wrong -- it's a stressful, exhausting time of year, no two ways about it. But my longing to be amongst the quadrupeds is even stronger now that I'm seeing pictures of their severe rotundity and videos of little hooves being gently freed from their moms' wombs until plop! a fully formed, gangly slimy kiddo emerges, slithering softly on the hay floor. For one reason or other, I haven't made a point of visiting the sheep side of the farm since my first week here. Part of me still feels unsure/unwelcome and another is simply too lazy to venture that far afield after working without a break for seven hours straight, cooking myself lunch, and doing whatever the fuck else I do once my little stone lodging sucks me into its vortex.

The rhythm of the dairy has begun to make some small amount of sense to me, and I can't tell whether it's that I'm finally beginning to "get" cheesemaking so the gradient on the learning curve has gotten less steep, or whether it's simply that a) I have fewer intricate details to learn overall since I'm not also dealing with animals and/or b) I am, for whatever reason, less completely paralyzed with fear and self-loathing regarding my perceived ineptitudes (I'd like to think it's to do with my very low-maintenance devotion to meditating, but perhaps it's simply that I gave away all the fucks for this quarter). Because things are either slightly or dramatically different every day, I've managed to be absorbed and engaged without getting bored or feeling terribly overwhelmed.

A typical Monday begins with setting up in the cheese room, attaching all requisite tubes and making sure forms are clean. If there is time, cheese in the cellar gets flipped as well. Around 9, the milk arrives and we begin pumping water through the tubes until it gets up to temperature, and then running the milk through to thermalize it. Today we had 1100 liters of milk, so the largest portion of that went into the big vat with the mechanical knives. Often if we do a batch of Buccia di Rospo, the allotment of milk for that batch gets pumped into the large cauldron, as it doesn't need to be as warm as something like our Dante (sort of like an English cheddar but made with sheepsmilk) and is cut by hand with a cheese lyre (yes that's a thing). Then we often make 3 or so smaller (100 liters of milk) batches of  cheese each in plastic totes. As soon as the milk is received, temperatures are taken and cultures are added, and then after roughly ten minutes, rennet is added as well. We make two cheeses with vegetable rennet and they require more rennet per liter because the stuff isn't as powerful as the animal rennet. The other day I made a super cool error by adding vegetable rennet to a batch of cheese that I'd already dosed with its serving of animal rennet because I was busy berating myself for one thing or another that I hadn't done well. It really just never fucking pays to be self-flagellating, especially in a cheese room. The jury's still out on whether those cheeses will be super fucked up or not, but luckily the vegetable rennet doesn't have a very strong flavor, unlike the animal rennet, which in large doses can impart a bitterness in the cheese, so hopefully the taste won't be too badly affected.

There are about a billion ways to liken cheesemaking to an overarching life philosophy, but one thing that I have learned, even if it hasn't full taken root in my mind grapes, is that no matter how well you plan for something, inevitably, things will go awry, and your ability to cope with these unforeseen missteps is really the most important part of all. Just last week, we were all set to make a batch of Zaffero, only to discover that we were completely out of saffron. So we had to make a different cheese. These sorts of tweaks occur on both a large and small scale all the fucking time in the cheese house. Problem solving. Anticipating all possible outcomes. And just fucking rolling with it when the one outcome you did not anticipate comes roaring around the corner like the damn Jabberwocky. I'm not saying I'm ANY good at this stuff yet, but I'm at least aware that these are things that generally help one to do a better job when making cheese, and also living life.

Generally speaking, the milk receipt and culture/rennet adding is the most stressful part of the day, though anytime I am asked to flip the terribly soft Marzolini early in their lifecycles I am wracked with anxiety. This is the last bastion for me, a flick of the wrist I still haven't mastered, and which unfortunately Toni is not giving me much practice with because she doesn't have patience for her cheeses being broken and fucked up. Understandable. But I'm not entirely sure how I'm to learn and improve if I'm not given the chance to keep trying. Alas, the clock is running down on my time here and there are some things that I don't think are worth the fight. I am trying to be satisfied with the knowledge that I've progressed to some level of competency since I started and continue to be a devoted and reliable employee in spite of sensing the encroaching shroud of laziness gaining on me each day. 

Due to some intoxicating blend of less intensive physical activity, loneliness/boredom, depression and LOTS of down time, my body has begun to change, soften, thicken in ways that I am not altogether comfortable with. I have always had an outsized appetite, but my farmer lifestyle allowed me to eat mass quantities and still be relatively slim/made entirely out of muscle. These days, I fear that my body is a physical manifestation of my mental and emotional state, which is to say that I am seeing in a very real way much of the work -- physical and psychical -- that I did on myself in Vermont being undone. I'd hoped I'd internalized these lessons I learned with Laini and Michael so that I would be able to apply them to everything going forward. But in their absence, I am reverting back into my old soft self, as though my time in Vermont was merely a dream. #fuck 

I've heard it said that the way you spend your days is the way you spend your life. So I suppose my life could be largely summed up thusly: Eating crackers on the couch and pining. Otherwise known as ECOTCAP.

Last weekend I went to Milan to see my dear friend Elizabeth, who left NYC roughly the same time as I did, only rather than relocating to the frigid north to shovel goat shit, she ensconced herself in the GLAMOUR capital of the world, ie Milan. Since then, she's gotten herself an Italianate fiance and a grown-up person's apartment and a credible and chic ex-pat lifestyle. And me? LOLZ let's change the subject.
#homelesshobospinster 

Anyslowlydyingalone, my experience of Milan was ENTIRELY different from my visit to Rome. I mean yeah duh they're utterly different cities with utterly different regional inputs. Rome is much more of an Italian city and Milan is much more cosmopolitan and continental as it were. Evidently the further south you go in Italy, the rougher and/or less friendly towards outsiders the locals are. I didn't necessarily find the Romans to be gruff -- certainly no gruffer than the prickly Tuscans -- but the Milanese I encountered were, improbably, very warm and friendly, smiling at me as I sat alone at dinner, engaging me in conversation in a non-creepy way as I waited to meet someone on the sidewalk, and generally being way more low-key and amicable than I'd have expected in what I had previously considered to be a very upmarket, fashion-obsessed and therefore snooty metropolis. Between the general good vibes-ery, the fact that I was staying off the beaten tourist track in an actual friend's actual home, and the extensive and awesome public transportation system,-- put into place by none other than Mussolini himself and delightfully deficient in pervs but chocablock with polite old ladies intoning "Permiso, devo cendere"), I felt everso much more at ease in this city. The entire goddamned city of Rome is one big living breathing museum, and thus by extension one big living breathing tourist attraction. Perhaps I'd have had a different take on things if my accommodations and overall circumstances there had been different, but it felt nearly impossible to have an unmitigated, quasi-authentic experience there -- everything was tempered with this sensation of being sold something, or having something presented to me through a layer of performance or artifice. 

I WILL say that one thing that was super shitty about Milan was the profusion of very poor and sad seeming refugees from mostly Africa and the Middle East who were forced to hawk their wares (selfie-sticks, cigarettes, neon bracelets) in  not aggressive but at times invasive ways, which is only to say that there was positively no avoiding it or them or thoughts of how hard and scary their lives must have been and probably continue to be.  Which is maybe a good thing? And which makes me reel to think how much more intense their daily struggle to navigate this strange country and culture is than first world white girl me.

I digress. What my back-to-back weekend trips cemented for me was just how fucking much I miss city living. That sentiment has likely been exacerbated by the extreme isolation I've been experiencing since I've been in Italy, but being amongst the humans, even when they pull some BULLSHITTY BULLSHIT, gives me an energy that solitude in the wilderness with only my acrid stew of terrible thoughts to keep me company does not. 

And yet ... being away from my goat pals has been roughity rough. And the prospect of turning in my cheesemaker credentials to sit at a desk in some high rise so I can barely afford to co-habitate with three twenty-five year olds makes my soul feel like burnt toast. Perhaps I can take some comfort in knowing that no matter what I choose, I'll be longing for whatever is on the other side of the fence. 

AND perhaps I should see a professional about the aforementioned mental affliction.