Connections

'thinking to myself how Leaning Snail came to be  . . . 


1. I attend the Home Extension Dinner on April 16. It is an Italian theme. Thank you DC and MAC!

2. The place card at my setting is Leaning Tower. I save it because I really like it. 

3. The inspiration for my blog creations, A Daily Creativity Journal: 365  Make Something Every Day and Change Your Life!  by Noah Scalin, suggests on Day 71 "Make something that seems like it came from another era in history". 

4. I imagine the tower being the snail's shell.  I think about this for a long time. Maybe a month. I think about it so long that I loose the place card when I finally sit down to begin work on it. It is lost for a week or so. 

5. Now relocated, I darken the image with brown shoe polish and trim a bit of the detail from the red paper frame. I add a soft green piece, completing the transformation. It also gets a bit of polish.

6. I photograph it on several different pages of a coffee table book I have long owned. In Tuscany, by Frances Mayes.

7. I remember this book because I watched Under the Tuscan Sun on Oxygen earlier this week while I am washing the dishes that had piled up because I was working on a blog post. Frances Mayes wrote the book on which this movie is based.

8. Friday evening, May 25, or maybe it was very early Saturday morning, I post my favorite of the photos and add a little bit of information from a Website on the Pisa Tower. To my delight, it includes the word spiral!!!!

9. Early this morning [2:35am] I am awake and hungry. While munching on Kashi and banana slices in soy, in the half dark, I page through In Tuscany. I spend time in the section called La Festa!

I learn that every town has at least one sagra, a festival that focuses on a particular food. There are celebrations for truffles, frog legs, cherries, potato, rabbit, pine nuts, cheese, and bread [to name a few]!  And dare I hope . . . ????  . . . . yes . . . .  snails/lumaca! In early spring, Cartona holds The Sagra della Lumaca!  I feel like I have come full circle.

One Further Note:

I become curious about the author of the book and learn she lives with her husband in San Francisco and also in Cartona, Italy! We have visited San Francisco a few times to see our youngest son, Scott, so by now, cereal bowl empty and probably 3 o'clock in the morning, I am so hepped up on connections that I'm pretty sure Frances Mayes knows me and that I am really good friends with her.  

So FuN!

@