Even without a calendar I can always recognize the turning of the year by my sudden craving for salt. By New Year’s Day every year, the chocolate overdose that accompanies the Christmas holidays just somehow seems to catapult me into a totally savoury world. Lindt, of course, has tried to have it both ways with their amazing dark chocolate bars seasoned with fleur de sel, but right now I’m having none of it. From today on, when snack time rolls around, I’m back to pretzels, hummus and pita, bruschetta, crackers and cheese. Anything that doesn’t involve chocolate.

Right now I’m sitting in front of the fire on this first day of a brand new year trying to resolve what to do about resolutions. Looking backward at the mostly failed ones I put forward last year, it seems prudent this time either to forgo the ritual entirely or somehow to decrease the possibility of failure so that something truly encouraging might actually come to pass.

This year, I’ve decided, I’m only going to make one resolution. I’m going to pass on all the stuff about exercise and healthy eating and go straight out into left field with something entirely new. I have resolved in 2011 to learn to speak Italian. 

For anyone who is cringing right now, trying to push away the nascent apprehension that I’m embarking on a cloned Eat, Pray, Love kind of experience, please have no fear. I’m not working through my marital angst by planning a year of travel to Italy, India and Bali. I’m actually just staving off the inevitable winter blahs with a fantasy life that includes the language of another climate, and mental images of another place and time.

Some weeks ago, while rooting around in some of the boxes that Sasha has packed up for give-away, sale or disposal, I came upon a CD set of Frances Mayes' Under the Tuscan Sun. Since this is not something we’d ever have bought, neither of us has any idea where it came from, but it did fit nicely into the CD player of the little Ford Focus I purchased this past fall. I listened to it all.

Despite the cloying southern drawl of the narrator and the total massacre of the Italian language (why do they let authors record their own works?) I fell totally in love with the descriptions of the landscape, the culture and food of Tuscany, the idea of an escape to someplace else.

So I have downloaded a good set of audio Italian language lessons to my iPod, found in my own library a number of wonderful books involving things Italian, bought a small English/Italian dictionary and a Fodors.

Now, over steaming bowls of ribollita or minestrone, I’ll be all set to fantasize at will. This winter, as I swan around in my fat pants intoning phrases like “Mi piace la pasta” or “Dove il bagno” I’ll be getting two things done really well. I’ll be dreaming the edge off reality and I’ll be learning something new. What could possibly be better than that?

It was a perfect New Years day. The snow that began to fall in the early morning continued throughout the day and well into the night. We ate croissants and French scrambled eggs for breakfast, with mimosas and our own home made preserves. In the afternoon, following a ritual we have observed for almost twenty years, we watched Casablanca by the fireplace and sipped prosecco from the lovely stemmed glasses that are so impractical in our everyday life. We also followed Roger Ebert’s commentary on the film and it reminded me again that this should probably be the year that I find the discipline to study the history of cinema and not just think about doing it. I’d like to join a book club too and spend more time in the company of like minded others.

In the small rural community in which we reside, there are no like minded others. Two former urbanites who came to Nova Scotia from elsewhere, we are doomed to be eternally other, ‘come-from-aways,’ outsiders who are never quite going to fit in. As a couple. we are too eccentric, too well schooled, too left wing, too exotic in our tastes, too shy, and too closely bonded to find a comfortable  place in village life. Although I respect so many of the members and appreciate the good work they do, I am not the Women’s Institute type.

We enter this year quietly and with more political frustration than personal joy. The Canadian government, for the second time in recent history, has prorogued our parliament in a shameful attempt to forestall further inquiry into the situation of the Afghan detainees. It is difficult to contain the anger engendered by such blatant contempt for the electorate and more difficult still to think of productive ways in which to channel it.


As I write this, the snow is falling again in what is now predicted to be the "real" storm. I am going to spend the day reading fiction.