It will get better

After months of planning, I move to Certaldo, a lovely medieval village in Tuscany, with my 89-year-old mom and my four-pound dog, Prose. Here, I’m sure, I will live an exotic, cultured life and write a brilliant novel about the Italian writer, Giovanni Boccaccio.

Day One

At my charming (two-room!) Tuscan apartment, the landlord gives me the keys. He is a pleasant soul who speaks no English and, for some reason, can’t understand my Italian. Yet, I am able to convey that I wish the apartment had a full-sized refrigerator rather than the little under-counter one, and he gallantly offers me a new one that he has in storage.

When she sees the apartment, my mother is appalled. “I’m not living here. It’s about to fall down. This is untrue, though, yes, the building was built in the early 1200s.

My mother says, again, “I'm not staying here. It’s not safe. I’m going to a hotel.” But I will not take her to a hotel, so she goes to bed and covers up her head after throwing her cane on the floor in a little hissy fit.

The driver I hired to deliver us from the airport takes pity on me and takes me to a furniture store where I buy my mother the nifty electric recliner I found the last time I was here when I envisioned her sitting by the window with the beautiful Tuscan view.

At the furniture store, I order a wardrobe for our clothes, as my brain is spinning as to how I can possibly make these two rooms work for us, since the front one, with the kitchen in one end, is mostly full of a monstrous sofa. I buy a microwave because my mother believes it to be a necessity and the crux of a civilized life. The driver hauls the recliner back. My mother hates it. I stop and get food, pizza which even I think is tough. She hates it. In my jet-lagged exhaustion, I lay awake and try to figure out how to arrange the apartment. I want to use the dining table for a writing space. I want a full-size refrigerator. There is a bright flash in my head. Maybe an idea or perhaps the precursor to a stroke. Get rid of the sofa that takes up half the front room and which mother says is the most uncomfortable thing God ever made.

Day Two

We are living out of our carry-ons because I dare not unzip the huge suitcases until the wardrobe arrives. There is nowhere to unfold them, and I envision stuff exploding out with nowhere to put it. But our three huge suitcases are alike, and I've packed my things with my mom’s. She is appalled that she can’t have her house shoes, so I gingerly insert my hand into each suitcase and feel around, but it is hopeless.

The apartment that looked so cute when I was here with my 20″ suitcase now looks crammed with the landlord's decorative items. I pile knickknacks and excess kitchen clutter outside in the garden. I take down the huge, very realistic nude that causes my mother to shake her head. She is convinced she is in the last circle of hell. And where is her Chapstick?

The landlord comes and I break the news to him that I really don’t have room for the monstrous sofa hide-a-bed and could he take it away? He is stunned and explains to me with gestures that he will have to take the thing apart to get it out the door. I smile sweetly with a look I hope conveys my complete confidence in his ability to pull this off.

He sighs and gets tools. Indeed, by the time he is through, the thing is in twenty pieces. Then he brings a full-sized refrigerator to replace the apartment one. He has stored this new refrigerator in the cellar below the apartment. Extremely narrow, turning stairs lead down to an arched door about five feet high. Watching him and one other man bring up the refrigerator distracts me for a while. He loads all the bric-a-brac I piled in the garden into the new microwave box.

Prose is constipated. No wait. She’s not.

My mother is so pleased to be rid of the sofa, she agrees to go out to dinner. But the restaurant I hoped would be open is not. The other one within walking distance for her won’t open for another hour and a half.

We're both exhausted. The little shop where I once bought salads and veggies and the most amazing green beans now seems to have nothing but pizza. Mother is convinced I'm going to starve her to death. And where is her nail file?

Day 3

Miraculously, the wardrobe is delivered at 8:30 a.m. I immediately unpack to excavate the house shoes, Chapstick, and nail file, stacking both beds full of stuff. Then I realize I have no hangers. I walk to the store I expect to have hangers. They have ironing boards and clothes pins and all manner of clothing paraphernalia. But no hangers. The young woman tells me that I must go to the Lego Store. I know exactly how far that is. I sigh.

At the Lego Store, which seems to have nothing to do with Legos, I buy hangers and cardboard storage boxes. Paper towels, washcloths. I can’t haul it all. I buy a rolling bag. I stop and get very expensive restaurant food to take home. My landlord is there, reversing the refrigerator doors, plastering over holes left by a shelf he had to move to put the refrigerator where I wanted it, rehanging the shelf over my workspace.

Suddenly there is a crash in the back room. My mother has let the back of her recliner hook under one side of the open window, and as she raised the back, she lifted the window off its hinges. It’s a beautiful thing, solid oak frame, and pretty sturdy because it did not break when it hit the tile floor.

The landlord cannot understand why the window should suddenly jump off its hinges. My mother murmurs to me what happened. I don’t want to tell the landlord, but finally I do because he is so agitated that he can’t figure it out and also because he is looking at us both as if we might be a pair of witches.

He leaves. I bring out the restaurant food which my mother declares to be “good but weird.” I consider this progress. I hang up all the clothes, assemble the storage boxes and sort stuff. The refrigerator is humming.

I will write, I tell myself. I will . . .