The month Italy closes

This week our town started its slow August shutdown. The hardware store taped a hand-written sign to the door with its reopening date. The bar is running on the owner's nephew. Half the shops just say "ci vediamo a settembre," see you in September, like the whole street agreed on it.

Our first August here, this made me genuinely twitchy. In Denver we ran two businesses. August was a quarter like any other quarter. Watching an entire country set the work down, on purpose, all at once, felt like watching someone leave the stove on and go to the beach.

This year I understand it differently. August is the month Italy proves it does not negotiate with your urgency. The offices you need are closed. The person who can stamp your form is at the sea. You can fight that for a few weeks, and we did, or you can let the country teach you the thing you moved here to learn. Nothing fell apart last August while we stopped. That was the lesson. Everything we thought needed us by Friday was still there in September, patient as a stone wall.

So we are doing what the street does. Slower mornings, the pool schedule instead of the work schedule, dinner that starts late and ends later. The girls have stopped asking what day it is, which I have decided is a sign of a summer done right.

If your own version of starting over has you twitchy right now, mid-move, mid-doubt, mid-paperwork, I wrote something for you. It is the first in a new series on the blog about the part of this life that has nothing to do with property: what it actually takes to start over somewhere new, with the honest timelines included.

Read it here: https://www.nattielfontaine.com/blog/how-to-start-over-in-a-new-country

Ci vediamo a settembre,

Nattiel