Embracing Found

Objects that surprise in food, art, and life

In Donna Leone’s detective novels, her Venice-based protagonist, Commissario Guido Brunetti, a detective superintendent, relishes in his walks through the city.

“He never tired of studying the city…over the course of the years, he had worked out a system that allowed him to reward himself for each discovery: a new window earned him a coffee; a new statue of a saint, however small, got him a glass of wine.”

After moving to the city, I too was enamored by my amatuer studies of an urban nature, using #morningfinds on social media to tag the intriguing sights, sounds, and the impenetrable tastes, smells, and feels of a place unknown to many, yet similar all the same. In a way, I was Comm. Brunetti, though I never rewarded myself with a glass wine, so early in the mornings were my walks. Instead, I was gifted the delight of what I experienced.

The thing is, my morning finds, my photographs, the words that arrived later in the day, originated from what was missing, lost: a stoop with no home hovering over its shape, old stairways where the treads had been pulverized, a volunteer marigold poking its golden mane through a sidewalk crack, wall where layers of stone had crumbled and presumably Humpty Dumpty had too, a red, high-heel strappy shoe without a mate, and obviously worse, without a foot to own it. My curiosity was piqued by what my imagination colored in.

Who owned that shoe and what party had I missed out on last night? Maybe a good one. What happened to the family living in that house? Lost money, chased out, moved away? The steps no longer used? What did they disconnect from?

In my head, the missing went found.

A few nights ago, I sat on our back terrace with our house guest, Shannon, a set designer from South Carolina in town to work on the upcoming Cincinnati Shakespeare Company’s production of Trouble in Mind. Enlightening me on her work, she included a story about the need for a stained glass window for a particular play, but the arts company was already over budget. Outside the theater, she spotted a dumpster with a rectangular of plastic with spikey things on its bottom sticking up out of the garbage pile. It was a chair runner to protect carpeting, used in offices and workspaces. She yanked that thing out of the dumpster, carted it to the backstage, and painted over it with colored gels. A stained glass window.

Trash equals art. Loss equals found.

Mark used to tell me I wrote best about loss. For a long time, I believed it, lived it. Then something changed in my writing, or in me. I’m not really sure—maybe both.

Out for a long walk after completing the final draft of my food memoir, I wanted to simply breathe. Not think. “It feels different this time,” I said to Mark, under my breath, afraid of even admitting this truth. The topic at hand was not cancer and death, or caregiving and death. I was writing about family, culture, feeding and being fed. To paraphrase Danny from Ted Lasso, who always says futbol is life: Food is life. Food is life-giving. Feeding is finding something worthwhile within yourself. Being fed is feeling found.

This wasn’t loss. I found something new from the wreckage of my words. The husband, again, who is NOT the writer, but suddenly became wise, said, “You’re embracing found.”

I really didn’t know how to react. I was raised in a household where this thing Italians call la mancanza, a missing, a nostalgia, a lack of something, hit pretty hard for me through the years, beginning with the fact I had carried some of my mother’s sadness after her mother died a year before my birth. I also carted around this load of mancanza from my father who longed to be the full-scaled (although he was full-blooded) Italian his father was. And he longed for his dreams to be fully-realized too.

On a professional level, I was rediscovering so much more, breaking the seal of the surface for air and also finding out I was out of practice in the ways of the day-to-day. Coming out of that work in progress and the overflowing of words, I wasn’t simply focused on what we learn about ourselves in memoir, but finding life outside the page too. If the memoir is the lesson, the after life of that piece is what we put it into practice.

Embracing found, loosely translated in Italian, is abbracciando ritrovato. Trovato means found, and ritrovato means re-found. Forging ahead into the abyss when no longer need as a parent I once was, carving out differents paths in my profession, searching for new ways to be in a marriage, and in our many-treed families. Or simply finding me amidst several months of chaos, a quieting of the self to be with the self.

After a rain storm last week, I wrote about some of the disarray in my life. “In the after soaking, I remove my ruby red watch, claw my fingers through my small strawberry patch to loosen the soil. Fruit reddened by a mooning sun now plumped up by rain. With lightning no longer whipping at my racing thoughts, I want for a berry. Please one berry buried beneath the daisy blossoms, not pecked at by birds of prey and my ramrod thoughts. One berry to savor on this tongue to remind me of the victory over the cloudbursts that drenched my soul. One berry.”

One berry to embrace the meaning of found.

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What object have you made into art? What art have you turned into life?

Let’s find together, the words, the berries, the life. Here’s a few places to locate me, but more are coming as I put these finds together.

• Pauletta Hansel and I are again offering our quarterly FREE, virtual caregiver writing experiences through Giving Voice Foundation. Next up, August 1st from 1-3 p.m. Learn more or register here.

• In a previous blog, I wrote about being intimate with oneself. Here’s the post from Italy Segreta that inspired a little more risk in the writing.

• Most of my followers here don’t often have the opportunity to read my “other work,” the work of the heart and mind, the work that supports individuals with dementia and their caregivers. I’ll post some of that content here off and on. This one is about expectations when we gather, something I’m a little too familiar with. Given the approach of summertime, I’m sure we could all use a little refresher on how to be together for one another.

There’s plenty more on the horizon, caregiving talks in Cleveland, a writing workshop at the Little Italy Museum there too, and a few links to published works on online soon!