Cosenza: An Uptick

Keith is a Brit with a pot belly and a great laugh and has an uncanny resemblance to my uncle. Maria is exactly what you would expect to be the antithesis, an Italian woman, short and soft spoken (at least that's what you think at first). Their home is about 30 minutes from the Cosenza train station, situated on a hill a ways up into the higher altitude. It is a beautifully renovated home that they ripped the guts out of and replaced with fairly state of the art furnishings. Multiple TVs, satellite TV, wireless Internet, two computers, a kitchen with three ovens, a pool, a small gym. The list goes on. Needless to say, I am not impoverished here.
My bedroom is one of four on the second story with a full size bed, armoire, chair and bed tables. Perfectly clean and perfectly simple, it will do, well, perfectly. It's almost 6pm on Monday by the time I have settled in and after a long day of traveling for me and a long day of entertaining guests for them, we sit down to a simple meal of home made carrot soup, made totally from Maria's garden, some bread and of course wine. 
Over the course of dinner I find out that Keith worked for a confectionary, Ma's, I  believe, and Maria used to run her own catering business. They have two daughters and three grandchildren. Everyone is exhausted, so we head to bed early - work will start tomorrow for me around 9am. 
Breakfast I make on my own, two eggs picked yesterday from the chickens they have, some tomatoes and basil, also from their garden, and figs, which grow in the trees along the driveway down to their house. After eating, Keith introduces me to the rest of the herd. Billy and Rocky, the two dogs, two cats, Luke and another one who's name I still haven't caught, but they both look like Simi, my cat, multiple chickens, four sheep and two rabbits. Today's job will end up consisting of clearing an area of their land and helping Maria in the garden. We end up picking tomatoes, eggplant, carrots, spinach, beets, peppers and basil. I couldn't believe how much we were pulling and picking in just one day. 
Maria is amazing in the kitchen. She started off as a waitress in a high end restaurant in London run by an American, Robert Carrier. At the time, he was very well known, and after watching all the amazing dishes go by night after night, she decided she wanted to learn how to make this delicious food. She would take bits of it home and deconstruct it, figuring out the ingredients and how to make each dish. Once she had a grasp on the trade, she went to Robert and asked to move to the kitchen. Everything went from there. A retired caterer who once employed up to 20 people at a time, she glides around the kitchen making four or five dishes at once. More parsley here, olive oil over there, salt in another pot on the other stove (they have two). I've been here for three nights and Maria makes something different every day for lunch and dinner from scratch. Cauliflower fritters one day with marinated beets, mini bruschetta, proscutto on cantaloupe, some bread and wine. And that's Lunch. Dinner is whipped together with such ease, but the flavors are amazing. Homemade soup she's made that day with vegetables from the garden plus pork shank followed by a type of bleu cheese and grapes.
All the while we are eating, there is all sorts of conversation going on while Keith pours the wine, beer, or gin and tonic - whatever we may be drinking that night. We talk about the difference between the UK and the States - What about health care? Retirement plans? How's Obama doing these days? To the more personal, how they met, how they came about moving from England to Italy and renovating this big house, and what a girl like me is doing coming over from the States to work on farms when I had a perfectly good day job. 
The routine here is a welcome change from the moving around all the time of the past week or so. Having people to talk to in English (rather than sorta English plus exaggerated hand and arm movements) is helping my morale immensely and I find I'm actually having dreams at night for the first time since I came to Italy. I'm still not sleeping through the night, but things are improving. 
The next job is staining a small shed that houses the chickens and sometimes the goats. They patter about me wondering what I'm doing and why I'm getting in their way of pecking at some perfectly good hay and soil mix. It takes me two days to complete the whole thing, trying to avoid splattering my clothes with bright blue stain and not aggravating the ram too much as to entice a charge. And when I'm done, Keith says the same thing he's said after each job. Something to the effect of "Not just an office dweller are you?" or "You really are wasted on the office life." If he keeps telling me that, I may just start to believe him. And who knows what comes after that.