For those people who know me really well, they know how ironic it is when I say I grew up on a farm. And that's as much as I'm going to say about that right now.
I spent a few days in the Casentino valley of Tuscany last week. The pastures were full and the grass was tall and some was in the process of being cut and baled into hay. I couldn't help but think of my childhood, when I would run through the grass as tall (or taller) as I was. The scent of drying hay that passed through the valley reminded me of sitting on the front porch of my childhood home in the late evening, enjoying that very same scent. I watched a well tanned Italian farmer on a tractor raking the hay into rows about to be baled and remembered learning to drive a machine much like that one, well before I could even drive a car. I watched the farmer pass back and forth across his field in the summer heat and wondered if my dad was doing the very same thing back in Arkansas. And if he remembered to wear sunscreen this time.
