Thank Goodness

I have been speaking everyday with our ex-next door neighbor Bruna. She is an 85 year young sparkplug who never stays still.

Friday she took me into her cantina and showed me where her son-in-law was forced to cut a hole in the roof and help Bruna's daughter and granddaughter (who happens to be 8 months pregnant) escape to Bruna's apartment above. They had been in the cantina when the waters in Via Buranco rose so high, and with such force, that they slammed the door shut. The force knocked the keys out of the door and they were closed in.

Bruna had already cleaned most of the mud out of the cantina by the time I got there, but she showed me the olive oil and wine that had been ruined.

She then went on to list off a series of  "Thank goodness-es" that surprised and delighted me. The main one being "Thank goodness we had the wood burning stove! We were able to eat a hot meal and keep warm!" Never did she say what bad fortune they had or how things were terrible for them right now.

That pretty much sums how the outlook here is so far: Thank goodness.

 

The Italian Red Cross has a site in English where it is possible to donate with a credit card.

When you go to the site, make sure that on the drop down menu, you select EMERGENCY TUSCANY AND LIGURIA. If you are donating from a foreign country, leave the 'state' field --- and the 'nation' field will be written in Italian. If you are from the US, the nation will be 'Stati Uniti'.

Today I was able to donate to the Italian Red Cross through their Paypal account. I encourage all of you to give what you can, large or small, to help rebuild the towns that have been hit so hard in Liguria and Tuscany. I think that my problem had been the browser. I had been using Chrome and when I switched to Safari, it worked fine. If you have problems, try again using a different browser.