Au Pair

One glorious day in central Italy, two young boys and I were walking outside through the fields, away from their house. I lived with and cared for these kids, sons of an Italian-American couple, as an au pair.

We beheld a sight we'd never seen. Their father, Pino, was walking very quickly in from the fields with an odd, bemused smile on his face. As he passed by us, I noted with dismay that his eyebrows were singed. The tiller had caught fire, singing both brows on his face! (Though a fire broke out, it hadn't been TOO bad. Luckily, he'd been able to extinguish it. Cell phones weren't a thing yet, and there was no phone in the house.)

If you consider my au pair experience as a whole with this loving family, it also included my trying to help birth a goat kid in the middle of the night alongside the American mother. Her husband was out of town.

Repeated loud bleating alerted us to the goat's plight, as all their stalls were literally beneath our bedrooms. She and I could get our hands into the birth canal to grasp the fetus, but darned if we couldn't get that kid turned around ourselves! She had to drive to rouse an Italian farmer at a neighboring farm at 2:00 in the morning to save the pair. We were thankful for a good outcome, in more than one sense of the word, including the nanny goat and her offspring.