I Bought a Farm in Italy for the Price of a Used Lawnmower (And Other Terrible Decisions): The Diary of Bob Henderson, Retired

Day 1. I wrote "Move to Italy" on a Post-it note at 2am after watching a YouTube video. I don't know what I was thinking.When Bob Henderson, a recently retired actuary from Columbus, Ohio, buys a one-euro farmhouse in the mountains of Abruzzo, he expects a project. What he gets is a life.Told in ninety daily diary entries spanning October to March, I Bought a Farm in Italy is the record of a man learning — how to prune an olive tree, make a correct ragù, lose gracefully at Scopa, and understand the specific patience of a hill town that has been watching outsiders arrive and leave for six hundred years.There is Giuseppe, his seventy-eight-year-old neighbor, who teaches him about the land one gesture at a time. There is Carmelo at the bar, who said domani on Day 23 and meant something far larger than tomorrow. There is Senator, a goat of considerable strategic intelligence who is, it emerges, female. There is a four-hundred-year-old olive tree. There is a child named Luca in Naples who writes in careful blue ink: “Maybe my tree already knows I’m coming.”And there is Linda — Bob’s wife, four years gone — who is in the grove, among all the people who have worked this land with love.This is a book about grief becoming ground. About the things that cannot be measured in a spreadsheet but are the only columns that matter. About a man who arrived with eleven pairs of khaki pants and a Post-it note and left — well, he didn’t leave. That’s the point.Questa terra sa chi la lavora.This land knows who works it.Perfect for readers of Frances Mayes, Peter Mayle, Monisha Rajesh, and anyone who has ever looked at their life at 2am and written something down.