At 71, Patricia Beaver shows no signs of slowing down. “I never pay any attention to my body,” she says. “It just keeps going by itself.” A long-time resident of Sonoma County, Patricia left town and her second husband about four years ago to follow her dream of living in Italy. She now divides her time between Rome and San Diego, but returned this week for a visit with her quilting friends in Petaluma.
Patricia, in her unabashed way, regaled the Petaluma Quilt Guild last night with hilarious stories about living in a former brothel in Rome, her struggles to learn the Italian language (“the most beautiful language in the world”), her close encounters with socialized medicine (“I’m all for it”), her attempts to earn a living in Italy with her quilting (“forget it”), and her openness to finding husband no. 3 (“my next victim”).
If anyone embodies La Dolce Vita, it is Patricia Beaver. She is open-minded, ready for adventure, maternal, sexy, stylish, and she loves to eat and drink — that’s Italian! (I write with authority here, having lived in Italy for two years myself). Patricia has collected her thoughts — and her recipes — into a book, which will be published in the fall of 2009. Called The Other Side of the Moon, the memoir recounts her travels, her romances, her cultural clashes, and directions for her favorite Italian dishes.
When she’s not in Rome, Patricia still does as the Romans do: she enjoys life. Quilting is a big part of that life; Patricia spends much of her time stateside traveling around to quilt guilds presenting her stories and her quilting workshops. Last night she showed us a couple dozen of her favorite quilts, one of which she named after moi. “Louisa in the Garden” depicts a fashionable young woman from a bygone era taking time to smell the roses (tulips, actually), an essential ingredient of La Dolce Vita.
