Scarpetta
In Italian, “Scarpetta” is the act of using a piece of bread to soak up the last bits of sauce left on your plate. It means the meal was too good to leave behind. Too beautiful to waste. It might be a mealtime expression, but I think it applies far beyond the table…
Do you ever find yourself rushing through the very things you once prayed for?
Rushing through dinner. Rushing through bath time. Rushing through the season of sticky fingers and a messy house. You tell yourself you’ll slow down when work calms down. When the kids are older. When life is less chaotic... But life is chaotic. That’s the whole thing.
“Scarpetta” is the one word antidote to this.
Scarpetta is slowing down enough to dance in the bedroom on a sunny spring morning while your kids laugh so hard they can’t stand up. It’s noticing their tiny hands, needing yours. It’s the sound of laughter from the next room. The smell of garlic sizzling in the pan. The feeling of sitting down at the end of a long day and being utterly exhausted, yet deeply grateful at the exact same time.
We’ve become a society that takes pride in how busy we are. But busy is the enemy of a scarpetta life. Busy steals the texture from our days. It turns precious things into logistics. It keeps us physically present but emotionally somewhere else entirely, thinking about the next meeting, the next task, the next thing to clean or fix or accomplish.
But the best parts of life are rarely found in the next thing.
They’re here. They’re now. And often, they’re small: A simmering pot of sauce. A crowded kitchen. A messy table surrounded by people you love. A season you don’t realize you’ll miss until it’s gone. The hard seasons, too, by the way.
Scarpetta is not about pretending life is always perfectly delicious, it’s about licking your plate clean anyway.
In fact, the sweetness of life only exists because difficulty does too. Without heartbreak, there is no tenderness. Without stress, there is no relief. Without winter, we don’t crave the miracle of spring. But to live scarpetta is to soak up all of it.
My mom used to always encourage us to clean our plates during a meal. She gave out a verbal award, “clean plate club,” when we did. We loved when a meal was so good we literally wanted to lick the plate clean.
What if that was your only aspiration for life? To live so fully that every day, every season, you’ve licked your plate clean. That is what it means to live Scarpetta.
