What’s getting me through

Between the virus, the dark, and the cold, life’s palette is smaller. Nothing big and dramatic about Itch today, but I did want to talk about several things that are keeping me going, a couple today and more next week.

— Walks. I really, seriously, need to take a walk every day. Fortunately, even with our ever-shifting kaleidoscope of lockdown colors (are we red, orange, or yellow today? — sometimes it’s all three in one week as the government rides the throttle), getting out of the house to walk the dog is consistently authorized. Lola and I usually walk a trail in the valley which used to be a railway line. Somehow this same route doesn’t bore me as I can watch the shifting of seasons, weather, and crops. I often see the same set of locals and their dogs. The Czech Wolf Dogs (a breed that is half wolf and half German Shepherd and popular among 20-something men) need to be avoided, but the other dogs are friendly to Lola, including the Pitbull we met yesterday. My biggest challenge on the walk is to keep Lola from rolling in seemingly irresistible wild boar shit, which is singular in its smell and stickiness in adhering to the coat of the dog. Yesterday I was not successful. After four shampoos Lola is mostly clean.

In the fall, until the first freeze, I often see solitary old men on bicycles who head to a patch of dense woods. They look furtive and avoid conversation and eye contact on the way into the thicket in a manner that alarmed me before I realized what they were up to. After they emerge from their secret foraging spots with baskets of porcini they are very talkative and want to show me what they’ve found.

Looming in the mountains in the distance is the unmistakable peak of La Verna, one of the monasteries founded by St. Francis and where, legend has it, he received the stigmata. It’s also the spot where I very illegally spread a tiny bit of my mother’s ashes, not because she was Catholic, or would have appreciated the sardonic fascination I have with the place, but because it does feel like an otherworldly and holy place. And it’s nice to give her a nod and greeting on the walk.

Occasionally I am joined on the walk by unexpected company. I started talking to a flock of sheep in a far field and the conversation went in a very unexpected direction.

I’d rather not have an intimate conversation with a wolf, who at any moment could be a special type of unexpected company on the trail — their tracks are everywhere. I often wonder if they are watching me while I walk. I think because I grew up in a suburban wasteland in Florida the fact that we coexist with wolves in close proximity thrills me and makes me deeply happy. The locals mostly agree. Friends who have had a couple of their goats killed still support having a healthy population of wolves. A couple of days ago a local man posted to the village Facebook page a photo he’d taken of a male and female wolf crossing the main road into the village at 9:20 in the morning and running into a field. The comments were filled with humor and delight.

— Anticipation. In the fall we planted 400 tulip bulbs. I think about them a lot during the freezing winter nights and cannot wait for them to visit us the Spring.

Our friends and former neighbors in Berkeley have decided to become our neighbors again, this time only part-time, and are purchasing the house at the end of our driveway. In addition to looking forward to a time in the future when the house will be alive with friends and family, I am excited about being involved in another renovation project. It is a joy to make an inhabitable, unloved house into something magical, and to reunite the two properties, which were legally separated only a few years ago, in spirit.

I discovered an odd thing when we restored our house. When working with a structure that is several hundred years old, and land that has been worked for thousands of years, it’s clear that the current moment is just a small fraction of its history. I would have assumed that makes whatever we do to the house seem less important, but somehow the opposite is true, because it is not just about the choices pleasing us today but there also is some sort of obligation to the future. I start thinking of alterations as changes that will ripple into the next several hundred years and leave a faint whiff of the choices, pleasures, values, and tastes of us. Just as the several layers of exposed paint I am looking at in the room where I am now bring me closer to the occupants of this same space who redecorated these walls in the 1700s and 1800s. And upstairs we can look into the frame of a former window, which is now incorporated into an interior wall. Back before our house was renovated into a villa in the 1700s it was a tower and the window was on the exterior and afforded a beautiful vantage point over the valley all through the middle ages. It’s easy to think of the person who originally created the window, and of the person hundreds of years later, and hundreds of years ago, who decided to seal it up to create another room on the other side.

Being in this flow of history seems to be especially helpful right now as it’s guaranteed that this all shall pass.