As I grew older I learned strange and arcane styles of work that I never did want to put into practice full time, but that now, 40 years on, seem like skills learned on the dark side of another planet. How to plough a field with oxen. Sowing wheat by hand. Milking a cow. Minding a flock of sheep. Biblical stuff. Perhaps those Bible stories made more sense to my precocious Catholic mind because I understood, literally, what was meant by separating sheep from goats, and crushing grapes to make wine, and the flavor of unleavened bread.It was all stuff that I lived with from day to day. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. I didn't depend on these skills to live or feed anyone. I saw them employed, I learned them in a dilettante-ish sort of way and I shared moments in the field with men who wore leather skin without a second thought for skin cancer. or the wrinkles of old age. My favorite task, myself a confirmed scion of a wealthy family, a dilettante like Paris Hilton on TV, was plowing a field.
Ploughing you may not know, is usually accomplished in the Fall, after the harvest is gathered, the wheat sold and the straw piled high in conical haystacks like dunces hats. Harvesting is always celebrated in books and the arts, but that's because it's a collective experience and one of joy- money in the bank!Ploughing is a solitary past time, in olden days a man worked with his oxen yoked to the ploughshare ( I told you it was Biblical stuff), and in more modern times that same man ignored the blandishments, the siren song of cows and harnessed horsepower to his plowshare in the form of a bright orange Fiat tractor. And with that tractor and even a single bladed plow an incompetent like me could turn soil at a rate far in excess of the most skilled peasant ploughman and his oxen. And that ploughing brought with it satisfaction.
I like ploughing because I enjoyed the proximity to the machine, the power of the caterpillar tracks clanking and the sight of the blade neatly slicing through the turf and exposing an endless wedge of rich brown soil। At the end of the day you could see the work done and measure the brownness of the soil against the grayish green of the morning's field. It was good work.I was put in mind of the olden days of farm work not simply because of my recent historic visit back to Umbria after a 25-year absence, but because, more prosaically I was cleaning my Vespa the other afternoon.
Unlike Autumn in Central Italy, summer in the FloridaKeys is a hot humid and breathless affair. Not here do we smell fresh soil, wet leaves and the cooling breezes of the change of season. I keep the Vespa under my stilt home, out of the burning, disfiguring sun, and I polish my red buzz bomb. I like polishing it because I have found the right tools for the job, and those tools produce a shiny red carcass where the scooter body previously was faded and dull with dust.
Like plowing a field where sometimes a corner is left unturned I occasionally leave a wedge of dusty Vespa undone through carelessness, and on the Vintage Red Vespa body, the wedge of dust smears like a dull stain of remorse and I rush to take another pass with the soft cloth and rub All Kleer over the opaque patch. While I wipe out the dust, I'm put in mind of those far off days of my youth, my unhappy days punctuated by ploughing pleasure, and my pleasure filled days today, punctuated by the requirement, from time to time, to be annoyed or alone or frustrated, and it all falls away even now, with a rag, some goop and a shiny Vespa to show for my efforts.
