Five years ago I spent three months in the hospital, much of them immobile with only the use of my right hand. That seemed like a cruel irony given that I am left handed but I learned to hold my iPhone over my head and painfully tap out one letter at a time. If I dropped the phone and it fell to the floor I was screwed till some ambulatory staff member popped by and could restore my connection to the outside world. Natalie helped take care of me.
I learned not to disparage the value of an internet connection. This was brought home to me again inside my splendid baronial farmhouse with walls three feet thick where I have been recovering from Covid. You say I exaggerate?
So far I have not heard of anyone capable of getting a cell signal inside the fortress and this feature has proven slightly inconvenient. Otherwise my recuperation has been a delightful interlude of solitude and pastoral silence interspersed with headaches, rashes, bouts of chest wracking coughing and bizarre changes in body temperature. It is weird to be chatting with your nephew standing six feet away and suddenly as he sweats copiously under the Italian sun I find myself shivering uncontrollably with my teeth chattering so loudly it sounds like I’m doing it on purpose for effect. I thought I would never feel warm again but then of course I started sweating so badly the bed felt like a hot tub. This virus is irritating.
The farmhouse at San Pietro (St Peter) has been in my family for hundreds of years. My brother in law was born here and grew up here with no indoor plumbing or heating and minimal kitchen facilities. He does not recall the period with any sort of romantic nostalgia as using the cattle shed for a toilet on a rainy winter night would in any civilized society be considered inhumane. And my family were by his reckoning the kind bosses unlike others of a more sadistic bent.
Nowadays the sharecroppers are gone and the old farmhouse is being converted into rental units as a part of the main bed and breakfast operated at the central farmhouse a couple of miles away and I am the first non paying tenant. My toilet I am pleased to say is splendid, there is in the Continental fashion a bidet and endless hot water from the shower. But of cell phone signals not a one.
In the throes of fever and temporary clarity the pursuit of distraction cannot be satisfied by an E-reader which demands concentration. I lay in bed my mind spinning unanchored from the world around me.
I had time to reflect on our good fortune where what we take for granted was once a luxury cruelly denied and what we expect in services isn’t always available even in 2023. And I was in no fit state to sit outside for a signal except for a few minutes at a time. Layne in California and I, both suffering from Covid, spoke briefly and telegraphically before one or other of us became exhausted. I have long held, especially since my motorcycle crash, that there is no dignity in ill health.
Monday night I didn’t sleep a wink, Heaven knows why so Tuesday morning (local time is 9 hours ahead of California so - most confusing as this blog publishes on Eastern time…) I took a walk to work up some exhaustion. The first thing I saw was a porta potty next to the cowshed. The times they are a-changin’.
I walked across the stubble left by my nephew’s harvesting two days ago. When I was a child the harvest involved a squadron of machinery clanking between farms accompanied by a platoon of field workers. I got this photo off the web as we had no dedicated photographers in those days, but aside from the faces the business of threshing the wheat was identical.
Out of sight to the right was a tractor usually on tracks set at high idle to run the power take off to turn the belt to make the machinery separate the corn from the chaff. Nowadays my nephew does the harvest all by himself.
He parks the trailer at the edge of the field and when the combine harvester’s tank is full of wheat he empties it into the trailer and just keeps moving. Unromantic and efficient.
I get to watch and ponder and remind myself how glad I am I got away and lived my own life in California when I was a youngster. Farming is a tough life and for me it was even tougher as I had absurd notions of travel and trying to unravel the mysteries of the world. Those were propositions not appreciated by my family which was rooted to one spot. Later this summer we will drive across the corn fields of Iowa and I shall be reminded of all this.
I walked for a while my head filled with memories, breathless slightly but glad I had the strength to be alone in the woods again.
I used to ride my bicycle through here but like so much else what was open space is now overgrown. The men who walked to work with machetes or tended their cows in the fields are gone and if mechanization won’t work, the land is lost and reverts to nature.
I wondered which of my sister’s two boys was wandering around the field doing I know not what in the distant tractor. I knew my own wandering had to stop but it felt good to be out for a bit. I wish Rusty were here. He’d teach the locals dogs make great indoor companions in a society that prefers them tied up outside. Another reason I couldn’t live here; I am just too eccentric for country living.
My sister asked me anxiously, and she always speaks to me in English when we are alone and I have no idea why, “What about fleas?” she said after she had absorbed the idea that I lived in a van like a gypsy. Gypsies are not well liked in local lore: they steal children. I’d be happy to steal dogs, not children.
I explained the once a month flea and tick pill and she looked surprised that science might have addressed the problem. She was too polite to suggest I might occasionally be laying down with fleas aboard GANNET2 because that’s what happens, the proverb says when you sleep with dogs. Her dog is tied up outside. Shades of Mexico and I sigh.
Every farmhouse had a water supply and while most rural artesian fountains are drying up my nephews have refurbished this one to its original glory. The water is clear cool and delicious. It used to be you could find these fountains scattered all over the place and they were also critical for shepherds and their flocks or farmers moving cattle or humans walking to and from a distant job. Dolores collecting water for her family in the village. I have no idea who had the camera or who used it. I wish they’d done more. I must have been about five at the time.
As a child I knew where all the fountains were as hot summer days made of them great wading pools. We’d drink all we needed and dangle our feet in the water to cool off after hours spent in the fields playing and stealing fruit. No one knew how to swim and I wasn’t going to show off even after I learned how not to drown.
They have a particular design. The first basin is for the animals to drink and it has straight edges. The next basin the edges slope inwards and here you rinse your laundry (!) because the last basin also with a sloped edge is where you soap your laundry. And also hit the clothes on the edge of the fountain to get the dirt out. The protocol was important and strictly adhered to so everybody could get the most from the water. If you soaped up every basin animals had nowhere to drink and the rinse basin had to be less soapy than the soap basin!
Like everything there is nowadays a better way:
I suppose I have to accept that growing up here in the summers while going to school at Hogwarts in England gave me a perspective on life but to spend nine months as a magic-free Harry Potter and the rest of the time to run free in these hills was, I think, bound to sew the seeds of cultural confusion. America offered me a third way and I am so glad I took it.
