The Man With Three Senses

“I love the smell of cut grass,” my sister said to me yesterday afternoon as we sat in the shade cast by the farmhouse. 

“Oh?” I was puzzled. “Can you smell cut grass here?” She looked at me in surprise. 

That was the moment I realized the common Covid symptom of loss of smell and taste had struck. 

The day had started suspiciously well with a pleasant dawn walk for me and the vague hope that there may be the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel in this Covid mess. 

Then I sat outside in the afternoon shade cast by the building.  There is landscaping and tree planting planned for these new rental apartments but the details are being filled in between other jobs.  This place is more than a working farm and the complexity of managing a restaurant and a hotel as well baffles me. 

Farming is an unsentimental business. These young bulls will be meat this winter.  The white cattle known in Italy as Chianina (“kee-an-eee-na”) are prized for their meat similar to the way foodies in the US are awe struck by Wagyu. 

I wander the stable making portraits of the condemned and am struck by how for once their shit really doesn’t stink. Thank you Covid. 

To live in a world without a sense of smell and no ability to taste anything is, I have discovered, quite bizarre. 

Everyone loves Italian food - not me, not anymore. The last plate of pasta I got from my sister was a container of tagliatelle in a cream sauce with mushrooms and it was delicious. The next day I could taste nothing anymore. 

The cherry preserves are gone, the eggs laid a mile away and fried in home made olive oil, the home cured pork products, all so much cardboard. My empathetic friend the doctor consoled me with the thought I might at least lose weight. Gee thanks. 

I suppose it’s churlish to complain. So many have lost lives and long term good health to Covid and we all sat through months of restrictions and job loss and uncertainty. 

I hope my lost senses come back and they usually do. To live the remainder of my life with no sense of taste or smell would require some adjustment though. 

So you can’t taste and you can’t smell anything.  

You can see and touch and hear. I can see the colors in the hedgerows. 

I can still hear the cicadas creaking in the fields, the sounds of summer throughout my childhood. The males rub their hind legs together to attract a mate and they do it during the hottest months: they are indefatigable. 

I can feel the cool breezes blowing through the valleys on these hot afternoons. 

For now this will have to do. 

Quarantine

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. 

Life And Death On An Umbrian Farm

 September 2013, from the archives.

I haven't been back to Italy since 2018, just before my motorcycle accident and now I am pinning my hopes on being able to take a trip in the Fall of 2022. My nephews' farm and bed and breakfast operation are today surviving the pandemic lockdowns and the swimming pool is built and they are taking reservations. Eight years ago all they had were plans, being observed by the older generation who grew up in post war Italy in an age of hardship:

I woke up Tuesday morning to the sound of a breeze blowing through the cherry trees outside my bedroom window, the air was fresh, the sky a little less gray and the fields stretching south from my I sister's hill top farm were dappled in the weak September sunlight pushing through between the clouds.

Below my bedroom windows my nephews are digging a swimming pool for their plans to have paying guests visit the farm, an ambitious plan that their father my brother in law views with a mixture of pride and apprehension.

This is, I thought to myself, quite the privilege, living the life even if temporarily of leisure amid the hustle and bustle of farm life. I get to see it up close, and as much as I was glad to get away thirty years ago, I was okay with being back here now. My sister Liz is ten years older than I and she is the elder of her twin sister by ten minutes so in some sense she is the matriarch of the family now our parents are dead. She has been a housewife married to the same man for close to forty years. They rebuilt this farmhouse where her husband grew up int their family home, Cerqueti Farm:

And there she is, the smiling face in the bottom left hand window surveying her world as she has for the past many decades, raising two boys and watching her husband till the fields and kill the pigs and raise the cows for market.

Her husband was not considered suitable by our rather snobbish mother and they were secret sweethearts from the age of 15 a full half century ago and despite their public reticence they are as much in love now as ever.

They labeled him a gold digger in the village because he was marrying the heiress of a landed fortune, five hundred acres of extremely hard work and a ton of inherited debt and no prospects. Today, after a lifetime of back breaking work he has handed over plans for the farm to his two strapping boys but he still raises livestock, the thing he has always loved to do as his boys expand and make their own plans for a "modern" farm. Vincenzo's idea of farming is to get up early, feed the animals, take care of the fields feed the animals watch the news and curse the politicians and then go to bed. I am not much of one to get up early on vacation but I did his evening rounds Monday night with him.

He found some wild boar piglets lost in the forest one day a few years ago and he brought them home, hand fed them and built them a pen. They were probably victims of hunters who love to kill these pigs for their rather gamey meat.

He let them out when they were adults but they just kept coming back to their home and one day this one came home pregnant. They know where they are well off he laughs, pouring their ground corn flour into their trough. Wild boar are as intelligent and tough as iguana in the Florida Keys. They are as destructive and lack all natural predators. Hunters are scared of them as thy will turn on an armed human and gore him to death if cornered.

Then it's down to the cow byre to feed the cows his sons don't want to deal with. They dislike the requirement to feed and water the animals every single daily day but he thrives on it. Vincenzo doesn't take vacations, he doesn't drink or play cards, he doesn't smoke, so his only vice is his livestock.

Most of his herd, reduced to three dozen from double that when he was younger he keeps on hundreds of acres of mountainside fenced in and free to come down and get hay and water or to stay on the hillside where he has a trough for them and they can forage as they please. He's says even in winter they frequently prefer to be up on the hill than in the shed that he has built for them at the bottom of the hill. The young ones and the pregnant cows he keeps in the shed.

This one, pictured above gave birth Tuesday night and Vincenzo and I went out in a rainstorm to help the newborn calf get its first meal. The new mother, afterbirth hanging down her hindquarters was kicking the calf away so Vincenzo tied up her foreleg and distracted her with hay while leading the calf to milk. I stood outside the pen holding the rope taut that kept her foreleg in the air and prevented her raising her hind leg to kick away her starving calf. It was all very elemental and satisfying when the calf finally pulled away and burped and the mother, released, started licking him.

The fact is he will go to the butcher in less than two years and will bring in six Euros a kilo, which puts your middle class urge to go "Aww!" in an unfortunate perspective. But that is life on the farm. My sister also called in the vet who spent twenty minutes and twenty five Euros removing a blade of grass from her pet dog's ear... So animal love has its place on the farm. As do tractors, viewed fondly enough that Vincenzo calls this his car.

It's the oldest and smallest in the fleet of five that they have but it's his and he uses it to look after his cows, moving feed around including bales of hay for the outdoor cows, by the light of the feeble glow of the headlamps.

It has been his entire life and my mother thought my sister could do better than marry the third child of a sharecropper who used to cultivate one of her farms. I guess she was wrong.

I rode shotgun on the tractor, an extremely uncomfortable place on the incredibly torn up road we had to take to his other stable of animals and there he went through the same routine twenty minutes later. Sweep the dirt, put out ground flour and hay and make sure the water drips are working.

He put out some pasta for the guard cat,

And admired his pigs which he himself will slaughter in January for his rather excellent home cured prosciutto and dried sausages, of which I am eating as much as I can while I am here. He told me the story of the European Union inspector who came by the farm to take blood samples of his animals to see if they were being fed artificial hormones. "I wanted to give him some artificial hormones up the back side," my brother in law said with a grimace. Damned government regulations.

He used to slaughter pigs in winter for money but new European regulations put a stop to that. Vincenzo, like everyone else I have talked to is fed up with the over reach of government in Italy. There are regulations for everything and it makes me laugh as I think back to the US Tea Party people who think we have too much government interference in the US.

It has been days of eating and talking, telling stories and thinking about the past which I find quite exhausting but rewarding. And it gives me much to think about and be thankful for. It's good to get off the rock and remember how most of the rest of the world lives.

Raising food, killing it and eating it. It doesn't get more elemental than that, agro-tourism and swimming pools notwithstanding.