I watched the sun come up as the morning cacophony of roosters, birds and sheep began. A thick layer of cloud hung over the ocean but below the hills, giving the impression that from my window, I was looking down at the earth from an island in the heavens. Above the clouds, the sky was glowing pink, and a gentle, cool breeze was blowing into my rifugio.
I wanted to go to bed, but I didn’t want to let you down, dear reader. (Speaking of which, I have a lot more of you dear readers than I ever expected, and so I’ll be changing names and leaving out place names from now on, and editing previous posts.)
The reason I was awake is that I cooked a beef stew with Scicli beans at the coolest part of the day, that is, starting at midnight with a cup of coffee. Cooking over a fire is all about balance: piling on wood at the beginning to get the pot to boil, steadily feeding the flame to maintain it, and then knowing when to back off and let the embers do the rest. You can’t stoke a fire without getting charcoal on your dress, and if you bring wood directly from the forest into your upstairs room all the ants of the forest will come with it, and you have to wipe the fat out of your pan with a paper towel and burn it on the embers, because you do not want to throw greasy water into the yard, and the ashes can be sifted and used to scrub out pots. As we know from the Book of Leviticus, only fire can cleanse the soul, and there are many, many rules governing the use of fire.
It’s a shame we don’t all have wood stoves in our homes and apartments anymore. There is a great deal of waste that can be burned; think of all the cotton and paper we use to soak up our various bodily fluids. We rely on landfills and enormous amounts of water, when it’s so much simpler and more sanitary to just burn it straight away.
I was in the hazelnut forest all weekend, teaching myself how to cut the young shoots and strip them with the back of the handsaw. Hazelnut sends new growth up from the ground, straight as an arrow, which makes it superb to work with. I’ve made hanging bags for fruit by re-purposing textiles from my luggage, and eased a whittled rod in between two ceilings beams on the lower floor to hang cooking pots from, the shiny pots I had scrubbed with ashes and brushes made of dried grass from the forest. I learned how to twist rope from cotton twine, built a rack for the firewood, and as soon as one project had finished, I had three more in mind. The weekend passed in a pleasant creative fervor.
There is great satisfaction in being able to reap from the natural plenty around me. That is the reason for all of this work going into my daily existence: I justify my own life by maintaining it. This is possible here in Sicily, where there is still a public infrastructure for living in close proximity to nature: the springs, the forest, the fruit trees by the road, the sun, the ocean, small-scale agriculture everywhere. Here, in the middle of a village, on a bus route into the city, I am entirely self-sufficient except for my food.
For food, I went into town yesterday morning. I was the only person on the bus, no one speaks more than a smattering of English here, usually none at all, but the driver wanted to chat. I’ve gone from not speaking a word of Italian, to being able to occasionally say something sensible, and after so many years of that wretchedly complicated language, German, Italian is beautifully elemental and monosyllabic.
To get off the bus is scendere: descend, decrescendo. This being my second time, I knew on the return trip to ask which bus stopped at the bigger village downhill, not my village, which no one knows, and I knew to say Vorrei scendere qui as we came around the last sharp turn before my stop. I was hot, tired, hungry, and laden with bags as I walked to my door, but it was pleasantly cool in the hills and I was glad to be back there, glad to make my nightly pilgrimage to the spring, glad when Giro* came by with a loaf of bread that his wife had baked, glad to eat it dipped in Sicilian olive oil, glad to take a cold shower, glad to be home.
Home: this feels like my home, like my life, more than anywhere I’ve ever been.
If only I could get my mind to catch up with my body. I may feel extraordinary peace and contentment, but the blasé aspect of modernity has followed me here: checking my phone, wondering if should buy tobacco in town instead of just browsing the selection in the vending machine, thinking about what I want to eat, in short, the flip side of the coin of what I said above, about justifying my existence by maintaining it. The modern version of self-justification, which is self-soothing, hedonism, justifying existence by making it feel good. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to divest myself of this, or if it is simply what man has become? Will I ever get to the other side of it?
* Name has been changed. The same neighbor who always brings me things.
This is really beautiful.