Best Laid Plans (of Mice and Bees)

Yesterday, I pulled back the black plastic tarp covering the patch of "no-till" garden where I intended to plant potatoes. After one month it had done it's job. The weeds and grass were pale and dead, last year's weeds were crumbly and semi-composted, ants had built an antropolis in the twilight zone at one edge, and the soil surface was littered with the nutritious casings of earthworms happily plowing, aerating, and fertilizing this patch of artificial night 24/7.

There was a strange low mound in the middle of it all, created by some burrowing creature I hoped I hadn't fenced in.

As I was forming a shallow furrow in which to insert the seed spuds, a tiny nose and two beady eyes popped out of the mound directly in front of me -- the scared little field mouse whose roof I'd just ripped from its home. We regarded each other a moment, then went back to what concerned us.

As I finished planting my potatoes, I gave the now impressively large mound (for a mouse) a wide berth because I suspected there was a nest of blind, hairless and pink baby mice somewhere inside. Wishing the mouse luck in finding a new home elsewhere before I returned, I set about moving more building debris into attractive consolidated mounds in preparation for the arrival of my mate. To do this required the use of a bee.

I'm referring to the motorized wheelbarrow seen hugging the roadsides all over Italy. Known as an Ape (pronounced Ah-peh), Pioggia's cousin of the Vespa (Wasp) is a vehicle of choice for the rural elderly, the illiterate, the under-aged and the mentally impared because it doesn't require a driver's license to drive. It is a favored delivery vehicle for light loads. Not even the tuk-tuks of Thailand are this small.

The Ape is the littlest enclosed passenger vehicle in the world and with the tiniest engine of any motorcycle (50 cc), making it the greenest, gas-sipping passenger "vehicle" there is. They are ubiquitous and comic to see trundling along emitting their nee-nee-nee drones. And they are notorious for tipping over. A search of You Tube will quickly reveal how an Ape is unloaded.

Leaving the mouse to sort out it's housing issue among the potatoes, I loaded my nearly mint, previously-owned-by-a-fastidious-old-lady-from-Petroio (the other next village over), just-purchased-two-hours-earlier, Ape with a couple hundred pounds of field stone and firewood. I cranked it up and gave it the gas. Immediately the throttle cable snapped.

Piano piano (slowly, slowly), I walked back up to the hill to get the other wheelbarrow.

Shipwreck Syndrome

I feel like a castaway madly tidying his island hideaway as he waits for the rising tide to lift the ship of mail order brides recently grounded on the reef too far out to reach.

Sally arrives at the end of the week and ...

Rather than neatly sorting coconuts and shells into tidy piles, and raking the beach and sweeping out my hut, I’ve spent the last month arranging stones and scrap wood and other construction detritus and sweeping the cement dust out of our new garage. I’m pruning the trees in a widening gyre around the house. I’m fencing the garden against porcupines and badgers. I am putting like things with like things, making bigger neater piles from the many messy mounds around the property. I’m painting the bedroom. I’m building a rustic table of scrap wood for the many meals we will eat out of doors. I’m picking bits of plastic and wire and metal and glass from the soil around the worksite. I’m building stone retainer walls and dumping wheelbarrows of earth behind them from the mounds and piles that need to be flattened. I’m raking and shoveling and hoeing and flattening all the terrain left rumpled by the Brandinis and the plumbers and electricians. I’m scything the weeds that have grown a foot and a half since I got here. I’m burning prunings and rubbish.

Yesterday, I washed the dishes and my laundry.

Today I install a bathroom mirror.

On reflection, this isn't exactly what I came all the way to Tuscany to do.

Hoepoe

Thornton Wildee called Rome the northernmost point in Africa. Tuscany is just a little north of Rome. It, too, is Africa when it comes to birds and summer heat.

For three springs now I've noticed the first feathered inkling of Africa, right around Easter, above the tiny pieve (chapel) marking the turn to the white road that leads to our property, sitting on a telephone wire as it's mate forages on the ground. It is the pushme-pullyou hammerhead of birds. Somewhat woodpeckerish, in low light you can't tell which way it is looking because it seems to sprout beaks from both sides of it's head.

It is a bird of habit and of place and reassuringly returns each year to this same little pocket of Africa at the northernmost edge of its range. It is the bellwether bird. And for 3 Tuscan springs I have known the good weather has arrived when I see the hoepoe perched on the line at the turn-off to Tana Lepre (Hare's Den). This morning, there they were -- the hoepoe and il bel tempo.

Tomorrow the bed arrives and I will nestle in!

Hunger Appetite Famine

It is Pasqua, Easter Sunday, and I am driving in a driving rain up into the hills over Lake Trasemino above the plain where Hannibal's army ambushed and slaughtered a legion in a humiliating defeat that ran the waters of the lake red with Roman blood. So I am thinking of history and food.

Chef and TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver says his big wish is that Americans teach their kids to have a real relationship to food. Real food.

Generalization: Most Italians have a different relationship to food than most Americans. Until sometime in the last 10 years, 80% of all Italians grew some of what they ate.

I remember my first trip to Italy in the mid-90's. On the train from Rome to Venice, I was amused by the little gardens tucked into every centimeter and inch of usable space along the tracks the entire way. In empty lots, in yards, in parking lots, on balconies, in tractor tires... you get the idea. Now you see less of this, but not much. This is not something you see in the States. Not yet.

Try to explain the Easter Bunny to an Italian and he'll smack his lips and dream of stewing it in wine, wild garlic and mushrooms. It's not cute, it's food. Many in our area over the age of 70, and there are many around here over 70, can remember something else few Americans can relate to -- "the famine" of the fascist years.

I've always had a good appetite, and the only true gnawing hunger I've known was as a kid. Once, I was rifling through a dumpster bin at a rest stop in the Sierra Nevada's near Mount Shasta after my car broke down near the end of a cross country trip. I was 17. I hadn't eaten anything but coffee in over 24 hours. I'd found a bread bag with a crust in it, a cereal box with a few corn flakes left, and a peanut butter jar with two finger's worth of goo. I'd caught a crawfish in the little mountain stream burbling behind the parking lot in a coffee can and was contemplating eating it raw like Richard Harris did in the movie A Man Called Horse. And of course this was before sushi had become an American household word.

As I was rifling some more, a girl about 12-years-old tapped me on the shoulder. She was holding a paper plate with a big piece of chocolate cake on it. She had a sandwich bag with a tuna sandwich in it. She had a can of cold orange soda fresh out of the family cooler. She held them out to me with stiff arms. "My mother thought you should have this." I looked over at the picnic table where her family sat. They were gawking, but not impolitely.

I accepted the gifts and sat down at the far end of their picnic table where I devoured them. I showed the girl the crawfish in the can. Then we both let it go. I thanked the mother and the very quiet father and the girl. And I've always remembered how my discomfort -- not just this once, but many times over the years -- was eased by the easy generosity of strangers. What happened for my stomach that day wasn't as profound as what happened for my sense of humanity.

This is how, as I drive through this verdant farmland to Easter supper with friends in Umbria, I contemplate the deeper meaning of today's feast, here in Italy, and in my life. Perhaps it is something we should all do a little more of.

Buona Pasqua and buon apetito!

Forest For The Trees

It's been virga all day across the Val d'Orcia, rain never reaching the ground. Big mats of cloud scudding along like pewter jellyfish, their tentacles dangling down over this undulant ancient sea bottom as freshets of wind churn the budding trees like corals and seaweeds in strong current.

This is what Giovanni and Arnaldo have spent the last two weeks since the big snow doing, harvesting one meter long logs from the snarl of wild bosco at the bottom of their property, just across from the castle ruin. It needs to be done now so next year's firewood can season all summer. It needs to be done now because the leaves are down and it is easy to see how to thin the stand best for the future.

This is what the managed wood will become in another 20 years. Truffles anyone?

The Double Standard And The Beauty of Also

I live on a slippery slope. This is what our hillside becomes when it is wet with nebbia (fog), piogia (rain), or neve (snow). Which it seems to be often these days. Because of this the terrain itself is teaching me a thing or two as I try to turn a worksite into a home.

Today I am 55, and I have built a house in Tuscany.

Problem solving is the thinking half of getting things done. Do it right and you cut your work in half. As a reader, writer, speaker and listener, I like words and phrases that say more than one thing at a time. I am not talking about efficiency. That is an industrial age term aimed at increasing production over time and orderly accrual of wealth. And I don’t mean practical either. Practical only concerns itself with the doing part of getting things done.

What I'm talking about is the act of satisfying the creative need and the aesthetic need at once. Not dual purpose, but dual result, a double standard of the best sort. The payoff is not instantaneous, but more meditative and accumulative. The quiet everyday Eurekas found in ordinary acts, these are akin to the feeling of inspiration Zen monks, poets, and even military strategists must know.

Today, I have a new rule when it comes to getting things done. After Rule #1, “Avoid solving problems with bigger problems to solve,” Rule #2 is: "Whenever possible, solve for more than one problem at a time." The key is forethought. Here is a short and simple list of some ways I try to achieve this:

Never go anywhere empty handed. When moving from point A, no matter how casually, always take something that belongs to point B and leave it there.

Never go from A to B without considering what is in between. If there is a weed that really needs to be pulled, pull it. Then take a moment to notice the change.

When pruning, gather firewood.

When mowing, gather mulch.

When fencing the garden, trellis peas.

When engaged in physical labor, exercise.

When stopping to rest, heal and gather force.

When removing eyesores and trash, improve safety.

While heating pasta water, cook broccoli, green beans or boiled eggs.

When clearing a field of stones, gather building material.

And while I’m at it, a few do’s and don’ts:

Remove the word "disposable" from my vocabulary. Before discarding anything, assume it has a “next purpose” and reuse or recycle accordingly.

Never pull a weed without knowing its purpose in the ground.

Never do something practical without seeing the aesthetic in it.

Remove all military vocabulary from my landscape. There are no "invasive” weeds. Armies invade. Weeds are more like common citizens, they move into neighborhoods suitable to them. And one does not "battle” pests. Insects want to eat my cabbage as much as I do. But they rarely kill the cabbage and devour it with relish I will.

Fencing 101

In Tuscany, in particular, a fence is a record of invasions by wild boar and porcupines, and of the gardener's intervention. I cannot say how old the fence around my orto (vegetable garden) is, but I can say it is an archive. It is not beautiful. It is rusty and snaggly and patched together with bailing wire. And now, with the first seeds of spring sown, it needs to be replaced, or patched once again. I have chosen to patch it. Patch it where the wild things have burrowed through. Patch it where the diesel dinosaur of the excavator ripped through it to lay our utility lines at the start of construction.

Again I find myself patching, repairing, healing what is crippled, broken, old, abandoned, but not yet dead or useless or done. Like the property itself. Like the old men a women seen doddering up and down the roads here after mealtime.

My initial instinct was to rip out the old fencing and crooked fence posts and replace it with a shiny straight new fence. And I suspect that I eventually will. But not this year. What is left of this old fence, the few places left where it is still intact, is also a record of where the animals have not gotten in. Yet.