Words of Wisdom

A fabulous early-autumn day here at the lake. Brilliant blue sky, sparkling water, a stiff breeze and warm, warm sunshine. The woods are ringing with the shots of Wednesday hunters.





On this beautiful morning I'm welcoming visitors from Words of Wisdom, where I'm honoured to be today's Blogger of Note (thanks to that hardworking duo, Sandy and Pam). Please, feel free to take a look around and leave a comment to let me know you were here, and where I can read your own Words of Wisdom.

I'm an English expat living in the far north of Italy, in a tiny, ancient granite village set on an outcrop of rock overlooking the splendid Lago Maggiore. I started writing this blog in 2007 as an antidote to being at home alone with two little monsters, a ravening horde of feral cats and a coop full of woman-eating chickens. Thinking of articles to write, and taking photographs to illustrate them has given me a real sense of perspective, a love of the tiny details in my surroundings, and reignited my sense of humour about being a mid-life mother living in a stubbornly medieval house half way up a mountain with no road.

In the sidebar there is a list of what I think are some interesting posts. Here you'll find local interest, expat advice, incisive socio-political comment and a healthy dose of pure Mamma madness. 

Enjoy!

A little-finger-chilling nine degrees at 8:16am. Bright and sunny. 

Monday morning

Monday morning, damp and blowy, with last night's rain clinging to the grass stems. 

In the woods, the sentiero is slick with fallen leaves and small, young chestnuts, dropped too early from the trees, not worth the gathering. The wind still soughs among the treetops and there is a creaking and a clapping of branches among the abandoned coppices. 

The devastation of an army of wild boar is daily greater - grassy meadows turned into mud baths, great granite rocks dislodged from ancient drystone walls, and sticks and twigs driven into heaps by searching snouts, like so much storm-wrack washed up to the water-line on a beach.

And the first snow has appeared overnight on the distant Alps.

Autumn has come to Piemonte.

Motherhood means ... No. 25

After the torrential rain that held off all day until I, exhausted, was bringing up the hill children, dog, shopping and end-of-week school clobber, today is damp and overcast and the laundry won't dry.

Motherhood means ...

... always having a hankie for the children, but never having one for herself. After all, Mamas don't cry, do they?

Tiny...

Tiny blue flowers, drinking up the warm morning sun.

Carmine Superiore.

By the kitchen window

Bright and clear at 8am, with golden sunlight slanting through the woodland trees. Another beautiful Indian-summer day ahead.

Today started cold and misty and is now bright, sunshiney-blue and breezy. 


A perfect day for almost everything - gardening, drying laundry in the breeze-filled attics, running Jakob! in the woods, and bobbling along the sun-dappled lakeside road with the windows rolled down and Paganini on max.

One of those days

Monday. A wet-blanket day. A wrung-out-dish-rag day. A walk-in-the-woods drippy, damp, gloomy day.

In fact it's one of those days.

It's half past nine. There's a semi-bald, caked-in-blood juvenile cockerel cowering in the woodshed (I've mentioned before how nasty chickens can be). The wild boar have been at the garden again. Jakob! is lying panting in the doghouse, covered in wild-boar mud (read poo-poo) and licking off the yolks of nine (yes, NINE) stolen eggs. Mamma's also covered in mud, along with chicken poop, egg yolk and cockerel gore, and there's weasel poop on my walking boots.

Oh yes, and I have the first cold of the school year.

So.

Sod the washing up. I'm off to take a shower, throw everything in the laundry, and then retire to the sofa with a glass of hot Lemsip and the last two chapters of Wuthering Heights, which I hope will show me that it is possible to have worse days... 

Nature making art No. 6

Fourteen degrees at 8am, misty and raining in great, majestic veils across the lake. 

Raindrops on broccoli, Carmine Superiore, today.


For more watery scenes, visit Watery Wednesday.

Autumn term begins

Nineteen degrees at 8am. Overcast and sultry. 

Trees all around are showing occasional glimpses of their new colours for autumn. The old chickens have started to moult and this years' junior hens have started to lay. After a week of trial-and-error, our new autumn-term routine is beginning to emerge, and Mama's days are now spent sparring with Jakob! trying to rub the rough edges off this ever-so-nearly-finished building project we call our home, and in the ongoing search for our garden, which has gotten lost under a summer's growth of grass and weeds. 

Easy does it.

Buzzed by a baldie : Falconeria Locarno

One winter in my dim and distant past, I had the pleasure to spend in Nova Scotia, not far from the Bay of Fundy. My hosts were an English painter and his Canadian restaurateur wife. These splendid role models taught me the power of creativity when harnessed to damned hard work. The studio, gallery and country kitchen they modelled on a shoestring with their own hands eventually became the beautiful and tranquil Tangled Garden. 

Much of my time there was spent meditating on the shape of my future. I would sit in the studio, a scribbled mind map in front of me, listening to opera on Canadian public radio and watching hour upon hour a group of bald eagles who resided in a copse on a nearby hill and hunted across the next-door fields or soared out to fish by the bay. And once or twice as I wandered through the fields of Evangeline's Acadia, camera in hand, I was delighted to get up close and personal with a flying baldie.   

All these memories came flooding back to me the other day as I sat amazed in the audience at the Falconeria Locarno. This small but impressive falconry centre is home to a wide range of trained birds, including a number of eagles, owls and falcons. The presenters of the pacy falconry spetacolo are as impressive as their feathered hunters. They are informative (in German and Italian), superbly well-rehearsed and, I have to say, rather pleasing to the eye. 

Here's a taster :



Recommended; I promise the show will leave both adults and children alike gasping at the grace, speed and hunting capacity of these wonderful creatures. I will certainly never forget being brushed by the wing of a snowy owl as it arced over my head, seeing a trained 15-kilo vulture swooping towards me at full speed (sending the usually dauntless Jakob squirming for cover under the seats)... 

...or being buzzed by a baldie. 

Nineteen degrees at 8am. Misty and opalescent with faint blue skies in the far distance.

A brrr-making 14° at 8am, rising to 28° at 3pm. 


The summer's dwindling, school's in, and it's all downhill till winter.