Early Easter

In Carmine this year, Easter has come early. The chicks are hatching and the ewe is heavy, the daffodils are dancing and the camellias are dropping. 

Happy Easter from the House on the Rock!

Editor's choice No.4: A mallard in spring, early March 2011

Another gorgeously warm spring day awaits today in Carmine Superiore. Ten days over ten degrees and we put our firewood axes away and declare spring with a sigh of relief...

In 2011, this mallard was celebrating spring by making his own work of art...

Cannobio, Porto Nuovo, March 2011.

Flashback: February 5th 2010

In Carmine Superiore, today, there are dazzling blue skies and the temperature is definitely warm for the time of year. On this day in February 2010, however, it was a different story...

Cannobio's Santuario della S. Pietà in the snow, February 5th 2010.

Views from Carmine Superiore No. 1: Cloudline

Clouds cross in front of the mountains in Lombardy, just across the lake.

A view from Carmine Superiore,

Winter 2010-2011.

Editor's choice No. 3: Carmine Conversation, 1st September 2011

The idea that Mama and Pappi might at some point in the near future take a break alone, together, sans brood, was some days ago mentioned at the family dinner table. Floated gently on the waters of the family psyche.

B., aged 5, obviously takes a while to digest new ideas. Only this morning did her considered opinion on the matter bubble up to the surface of her little pond.

B.: "Mama, you and Pappi can't go away together without us!"

Mama (seeing a romantic weekend away-from-the-hill slipping through her fingers, and trying not to sound too desperate): "Why not darling, I think it's a great idea..."

B.: "No, you can't go away without us!"

Mama (staying cool, but giving herself away with the unconscious Enid-Blyton-speak): "But why ever not, dear?"

B. (speaking slowly as to a particularly dull dullard): "Because we can't - reach - the - pasta - machine." 

Mama (guffawing into the washing up, thinks): I could always leave it on the bottom shelf...


Pic:  justinsomnia

Editor's choice No. 2: 8th October 2007, Strange Goings On

In the balmy nights of Carmine summers, when the residents sleep with open windows, and lightning streaks silently across the skyline, strange things sometimes happen.

A few months ago, on just such a night, I awoke at about 3am. I lay awake, straining my ears to try to separate out the gentle sounds of Carmine Superiore’s slumber. A resident’s snoring, the running of the streams, the woodland owls, the snuffle of a wild boar, the far distant humming of a goods train across the lake in Lombardy. What had woken me? Did one of the children cry out in sleep?

The first alien sound I identified was the rattling of a ladder. Perhaps my neighbour, then, had arrived. Well-known for leaving his keys behind four hours away, he was more than twice seen extracting a ladder from its cradle and insinuating himself into his house by unexpected avenues.

Then I heard something else.

Voices.

Strange. Statistics would have us believe that by this late hour burglars have already slunk off to their beds, and besides, no self-respecting burglar would be making this kind of noise – would he? (For statistics also tell us that the vast majority of burglars ARE men.)

I felt for my specs, got up, went over to the window as quietly as possible, and looked out. Ah. First I located the ladder sound. A light breeze was rattling the ladder strung to a wall in the next-door garden. It wasn't some masked man heaving it up the hill after all.
And then the voices took up my attention. Two people were sitting together on the bench way up the path. They sat by the signpost under the light of the ‘street’ lamp (well, it’s hardly a street), just where the path splits : up for Molinesc and Cannobio, down for Carmine Inferiore.

Two people sitting on the bench, chatting and laughing. A canoodling couple, perhaps, out on an amorous adventure.

As I watched, one of the figures stood up and I drew in my breath sharply. A man. Definitely.

Definitely, because in the words of David Byrne he was buck naked.

The other stood up too. Not a woman, but another man. Also starkers. I smiled an involuntary smile of disbelief and continued to watch as they jogged along towards the nucleus of the village, passing the end of ‘our street’ and up the great broad steps towards the church, where they were no longer visible.

There was much whooping and shouting in the churchyard, before I once again heard the patter of naked feet. And saw them streaking back past the house and on up by the gardens. Reaching a rocky incline, they slowed before disappearing under the canopy of trees, leaving my incredulity as the only sign that they had ever been there.

HAD they ever been there? If not, what does my vision say for the state of mind that conjured it? Was I overcome by the erotic stillness of the summer evening? Or rendered momentarily insane by the triple stresses of child-rearing, house-painting and daily hill-walking?

If what I saw was real, and two high-spirited blokes had come jogging around Carmine that night, having left their clothes under a riverside rock perhaps, or in a neat pile on some bar-stool, WHAT on earth were they doing? And why? When they could have been tucked up in bed (or sprawled on the floor) with the world spinning happily and the beginnings of a hangover headache mustering up in their temporal lobes.

If you can enlighten me, I’d rest happier in the knowledge I hadn’t momentarily paid a visit to La-La land. 

Editor's choice No. 1: 27th June 2009, Everything Changes

One June day in 2007, a little boy, not yet three, is sitting on a climbing frame in a hot and dusty garden surrounded by sixty other children. He is terrified and chattering, head down, eyes darting to and fro, frozen with fear. His mother has understood virtually nothing of what has been said in the parent's meeting that has preceded a tour of the kindergarten, and now, a puddle of linguistic isolation all around her, she sees his distress, and wants to weep for herself and her first-born, to snatch him away and run, run, run, to carry him off to a place that may not be so sunny, but where at least she can equip her children to meet life's big events without fear and confusion.

Two years on, a robust little girl runs down the steps on extremely sturdy legs into the same garden shouting "Hooraaaaay!" at the top of her lungs. She vies for a place on the see-saw, scrabbles around for a plastic spade in the sand pit, is introduced to the older children by a confident and sociable little boy, a fluent Italian speaker, her older brother. Occasionally she checks her mother, who, chatting with a gaggle of others, slides her sunglasses quietly down onto her nose so that no-one will see she is on the verge of tears once again. Pride in her son's achievements, pleasure at realising she herself now understands almost everything that is being said, and joy that her daughter has met one of life's big events without fear and confusion.

Everything changes... 

“Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.”

---- Leonardo da Vinci

December sunrise

Cold, dry, and with snow and ice still making the sentiero an obstacle course.The bathroom temperature is hovering steady at 5°C.

This morning's sunrise, from Carmine Superiore.

Medieval Sunday in Italia bella

Today, Carmine looks a little as it did at Christmas in 2009...

...and the Sunday soundtrack is the music that would have been heard in the courts and cloisters of northern Italy around the time San Gottardo was built ...

A fraction below 5°C in the bathroom this morning. Cold, bright and dry. The laghetto is frozen and there are icicles forming in the streams. 

First snow 2012

One solitary degree at 8:03am. Frost in the frost pockets where the cold air tumbles down the sides of Carmine's ramparts. Ice cubes in the chickens' drinking water. And now there is a dusting of snow on the palms, and a pile of cats on Mathilda.

Knowledge of things nearly eternal

A mild and misty Monday morning.  

Today, standing at my favourite morning spot, the mountains behind me, the woods full of wildlife surrounding me and the cries of the seagulls almost the only clue to the presence of the great lake below me, a snatch of a quotation came to me out of the autumn mist, and sent me running home to Rachel Carson. Not for the more famous Silent Spring, but for her first book, Under the Sea Wind, and this passage:

"To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be. These things were before man ever stood on the shore of the ocean and looked out upon it with wonder; they continue year in, year out, throughout the centuries and ages, while man's kingdoms rise and fall."

I'd say that just about covers it.

Portrait: http://www.chatham.edu/host/library

What's kindling in Carmine...

Cold, dry and hazy. 

The five degrees in the bathroom and the fire burning in our beloved Mathilda, has signalled the start of our Carmine winter.

Perfect kindling.

I suspect that falcetto will be in my hand rather a lot of the time in the weeks to come.

Nature making art No. 7

After two days of thundering rain, the skies are once more blue and the sun is warming Carmine's ancient bones. 

And nature is making art again...

Raindrops on autumn leaves. 

Carmine Superiore, 2012.