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.

Remembrance

Nature's supermarket

This morning at the Belvedere the sun rose in a cocoon of autumn mist, foretelling a change in the warm and bright weather we've been having. 

It will be a wild supper in Carmine Superiore tonight.

Parasol mushroom the size of a dinner plate and weighing 250g, from Nature's Supermarket, free of charge.

Wetday wildlife

Cloudy with the occasional sunny patch that I hope is going to sanitize the duvets and dry out a just-washed feather pillow, although somehow I doubt it. Wet underfoot and definitely autumnal.

Last night's rain added to the mild weather makes this a Fire Salamander day...

Big Daddy fire salamander

Carmine Superiore, October 2012

Plus ça change...

Misty, drizzly and rainforest steamy. 

As I feed my sheep the fat chestnuts I've just gathered in the woods, the monsoon weather brings a memory of our little house in Zaria, northern Nigeria, during a gap between rainstorms. The guard is leaning on the gate, lazily disputing with another man in Niger French. Dauda is out back, singing to himself a faintly familiar gospel tune as he prepares lunch. And a herd of skinny white cattle is passing under the avenue of mango trees beyond the fence. 

My ram's head comes up for another handful of the pocket-warm shiny nuts and I see in my mind's eye the head of a white cow come up to steal a golden, juicy mango from a tree. 

As I make my way back to the house, there are fire salamanders on the path, and in Zaria that day I found a chameleon in the garden, shedding his skin. 

It's easy to remember my life in Zaria as a great adventure - and easy to forget that my life in Carmine, while different, is really just the same. 

The great Carmine autumn migration

Cool and damp. Rain later. Probably just as I am descending The Hill, having decided against an umbrella.

The Carmine cats have noticed the change in the season, and are busy organising their indoor nests for the winter. Somehow there seem to be more this year. I have gained one very thin and very hungry blacky, a caffé-latte with only one eye, a rather bad-tempered fluff-ball tabby and a marmalade bruiser who's less confident than he looks.

And it seems that various members of a less ... tactile species are thinking along the same lines. This morning I evicted three of these fellows before 9am, and am remembering India...

Irregular verbs: a grammar lesson

Here in Carmine Superiore, summer edges day by day towards autumn. The Virginia creepers are flaming, and we've turned the orto over to broccoli and winter salad. The mother deer I see every day in the woods are starting to wean their young, and the cockerels from Easter are starting to bully me when I come to feed them. Still bright and hot, at least at midday, but today there's a gusty wind that bodes a change in store. 

One of the many things students of English - or indeed any language - find difficult is the irregular verb. Of course, there are many wonderfully simple regular verbs: I love - you love - he loves. But how on earth does one hook on to the irregular verbs? I am - you are - he is are as far away from I be - you be - he bees than one can get. As I have in the past told teenagers in terror over their English exams, you just have to learn them. Learn them by heart along with your compound verbs. You know, insert them into your long-term memory - if you have any memory cells left after the Friday-night binge drinking, the Saturday-night ecstasy and the Sunday night weed.

Today, though, I believe I've come across a new category of verbs that no student of English will find in any grammar book. I've decided to call them the housewife verbs, and they include 'to clean', 'to dust', 'to launder', 'to tidy', etc. What's strange about them is that, if you are a housewife, these have only one person in any tense:

I iron
I have ironed
I ironed
I would have ironed
I did iron
I will iron
I am going to iron 
I am ironing - ironing - ironing...

Know the feeling?

Scandal!

A hot day, but fresh all the same. The daily temperature range is about 10° starting in the upper teens.

We were surprised a couple of days ago to receive a visit from a representative of the local health authority carrying what translates as an 'exposé'. For me the word conjures up red headlines from The Sun with a half naked woman on the front page, and lots of monosyllables expressing indignation, horror, shock and ridicule - in bold and italics and sometimes even underlined so that you don't miss them. Lurid goings on in the back rooms of the Houses of Parliament, shocking treatment of bald lesbians, the naked romps of princes of the realm in the back rooms of casinos ... you know the kind of thing. 

So the exposé we were confronted with was rather dull in comparison. Not a single prince's buttock in sight. It was our activities that had been exposed! We were (wait for it, wait for it) keeping sheep. Or perhaps that should be "keeping sheep!" Scandal! Exposed at last! Shock! Horror! They were keeping sheep! 

Well, your honour, this is hardly the Piazza del Duomo, now is it?

Anyway, our friend from the veterinary service examined Max and Moritz, who were unusually helpful. They didn't stamp on his toes, try to butt him down the hill or snaffle large-denomination banknotes out of his pockets. While they stood to attention, he took a blood sample and pronounced them very healthy, well-fed, being kept in optimum conditions and with all the necessary identification, permissions and paperwork (in triplicate and signed by the Pope). He was perfectly happy about the sheep but pretty pissed off about the absence of naughty goings-on behind the baita. 

10/10 Phew!

And even Max is smiling (just):

Summer update

Temperatures in the searing thirties, with a soothing wind, and thunderstorms constantly just under the horizon.
Summer here in Carmine is in full swing just as Enid Blyton would have liked. The gardens and the children are rampant and the vacationing adults are laid back. There's a homemade water-wheel under a waterfall, and a hot dog in the old lavatoio. There are picnics and rowing boats and sailing boats and blow-up rubber boats. And hydrangea blooming everywhere.

Hydrangea, Carmine Superiore.

Summer 2012

After the rain No. 1

Looks like it will be another sunny and warm day at the lake; temperature in the mid-20s.

Time again to be bottling sunshine.

Here's the recipe.

Also at Easter

Cool and overcast. Threatening more rain. 

The last Easter tulip in Carmine Superiore.

Carmine's winter flowers, No. 5

A warm and sunny day today which saw us out on the little piazza by the church, soaking up the rays. The snow on the sentiero is almost gone, and the water supply is back in action.

Another of Carmine's winter flowers - one I haven't seen before, and one I can't name. Anyone?

Survivors

After yesterday's surprising 14°C at 4pm, and last night's warm wind, we woke to 6° at 8am and no water anywhere in the house. 

This morning, there was no husband, no water, a fox at the chicken coop, a dog with self-inflicted diarrhoea, two children bent on killing one another with my boot trees, and a mobile phone that had given up the ghost. Despite this, we did manage to get to school within two minutes of the bell, and in pretty good order. 

On the way home to wait for my heroes from Sicea, the water company, I snapped this little survivor of the snow, and hope that I will come out of this blooming as well.

Scilla, Carmine Superiore, February 2012

Carmine's winter flowers, No. 3

Minus six at dawn this morning with snow frosty and sparkling on the ground and the roofs. No water in half the house and in the side of the house where there is water, the boiler has gone into hibernation. Ho-hum.

Here's another lovely winter flower to keep our spirits up.

Still snowing in Carmine

Minus one degree at 8.30am as I inched cautiously through Cannobio's old town in my snow-encrusted Fiat. About 20cm of snow on the ground, and still snowing. 

Snow on camelia,

Carmine Superiore, February 2012

Carmine's winter flowers, No. 2

A barely pink rose.

Carmine Superiore, January 2012.

Carmine's winter flowers, No.1

Another bright day, and still no rain. But with a cold wind that chills right up to the knuckles.

Bucaneve in Franco's orchard.

Carmine Superiore, today.

In the crowd

The weather at Lago Maggiore is still dry and warm for the time of year. Eight degrees in Cannobio today, with a strange, pearly mist across the lake. 

A little face in the crowd.

Brissago, January 2012

Spring thoughts in autumn

Raining and autumny. The rain that has brought floods to Genova has here created thundering torrents where before, after so long a dry spell, there were only tiny dribbles of streams. The sentiero is again flooded in places, and yesterday, the chicks were up to their feathery knickers in water.

Visitors. 

Fiera Degli Allevatori. Cannobio 2011.

Next year in Carmine?

Rain

Twelve degrees at 10am as I dawdled my way towards a capucchino and a brioche. Raining. Steadily but not spitefully. And the fire salamanders are in love, and are copulating among the fallen leaves.

I love the autumn rain in Carmine. I love to walk out under the woodland canopy, to hear the rain on the leaves above me, to smell the rain in the soil under me. And not be wet. And not be cold. 

I love the mist that drifts in with the rain. I love the way it caresses the treetops and sometimes shrouds Carmine completely, arranging itself over the stone rooftops like the soul of a woman in love reaching out and enveloping the form of her beloved.

I love my wood fire, a single light, a wine-dark glass winking at me, a sofa, a book and the sound of the rain dripping from the ancient eaves. 

And silence.