This place has never done a great deal for me, I’m a child of the cities where I can walk and watch people, look at art and search for creative inspiration. This place is all limestone mountains, earthed by size and holding in lakes and streams, fir trees and a sense of feeling tiny and insignificant against the backdrop of these giant grey mountains. But somehow, this time, this village communicates with me directly, settles me, earths me, draws me along its edges and down it’s slopes and up its steep hills. My emotions flow with the waters that trickle over the white rocked waterways that lead to the dam; the colours caress me, deep jades and cerulean blues. I am briefly calmed. It's the first spring we've had here. Our days take on a quiet rhythm. We walk, shop, cook, eat and walk again. The brain starts to align again.
I walk with the daughter up the back of the house and up through a pathway that in thirty years I’ve never been on. Maybe that’s symbolic of my life at the moment, making new pathways, seeing things previously unseen. I have to crawl the last few steep metres, moving sideways, crab-like to reach the pathway that’s cut into the hillside. The sound of bees amongst the spring blossoms, songbirds, yellow and white butterflies alighting on dandelions, chasing each other up the hill, it’s as if I’ve seen nothing up to this point of my life.
It's Easter, Friday and there's a procession of people at 8.30 coming down our street carrying a cross and stopping at the various stations of the cross that are scattered about the town. They sing as they go and in a way, even though I’m no longer of the christian persuasion, the simplicity of their actions, going back centuries, are beautiful and give me a sense of place.
I wait impatiently for the moon to rise, I see a lightening to the east of the mountain and after a while, a voluptuous big moon quickly appears, over the church that is all lit up for Easter, the lake silvered by its presence.
The next day the daughter leaves to meet up with a friend in Vienna and I go for a long walk along the new walkway, passing glimpses of the aquamarine stream, the white pebbles, the tall emerald pine trees, perfumed wild violets nestling in amongst the dandelions, low to the ground white and mauve crocus appear along the river bank. It's the first Easter Sunday I have spent on my own in my entire life! I take myself out to lunch - I have a radicchio and speck lasagne which is light and tasty. I go back home and share a Sicilian cassata with my sister-in-law which is sent to her twice a year from Palermo, encased in a beautifully decorated tin and is spectacular. After a large slice, I head back down to the lake with all the other Italian tourists who've probably consumed too much food.
It’s a perfect day, almost a heatwave for this region. I find a grassy patch on a hill and watch the river make its meandering way through different entrenched courses. I’m happy just staring. That worries me, as I’ve always been a mover and a shaker and yet here I am, content to be still. It’s a good thing, I think. It’s very zen, it’s meditation. I am warmed by the sun.
Two days later, I have left again. But that's my life now. I am gypsyfied, forever on the move.
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