NON-MATERIAL WEALTH - 17 August 2011
17th August, 2011
Saturday, 14th, was our first day alone in a week and we luxuriated in its simplicity. A morning of laundry, grocery shopping and house-cleaning. An afternoon of reading and napping in our darkened bedroom. And in the evening a simple meal of salad and pecorino cheese spread with homemade pear and peperoncino jam munched along with some local walnuts cracked open between two stones. Plus a large jug of iced verbena tea, made from the branch of leaves Gianni brought us earlier in the day.
Joel fashions a paper lantern for a candle and we sit in our deck chairs, right out there in the gravel patch. The air is still as the enormous full moon rises above the hills, its orange glow hypnotizing us for an hour. When we stand, we open our arms to the moon and invite our Cape Cod house to let go of us and receive new owners.
On Sunday morning Gianni drives up to our door with 2 old contadini men, Siro and Moro. Lord knows why, or what they've been up to, but we happily sit in the shade chatting and at one point Siro, who was in Libya during the war, pulls a dozen, tiny, dog-eared black and white photos from his wallet. There is no money in his wallet, only these photos, which as we look at them we realize are his spiritual currency. They are photos of his fellow soldiers, of his brother, of his sister, all of them long dead, most of them in the war. Moro also was in the war and returned to find his entire family had died in a bombing. His home, his loved ones, everything, gone.
Gianni tells us Moro has one of the best gardens around and so off we all go to check it out.
I want to say here, that this is the second time in 2 days that we've been reminded of the ignorance of judging a book by its cover. Moro, like Marino and Bruno - from Friday - live in soulless, bordering on brutal, buildings on the edges of their respective towns. These buildings, which surround all beautiful old towns, have been built in the last 30 years, and the ones currently being built surpass them in poverty of architecture and meanness of material. We've noticed these building for years, judging them and their inhabitants to be part of a blight spreading across the planet. We assumed that most people chose to live in them partly because of their income but also because it was their idea of "modern". Once again our elitist aesthetic has blinded us. Many of these people live in such places because they have been displaced, either from their countries of origin or from their original homesteads.
But look at Marino and Bruna with their baskets and canes, their jams and poetry, and their evening trips to the natural water source. And look now at Moro, whose garden is of a size and bounty and imagination as to make the house irrelevant. We walk past row after row of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, celery, onions, cabbage, lettuce, squash, water melon. I'm busy studying Moro's technique for tying his tomato vines when I realize he has disappeared. There he is! His face peering out the top of a gigantic fig tree which he has climbed with the ease and rapidity of a schoolboy. He comes back down with a bag of chartreuse figs for us whose delicate pink insides are so luscious I'm afraid to be seen eating them.
Then he takes us into his cantina and shows us a glass-fronted cupboard laden with fossils he has dug out of the earth over his lifetime. We're talking ancient here. Beyond ancient. Their conch-like shapes the same color as the clay earth, many of them filled with crystal. He gives me two, placing them in my hands as though passing on an oracle. The lesson being that it doesn't matter if the roof over your head will never appear in House and Garden. As long as you stay connected to the land you will have everything you need and will encounter wealth in the generosity of each other's company.
