THE BOVINE AMBLE
9 June 2012
We had planned on going to Siena the other day for more supplies, but it felt too much like going to a city and neither of us were yet ready for that sort of energy. So the opening phrase of this paragraph: we had planned…dissolved as we began practicing doing what feels harmonious in the moment.
It takes some getting used to, this degree of letting go. A couple of days ago, we agreed to spend the day observing how often we use the word ‘should’ in the course of a day. It’s appalling! Who are we should-ing for? To whom do we owe this sort of obligation?
A few years ago I was in an elevator with a mother and her 10 year-old son. He asked her, “Why is Aunt Harriet always saying she shoulda this and shoulda that? Is shoulda Yiddish?
‘Should’ is one of those words that squeeze the enjoyment right out of life. A word that implies a negative judgment if you don’t do the ‘should.’ The difference between, I should make the soup now or else… and, I’d like to make the soup now so I can enjoy it for dinner, seems, to me, to be that the former carries the implicit threat that if I don’t make it now not only will we go hungry but it will be my fault. In fact, I didn’t make the soup because I wasn’t in the mood to and when we got hungry later I really enjoyed making a spur of the moment omelet.
As it turns out, we woke up full of beans – in spite of not having had soup! – and felt like trotting off to Siena so that we could go to the art store where I bought a wonderful box of pastels and 2 wooden palette knives – one for spreading butter! We also went to the bedding shop where we bought our linens last year. This year’s treat being a down mattress pad for our increasingly bony bods.
What a pleasure, Siena, with its circular design of cobbled streets around the Campo. The Campo, as always, an open reward after the narrowness of the medieval alleys. And what pleasure to enter the shop and be greeted like family by the owner and the two saleswomen who helped us last year, all of us chatting away in Italian, remarking on how time flies and how it was just like ieri that we saw each other.
We lunched at our favorite restaurant, at our usual table outside, from where we could watch the comings and goings of students, tourists and the Sienese. Osteria Loggia has a fine cuisine: Italian with a light touch and a twist. Joel started with a delicate dish of anchovies in a saffron broth while I wolfed down the creamiest of buratta’s drizzled with the restaurant’s fragrant oil and a whiff of chives. So I was surprised when my main dish of tagliatelle with ragu arrived, sitting belligerently on its plate. Not only did it not have any signature invention, it was hostile; the pasta and sauce refusing to marry, remained irreconcilably divorced. I was just thinking I ‘should’ have ordered something else…and along with the should came an undercurrent of self-ridicule mixed with scathing, if silent judgment of the restaurant… when the waiter came over and gently asked me if I’d like to order something else. I demurred. In truth my appetizer had satisfied. But he actually, genuinely wanted to know in what way the dish was unsuccessful. He wasn’t asking because he ‘should’ but because he wanted to assist the kitchen in its quest for high standards. He thanked me for my opinion and brought us, on the house, two of the most magnificent desserts we’ve ever had: the lightest of light hazelnut sponges with a good daub of hazelnut ice-cream, alongside of which sat a cylinder of vanilla custard topped with sea salt, the whole thing sitting in a pool of melted milk chocolate.
And so these lovely days go. We’re taking on the bovine amble. Even the laundry is stress-free. Perhaps it is the gazing at the green and gold hills between pegging and unpegging, or the slow stony walk back to the house, the sun already soaking up the moisture from the sheets and towels – and probably doing the same to my skin. Some say one ‘shouldn’t’ stay out in it, but that’s another should I’m letting go of. Nothing can reverse the creep of crepe at this point, so I might at well wear it in the golden shade I prefer to winter’s deathly pallor.
There’s more to all of this, but for now, rather than exploring the crevices of my mind I’d rather make a cup of tea and sit in the deckchair next to my lovely husband, the two of us doing sweet bugger-all.