Our African Summer
August 25 2012
It’s hard to believe that what we’ve come to call our African Summer is drawing to a close; we have a week and a day left, 2 days of which will be spent breaking camp. Then we’ll leave these voluptuous hills behind and make our way north to Nice where we’ll drop off the car before flying to London the following day and 3 days after that, the long haul to New York City.
We will have been here exactly 3 months, during which time we breakfasted out in the cool air of every early morning. We will have made some 30 to 40 trips across the hot gravel to hang the laundry, marveling each time at the wonder of our lives that brought us to this clothesline in this vast expanse surrounded by these parched hills, the form and colour of which never diminishes but rather intensifies each day; the hills themselves going from vibrant green upon our arrival, to the blonde-gold of their hay-days and finally, to the greyish greenish splendor of the tilled earth.
We have communed with these hills for many hours, during all hours of the day and night, and with each communion have received the blessing of their abiding beauty. We’ve spent the blazing afternoons upstairs in our studio writing, photographing and drawing and when we became too shut-in, drove to the town pool for a few laps or luxuriated in the comfort of the air-conditioned car as we made our way along the white roads to new villages, or the pecorino farm, or the cool dappled woods of Vivo D’Orcia. We’ve stumbled along the scalding cobblestones of noonday Siena in search of sheets, or pastels or a cooler pair of pants before rewarding ourselves with lunch at the sensational Osteria Del Loggia, each lunch outdoing the prior one.
We’ve read and napped and bickered and laughed. We’ve played with friends and gazed at the stars. We’ve walked the dusty road in the cooling air of early evening, the earth reflecting and radiating the day’s heat; the earth cracking open, the cracks widening like upturned mouths pleading for rain.
We’ve watched crops fail in the relentless heat. Gardens, normally abundant with tomatoes, summer vegetables and fruits, have withered, their produce shriveled and without taste. Trees are dying, everywhere. Here on the farm, the hydrangeas gave up long ago. The cows ran out of water and had to be relocated. Two nights ago a fox killed one of the lambs. A serpent ate all the hens’ eggs. And still Silvia and Vincenzo work from morning until night, hoping their water supply will last until the rain comes. Hoping rain comes. It’s been 4 months.
Yet the innate generosity of the people never dries up. Everyday the basket outside our door is filled with something from the farm even thought there is not half of the abundance of last summer, even so Silvia puts some eggs in the basket, a few tomatoes, some peppers, a couple of zucchini, a handful of green beans.
Everywhere you go you see the prayerful hands accompanying the moan of “Mama Mia.” We are all in agreement: the change has arrived. We have, every one of us, contributed to the decline of the environment. And how will we adjust? Already vineyards are being planted in England. England! Will Tuscany become the new Africa? And what will happen to Africa?
But this is not a place I want to enter now…the realm of negativity is self-perpetuating. Better to return to the moment; to be grateful for the whirr of a fan, to sip an espresso with a dollop of chocolate gelato in it. The day is young and we grow old in it. A nap perhaps, or how about we go off to look at Lucignano, a village we recently heard about, knowing that when we return the day will have surrendered its heat once more and before us will stretch the long sweet evening; sitting under the trees, watching the bright flash of color from the hills salute the setting sun.
Let’s take the summer soup outside, a hunk of homemade bread and sheep’s cheese, oh, go on, a few olives and some dried sausage won’t go amiss. Do you hear the cows? What are they going on about? Listen…is that a nightingale? And oh, look at the stars…