Chapter One from “A Hands-on Life”
Have you ever wondered if there was another way to approach ‘living life’? Wondered if
Somebody, somewhere, had stumbled across a way to make sense of life that was different than we learned in school or from parents? A verifiable way, like to stick your finger in the shower water to see if it is too hot or cold before jumping in naked way. Well, this is an account of what happened to me last summer in this regard. First, some context.
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In the foothills of the Alps between Italy and France, on the Italian side not so far south of the Swiss boarder, my wife and I have a little stone house we bought some 22 years ago. It was a hayloft then, a loft, with a few rooms beside and equipment parking under when we found it, and over the years it has been remodeled into a cozy comfortable home, which we return to about twice a year for a few months, so my Piamontese wife can reconnect with family and friends, language and sky.
There is a lot of “left over” time for me when we are there for these extended periods, so I’ve taken to exploring, small roads, hidden valleys, towns, villages and borgates (a borgate ( bor-ga-te) is a group of houses too small to be a village, more a collection of family homes who found living near each other preferable in the wild mountains than to live in alone in isolation). And in these 20+ years of serious wandering, (not all who wander are lost) I’ve found some fine places and lived some memorable moments.
For example, if you head south from where we live, south through Cavour and Saluzzo, past Manta and come to Busta, and there, just before you enter town, take a small road right until you come to Dronero. Dronero has a great market, should you happen to arrive on a Monday morning, and a very fine old medieval center with narrow stone streets and houses, fine old churches and even a castle, but this is not why we come here.
Dronero is also the city that is the guardian of the entrance to Val Maira. If you look at a map of North West Italy, or are fortunate enough to be able to wander this part of the planet a few years, you soon notice that the predominant geologic feature of these Alps are the valleys, great long valleys that penetrate deep into the Alps from the great flat valley of the Po River. The Po runs, fed by tributaries from these valleys from west to east, from these Alps clear across north Italy to the Adriatic south of Venice.
There are about 9 of these valleys, each named after the river that flows out of it, to joint the Po, and each has its own unique story, with names like Val Stura, Val Varrite, Val Chisone and Val Suza. They vary in topography, some wide and generous, others narrow and lean, and they each have their own culture, with unique dialects, customs, and ways of life, their inhabitants arriving in different ages of European history from different directions.
Val Maira is near the south end of this chain of mountains, and its whole story is told in the name, Maira. You see ‘Maira’ means poor, or lean, or even stingy, in the language spoken there, which is not at all Italian. The Language is an eastern version of Occitan, the old language of the troubadours, spoken even today from Catalonia in Spain; all across what is now Southern France and the mountains of northwestern Italy. It’s a good thing to mention this here, as it plays a part later in this story, as it is also the language my wife speaks at home, over the dinner table with her family.
So Val Maira is lean. And the people who lived here and still live here today had to make their living from near nothing. If you drive now, from Dronero up the road into Val Maira, you see the mountains rise up on both side of you, and feel like you are entering into a funnel, past the villages of Roccabruna, Cartignano with its fine castle seen to your left, its tower sticking up through the trees across the River Maira, through San Dammiano, the last big village on the road, and into the gorge of the Maira, where the road is hewn out of the rock next to the river, with stone cliffs rising a few hundred feet vertically over your heads.
Before the road was made, just after WWII, by the minister of Finance of Italy who just happened to have been born in upper Val Maira, there was just a mule path here, and it is said that if the inhabitants didn’t want you to enter the valley, a few well placed stones dropping from a few hundred feet above rather permanently changed the plans of any uninvited guests. Today, the road keeps going, all the way up the valley to near the boarder of France. And on the main road are small stone villages, Macra, Stroppo, Prazzo, Marmora, Acceglio and at the near end, Chiappera. And each of these have side roads or mule paths that go up, way up to high fields and hidden valleys, with many smaller villages, churches and borgatas, each with just a few inhabitants even when the valley was at its point of highest occupancy, just before WWI, when there may have been 3,000 people in the whole valley.
Just 3,000? Yes, as there is no way to support even that many, unless one is very clever, thrifty, intelligent and creative. You see, they say the only cash crop they were said to have had was the hair of their wives and daughters, which they cut and sold to the rich in the big valley below to make wigs and hairpieces. Cash which was most carefully spent on the few most basic elements of life which they could not make or create on their own. This story is a bit of an exageration but it was true and sets the stage.
Their lives were centered on a cow culture, with each house built over stalls for the animals, with living quarters on the second level and storage for hay, feed corn and other things needed to keep dry on the third level. Milk, cheese, bread and what could be grown in the high small fields between rocks and rivers, potatoes, cabbages, leeks, onions, and salads for example. And in books I’ve read, many times we are asked to realize that having no money or material things we imagine we need, is not the same as being poor. The evidence is that these were very creative and imaginative people, who considered themselves very lucky to have this valley as their own, lived full and rich lives, based on the stories and poems left behind.
One bit of evidence is that many of Italy’s finest statesmen, poets, writers and artists have come out of this valley, another bit of evidence is the large number of well constructed and finely decorated churches, chapels and buildings left in this valley one can visit today. For example, if you start at Stroppo, and take the road up the mountain to your right, you will pass a whole procession of churches and chapels, all the way up the mountain some 4000 feet above Stroppo, with small villages and clusters of houses all the way up, each church big enough to hold most of the inhabitants of the whole community. They built them to worship different feast days of different Saints, at different months of the year, to mark the passage of the seasons and the different activities of life needed to survive and thrive in this valley. And if you pause and look, at any one of the locations of these churches and chapels, you will find yourself in a place of special beauty with unique views of the valley below, the smaller hidden valleys across the canyon, and the mountains above.
But all this is just to set the stage for my story, as all stories need a place to happen. Up near the high end of Val Maira is a small lateral valley, Vallone Unerzio, with a few small villages, one of which is Chialvetta. Chialvetta once had maybe a population of a few hundred people most, but over the years after WWI was gradually vacated, leaving a year round population now of three families. One is Rolando the innkeeper, who operates a trailhead hostelry for hikers as some of the very finest alpine trains start here or pass through Chialvetta. The second family is headed by John, who has some cows and does handy work to live with his wife and two children, and the last is Pierin d’Crav, Peter of the Goats, an 84 year old shepard, the last of his kind, who was born in Chialvetta and has never left, except for one trip to the city below, which was enough for him. More about Pierin later.
About 15 years ago, a nun, Sister Maria Josephina, who was born in 1923 in Chialvetta, inherited a small house from one of her relatives, a little house called the Buscatoia, or ‘the woodshed.’ And, since nuns cannot own property, she gave this house to the Seminary of Saluzzo, a school to train young men for the priesthood. My brother in law, Don Michelangelo Priotto, or Miche to us, was the headmaster of this seminary at the time, and had this little stone Buscatoia remodeled for the use of the Seminarians, whom he thought would benefit from some good time in the high mountains. And, when this little stone house was not being used, he offered the keys to my wife and I to go up and stay, as long as we wanted.
And this is where my story starts.
Most summers, we go up to the Buscatoia for a few days to a week. We find this place unique in all the places we’ve been in Italy and Southern Europe. Part are the mountains, which rise up very vertically all ‘round Val Maira and Vallone Unerzio. They are striated stone grays of every shade, hard stone very jagged and pointy that give feelings of being the teeth of some giant predator that could eat big mythical dragons for snacks. And between the peaks and points, there are valleys of all kinds. Some high and treeless, with only lichen and moss for cover, some near vertical covered with tall trees, that look like fir or cedar trees but loose their leaves in winter. Others that have meadows and grassy expanses where cows and goats still graze today. Lower down, anyplace that could be cultivated was. There are stone terraces and walls everywhere it was possible to build them, many now hidden and coved by trees and vines that have regrown in the valleys since most the people left to go to work in the factories a generation ago. And the floor of Vallone Unerzio is all cleared fields of cut grass, cut and stored in the haylofts to feed the cows over the long winters, or fine house gardens growing a profusion of veggies and potatoes.
There is water moving everywhere, streams waterfalling and cascading down each small valley to join the Unerzio creek, rushing down to Val Maira, river Maira below, and most years, year ‘round snow filling niches and notches in the high rocks way way up above, appearing and disappearing as clouds make their way ‘round the peaks.
It is a great place to walk from, France is a good day hike on foot over the 11,000 mountains, and there are trails leading from here to all the rest of the Alps of Italy, France, Switzerland and even Austria, if one has the time to walk, with Refugio’s, small wood or stone houses all along the trails provided now by the European Community for hikers and wanderers.
Or a fine place just read, relax, socialize with friends, lovers, nature or things Higher. (I was tempted to say ‘God,’ but I must admit I don’t really know for sure what that word means, and it might mean something very different to you than me. So I’ll stick with the word “Higher” as most of us do know from experiences or suspect by intuition that something real lies in that direction).
And when we go up there for a few days, I like to rise early just before the sun, and go find a place to “sit.” Sit? Well, yes, a practice I was given about three decades ago and some how stuck with me. By ‘sit’ I mean just that. To find a quiet place, to put myself down in a good vertical posture and just be still for 30 or more minutes. I can’t use words like meditate or contemplate as these words, like God, just have too many meanings to too many different people, and I can’t say I know what they mean. But sit . . . ‘sit’ anyone can understand. Just sit still. Outside first, and sometimes inside too, with luck and listening.
Why? Well, the reasons have come and gone. Dreams of self improvement, desires for better states, plans for results of some kind come and go, it is just human nature for these things to pass through. But the bottom line is that I just sit because that is what a man does. Some unnamable service, for the planet, for the life growing on it –but finally – finally I just sit to sit.
So in Chialvetta, especially at the Buscatoia, the sun comes late, two hours after it hits the peaks above, as the valley is deep and narrow. So I get up early and walk up the valley, up about an hour, up to a small village named Grangie I found exploring years ago. Grangie is high up on the northwest west slope, hidden from below and can only be found on foot. There is no car road there. And just above Grangie is a small rock that is just the right shape to sit on, sit and wait for the sun. And for ten years or more now, there’s a few summer mornings where the sun and I keep this appointment, and near every time, when I finally stand and look around, this understanding or even knowledge of some kind is at hand, like the Taoists of old, that there are places in nature that are different, that give one a sense of well being, or more being, places that taste and smell of mystery and even magic.
First Light over Grangie early one summers morn’n
Maybe because Grangie is a place in the sun, the first place under the tall peaks the sun warms and lights in the mornings, and one of the last places for it to leave, or it’s the view, more than a mile across to the rocks and trees and snow fields of the canyon walls, or the feelings of the green patchwork of fields below, green cut grass all crisscrossed by a geometry of stone walls, or it is the constant change of the weather, real weather moving across the pure blue sky, clouds and fog and thunder and lightning, mists rising up like living spirits while clouds are torn and moved by the dragon eaters teeth of pointy mountains above. Or it is the green spreading trees near, that surround and protect the village, with its many small flat fields hand dug and terraced out of the mountainside, or the living stream, just alongside the last house next to the village fountain, white water jumping down rocks and impatiently slowing through small pools, never silent, never loud.
So I usually wander a bit around Grangie, reluctant to leave and descent to the ‘life of man’ below. Grangie is a collection of four houses that have been either very tastefully restored or were never allowed to go to ruin, another that is partly collapsed, and three that are ruins. They are made of mortar less stonewalls built of gray stones that came out of near by fields so they could be cultivated. And stone roofs, big flat stones, held up by trusses and rafters of trees cut from the nearby forests.
And it was a natural thing to imagine me living here, now as a man in the shadow of seventy, a kind of going to the mountains life, with ample fields to grow some food, a place to express my life long interest in building and fixing buildings and houses, and this feeling of finally, after a life of never really having a place to settle and stay, a really fine place to make my last stand and let the world come to me, for a change.
The “settle” word has great emotional meaning for me. I’d lived in 15 different houses by the time I was 18, and the wandering has never stopped. And all along the road of life, I’ve kept wondering if I would ever have “my place” on the planet, a place I could plant a tree and eat it’s fruit a few years later, or plant a rambling rose and watch it cover a part of a cozy house. You know what I mean by cozy house, don’t you? In a fine place in nature, with a wood cook stove, wood floors, bookcases filled with books actually read, a pantry full of the fix’ns of good food, a house garden out the back door, a cellar with some wine really held here for the years needed to reach maturity, beds with flannel sheets and down comforters, a big wood table and chairs strong enough to lean back on to eat with friends and family, a handy work shop with all the tools needed for winter projects, that can be left a little messy, a desk for writing and pondering, and well placed chairs on the porch to watch to sun move across the sky by day, the moon by night side by side with the loved one. Maybe your images aren’t just these, but you understand, don’t you?
Well, in the summer of 2000, early one morning, I found a “For Sale” sign on one of the last of the standing houses. I could not believe this as there is near nothing for sale in these mountains; people pass these houses and fields from generation to generation. And if a place is to be sold, it is passed quietly to friends or neighbors.
Upon seeing this sign, copying quickly the information, I ran down the hill all the way to Chialvetta and found my wife Aure, and after catching my breath, told her of this, for me, miracle.
In the passage from Grangie down the narrow stone foot path under the oaks and elms, shortcutting across some terraced fields, jumping down the lower stone walls, down to the mule train next to the small river and following it down to Chialvetta the imagination had built a whole life style around Grangie and this house. Have you ever had this experience, where the imagination is fueled by something strong and creates a whole story stronger than the best movie you ever saw? Well, it was like that. I’d cleared and planted the nearby fields with potatoes and cabbage, I’d created a warm kitchen with wood stove and all, a workshop with all the tools I could dream of, all the “settle” images I’d had my whole life collected and took shape around this stone house and nearby fields.
Well, I burst into the Buscatoira where Aure was doing some kitchen things, and the whole story flowed out of me, all mixed up by enthusiasm. She said, “lets go look while out finish telling me what you found.”
She was patient with me, and as we walked together back up to Grangie as I told her my secret dreams and feelings. She was quiet, just taking it all in as until this moment, I had kept Grangie and what I had found there more or less to myself.
A bit about Aure. To understand the part she plays, you need to know who she is, where she comes from. She was born in Piamonte, in the little village of Bagnolo, about an hours drive north of Val Maira; here parent’s families come from this land, for generations and generations. She grew up in a near medieval atmosphere where all the rituals and traditions of the Church were part of the fabric of daily life. There were processions the whole village lived on feast days, to mark the seasons, the planting and harvesting, the long winters start and end. Here father, Antonio was a builder and stonemason. He and his brother built or repairs houses and outbuildings, churches and communal ovens in the nearby mountains and villages. Aure has driven me to some of these small villages where the mark FP is there on the buildings, Fratello Priotto, the Priotto Brothers. And her mom had a small store in the village that sold a little of everything.
There’s a lot more I could tell you about Aure, but the real point is that she came from a world very different than mine, a blending of a very traditional rural town childhood and education of a modern Euorpean woman who holds two Masters degrees, has pariticipated very activily in the political currents of the sixties and early seventies. She has been a sorce of wonder and education since the moment I met here up to smile I just received looking up from my computer as I write.
How we met and the wonderious events that followed will have to be another set of chapters of this book.
Back to Val Unerzio and the conversation about Grangie.
Aure and I walked up to Grangie, took a good look around a the house for sale, the other restored houses and the view around. And we really wanted to look inside this house for sale to see what was hidden behind its stone walls and big wood door. So Aure and I decided to call and find out more. We spoke to the owner and he invited us to stop by his house on our way home to talk. Within a few hours, we were down just outside Dronero, at the mouth of Val Maira, at the house of Mr. Rosano (a very common last name in Chialvetta, more than half the tombstones in the cemetery are Rosanos) and listening to his story about the house. It was his mother’s house, where he and his sister were born and lived there until the 1960’s. When his parents died, they both inherited it. The sister was left all the land around the house and he shares the house with his sister. They decided to sell it to avoid the complex heredity laws of Italy to make it easier for their children to have the money.
We agree to meet him up in Grangie in a few days. And I must admit, I was full of a kind of excitement and anticipation that I don’t remember since childhood Christmas’s. A few days later, we were up in Grangie an hour early, just sitting waiting. Aure didn’t say much, and I held my enthusiasm pretty much to myself.
Mr. Rosano came and unlocked the old heavy wood door, and we entered. A big house, like walking into a museum of life past in these mountains. Behind the door, an entry way big enough for cows and people. To the left, the entrance to the stall, a huge stone vaulted room big enough for four cows, in front of us, two doors that lead to storage rooms, and to the right a kitchen/main room with a wood cook stove, table, shelves on the walls for food, small enough that it would be easy to heat, large enough for two to cook and maybe six sit at the table. And just ahead in the entryway, a big wood stair like ladder going up.
Up is a level with a bedroom to the right, storage for tools, cheese making, spinning yarn and more in the center, and to the left, entry to a huge two story room for hay storage for the cows for the winter.
And above the bedroom, the highest room, for drying corn and other things to eat. The whole place is a bit dirty and in disorder, the huge roof beams look a bit tired, a few of the stone walls need care. There are things scattered everywhere, old tools, wood utensils for making cheese, some old mule harness, cow bells with leather strapes, old wood benchs and chiars in various state of disrepair, and many things unrecognizable, yet I feel some kind of affinity, even affection for the old house.
All the images and dreams I had took some form and shape as I went from room to room, level to level. I was rebuilding it in my mind as I went, and was almost moved in by the time the tour was over.
After exploring the house with Mr. Rosano, we went outside and sat on a bench with him facing the valley below, framed by the rugged vertical peaks in front of us that raised up out of the valley to just touch the clouds. After some silence, just looking together, we spoke about the house and what was for sale. The price for the house is $35,000 as the Euro was then. He explained that only the house was for sale, that all the land around is his sisters or belongs to the descendents of others who once lived here, and there is no chance, from his point of view, there would ever be land available. My heart sinks about half way, as I realize how much I really wanted to the land too, to call my own and to be able to grow my garden. And with no land, even a biologic septic system would be impossible to build.
He went on to say that his sister would never sell her land, and that much of the other lands belonged to descendents who couldn’t be traced. He explained that during the time after WWI, there was great poverty in Italy, and in almost all of the large families, with many sons, many emigrated to the Americas, to Argentina, Brazil and a few to the United States to find a life where they could eat and live. And after a generation, most had lost contact with those who stayed behind. In addition the Italians have complicated laws to protect the privacy of people, and even if the owners were here, the only way to find them is by luck or through willing neighbors. (A detail to play a part later).
We parted company with Mr. Rosano and made our way back down to the Buscatoira, all the time talking about the house, the life style possible there, and the obsticals.
Aure, who’s father had been a stone mason with a lifetime spent building and repairing houses like this gave me her impression of the house. From her point of view, it was a wild dream that was a project too big to take on. It needed a new roof, total remodel inside, and all this with no roads or services other than electricity. It would take years and a lot of money, not to mention the legal hurdles of getting a permit to do the project, needed as these mountains are now protected not only by Italian law but also the European Common Market laws as all land above 1600 meters is considered like a preserve or park. And then, if we somehow got past all this, what would we have? A house that weather and altitude would only allow us to use part of the year as there is snow here from mid fall to late spring. I had arguments for all of these logical points she made, unspoken as I realized that behind all her logic was really an emotional ‘stand.’ This was something she just did not want to do, and without her full support, the most important element of ‘settle’ would not be there, the support of my loving wife.
On the mule trail walking back to Chialvetta, I still have this clear emotional memory of a kind of devastation. It was so strong, in feelings and sensations in by heart, that something in me could stand back from it and see it as if it were somehow separate from me. Mine but also not mine. And from this point of view, I could see the lifetime of hunger for a place of my own, could see all the broken dreams from childhood moves, could see this very human part of my being that could be called some kind of nesting instinct that took the form this day of all the images and dreams that had collected around Grangie.
Have you had this happen to you too? A moment where you could see yourself with kind of a quiet objective clarity? Where judgment was suspended, comments or justifications just became silent and where what was left was just a compassion and acceptance of myself, just like I am? Such a human moment, where how I am is seen, as if from above, all exactly as it is, and it is OK. Well, this was one of those moments for me, strong and memorable, an episode of life that marked me.
Even with the real disappointment that my Grangie vision could not happen, I felt that I had received a gift from Grangie of seeing myself and all the processes that make up who I am with such clarity and openness that the gift of seeing was stronger than the disappointment of the loss of the dream. Have you had this happen to you too, where the sweetness of the truth was somehow more precious than the strong discomfort of seeing some real facts about ourselves, who we really are and how things happen in us?
I have friends, and you must too, that say that human life is some kind of school, and that the events we live are given to us to help us grow and evolve in some way, if we are able to take them that way, as self-knowledge. Well, I don’t know about this, I have just a bit more evidence to support this idea than I do to deny it, but nothing conclusive really. I don’t know who or what could be the architect of such a life, and there seems so much obvious disorder and absurdity to human life I can’t often even make room such a point of view. But when I live moments like this, with this kind of real seeing of myself, like I am with some gentle openness and understanding, the question about how to read the events of my life is ‘in my face’ using some street talk. And as this yarn unfolds, this becomes a much more important question, if you’ll stay with me.
So, some years go by. Our two-country life, living on a boat in Sausalito on San Francisco Bay some of the year and living other months in our stone house on the Alpine foothills in Italy takes a kind of rhythm. Life in each of these two worlds grows, with friendships deepening; involments with activities and studies growing, and there is a sense of life lived well.
We return to Chialvetta for a week here and there in the summers, and I drive up a few times in the winter, to see how snow on fields and ice hanging from rocks and tree branches look and feel. And with each visit, Grangie returns fresh and clear in me, all the forces the place evokes run afresh in me, the feeling ‘at home,’ the side dish of Taoist magic lurking all around, the wonder of the beauty through the seasons, all the suppressed impulses of ‘settle,’ as well as all the impossibilities, together, in a gentle way that almost evokes an inner chuckle as if I were observing some child I had great affection for. Very real, all of this, yet somehow impersonal by now. It was as if there was an inner world in me just as clear and full of wonder and mystery as the outer world of Vallone Unerzio, and that all the forces of nature that I could feel there in Vallone Unerzio were equally real and present inside too.
A few years ago, there was one trip up to Chialvetta that played a part in the events leading up to the day this story is leading to. Miche, Aures brother, called us and asked us if we could give Sister Maria Josephina a ride up to Chialvetta the next time we went. He explained she was the nun who had donated the Buscatoira to the Seminary and she needed to go up to visit her family house in Chialvetta to help an ailing sister with some family business. “Sure!” we said, and so we found ourselves a few weeks later heading up Val Miara with Sister Maria Joshephina chatting merrily as we drove. A short slightly round woman, a warm round face with rosy cheeks, blue eyes, wavy hair that was once red, cut neck length, conservatively dressed in street clothes, very much looking like somebodies favorite grandmother or aunt. She is in her early 80’s, in very good health and spirit, and all the way up Val Maira, full of stories and tales of this land and especially Chiallveta.
The last thing she tells us before we arrive is that she hopes, after meeting us, to introduce us to Pierin d’Crav, (Peter of the goats) while we’re here. They were childhood friends and she finds him a remarkable old man, also now in his 80’s. She tells us that he only left this valley one time as a young man, to see what the world below was like, and after a short time ‘in the city’ (which city we never heard) he came home to stay, certain that the men and women ‘below’ were crazy and dangerous. We said; “Sure! We’d love to meet him.”
One afternoon late, she dropped by and said; “It’s tonight. Pierin would like to met you, I’ve told him a little about you, but you must understand him a little. He has said he will not change his evening just for visitors. He will eat, clean up and maybe make some cheese, like he always does, and he will not feed you too, but you’re welcome to come sit at table with him and talk. Oh! And you should know that he makes some people very uncomfortable, you see, Pierin is a man who can “read” people. But I think you’ll like him.
So we walked up through the stone houses, narrow passages between walls and doors, past two of the four fountains to the ‘house’ of Pierin. It is a long building, more like a stone barn, with living quarters at one end. We enter through simple wood door to find ourselves in a warm kitchen/main room, wood floor, white stucco walls where they can be seen, with a wood cook stove warm and cooking, a simple wooden bookcase full of books, a big wood table with four sturdy chairs and various cook utensils, pots and pans and big spoons hung over the sink, just next to the stove. No space wasted, all in order, all looking like it had been there for years and years. Nothing new, nothing broken or unused, but everything needed, at hand, ready and clean for use. And in the far corner, a rather new TV.
Pierin was sitting at the table, a bowl of green soup in front of him, some bread on a plate with a big knife near. He was simply dressed in jeans, a loose light tan shirt, and with a napkin neatly tucked in the top to protect his clothes from the soup. He looked at us with an open intelligent expression of interest and curiosity, very well contained and with a quiet reserve. Bright blue eyes, lean slightly narrow face, strong jaw, well defined nose and cheekbones, high forehead still covered with gray hair, with a hard to read smile on his lips.
After brief introductions, he ignored us and started to speak to Maria, as he called her, in a pure Piamontese not colored by any Italian, talking about a particular afternoon when they were young adults, about the color of the dress she wore, the broach she had ‘round her neck, and what she said to someone. It was the afternoon they decided they had to walk to France at night to get salt for the cows. The Germans forbade them to go anywhere, but if they did not have salt for the cows, the animals would die. So they decided to walk over the mountains at night to somehow get some salt. Aure and I had walked a part of that trail, up, way up over the high pass, the trail called La Scaletta, the staircase, as there is a place where there is a vertical cliff with this notch in it about 1000 feet high, and the trail goes up this notch like a staircase, hundreds of short switchbacks, that we found very challenging by clear daylight on a nice summer afternoon. To go at night? Four or five hours to the nearest village in France? To return with a 100 lbs. of salt carried somehow on the back? To be shot on sight if the Germans found you?
At a certain point Pierin stopped and looked at me, not just looked, but looked with a gaze that weighed and measured me, then he asked me in a clear Piamontese if I understood him. Yes, I said back, in the Piamontese I know, I understand you. He laughed and said; “Well, think of that! An American that understands me. Well, now we know each other.” (not the exact words but the content of the message.)
And without a pause, went back to his conversation with Maria. She looked a little confused about the details of his story and he looked at her, with a bit of sadness and patience and said; “Ah, Maria, you don’t remember. I do, I remember. Every word, every movement of that day, when we were young. I have my mind, still, you see?
‘I have my mind.’ The way he said that was different than I’d every heard anyone speak, and after we left him, on the walk back to the Buscatoria, Maria said that he did in fact remember, every person he ever met, every conversation, word by word, and more, every place in this valley, every tree and meadow, every season and change of weather, he remembered, he knows.
And Pierin will play his part in this past summers events, as they unfold.
After this meeting with Pierin, I met more men like this; active and healthy well into their 90's.
A few weeks later this same summer, I met a tractor salesman named Giuseppi Castagno in Pinerolo, the town where Aures sister lives. , Giuseppi was 73 this summer, and obviously very robust and healthy. Around the subject of tractors, men and mountains, I related this experience of the men in the mountains. About Pierin d’Crav and other men I’d seen. Then the oposite experience seen around the main square of Pinerolo, on the benches, where many men much younger, fat, smoking, telling stories and very obviously bored, on their way to an early end. Or men sitting in bars reading newspapers or playing cards, their time just running out like sand in an hourglass. Giuseppi agreed, and added, in fact the week before, he had served a lunch for his family’s customers up in Val Susa, high in the mountains. He, like his father and grandfather before him, has done this every year for generations, as a 'thanks' and get-together for the men they sell to. Giuseppi selling tractors and hand tools, his father and grandfather, hand tools and horse and mule harness and gear.
Well, at table were about 45 men, and the subject of their good health and long life came up, and they took an informal pole of themselves, and found 6 or 7 in their 90's, all the rest in their 80's except Giuseppi and two other "youngsters." All work every day except Sunday and feast days, all in very good health. And they went on to lament their sons and grandsons, saying they had worked hard to save money to send their sons down to 'the valley' to go to schools and universities, to become engineers, doctors, administrators. And now, almost all the sons, dead. Grandsons retired, sitting on benches, waiting to die, great-grandsons in front of computers, fat, not able to work even a morning with their great grandfathers, and the next generation? Not even real, addicted to TV and a vicarious life.
An aside, out of the context of the story.
And here I am at 67, at a fork in the road with a choice of these worlds, and I know beyond any doubt that I have a short time to pick the road in the direction of these old men who are very alive well into their 90's in every way, or I will be dead a generation before. And I don't see the right "form" for me for this road. My friends who I would like to be 'at table' with when I am 95 are in California, and the style of life that most assists this longer road is here, in these mountains in Piamonte. And the form of “inner or spiritual work that most corresponds to me, who I am, and also where I have 'my place,' is there, in San Francisco.
In the meantime, the time between this meeting with Pierin and now, Aure and I have continued our two country life, and both of us begin to feel the need for this chapter of life to end, without knowing really what could be next. Sure, it is interesting to move back and forth, to live with two cultures and languages and ways of life. Sure, we’ve learned and grown, met many fine people and events, seen and tasted things that one can only live with extended stays in a place. But we also see this wish to settle growing, to have a place that is really a home, where projects can be started and finished, where one could have a dog, plant a garden and eat the produce, start a class and stay long enough to finish the course of instruction, and not have the feeling of being a guest, even in your own home. And a style of life that corresponds to the “forest stage of life, (to use a Hindu metaphor) to this last big chapter of ones human life.
So the spring of 2007 comes, and there is a strong call for Aure to go to Italy to help her family. Her mom Laura is 84, in good health but cannot live alone any more, has been in the house of Aures sister Claudia for this few years. Claudia also has two young, very active and precocious children, Anna 5 and Guilly (Billy) 3 who demand and get a lot of attention. In addition, Claudia is a Medical Doctor, with a specialization in blood chemistry, who works in the blood laboratory of the local hospital. He husband, Luca, is in partnership with another, a business in technology the field specializing in
Measuring systems, designing and making hardware then writing the software to make a working product. This year he is involved in the testing of the high tech carbon fiber materials going into Boeing Aircrafts new Dream liner Jet, working at the other end of Italy days on end trying to solve the complex problems of testing material with with ultrasound. He is home just on weekends and holidays, and then spends much of his time trying to catch up with his computer work.
Claudia is at her limit with all this, and has been having medial problems, some from stress, some from other causes. And so Aure went in May to see what she could do to just lend a hand, with moral support and some on hand caretaking. Mom Laura was moved up to our house to live for the summer, and Aure took the children some of the time, or stayed just to be a helping hand other times.
Her arrival was well timed, as the week after she came, Claudia was rushed to the hospital with some bleeding, and ended up with a hysterectomy. And Aure was on hand to care for all, giving Claudia the room and space for a relaxed recovery.
I followed Aure in Mid July, finishing a needed stage in a project I had been working on a few years. I went to spend a summer helping Aure with her caretaking, and doing what I could to help the caretaker herself, and that is how this summer went, with the exception of three trips up to Vallone Unerzio. The first was early August, with the whole tribe except Luca who was in working the south of Italy. Aure and I took my little Red Citroen van loaded up with all the food and luggage, and Claudia followed in their little blue Fiat with Laura and the two children.
A side note here on this little Red Citroen van. The Citroen factory calls this model a Berlingo, and we have shortened this and have names this faithfull little panel van the Bingo, and that is the name you’ll find here in this account.
It was the children’s first real trip to the mountains and Laura’s first after 20 or 30 years and everyone was excited. And, all had a great week. Of course, I made it up to Grangie, early the first morning, to sit and wait for the sun, and then every day after – and the stone house was still for sale. Sure, I looked at it, felt the pull of Grangie tugging on my soul, but I just sort of swallowed my thoughts and dreams and left them quiet – I just didn’t want to ‘go there,’ as is said now.
On the second morning, it was Aure suggested a walk, all of us except Laura, who was very content just to sit back in a big folding chase-lounge in the garden outside the front door and read fables.
Laura and reading of fables is a side story worth putting here. For the first 82 years of her life, Laura carried the family, working from rising out of bed in the early morning ‘till her head hit the pillow at night. She cooked, cleaned, washed and ironed, knitted and darned, and ran a small store for years and years that sold just a little of everything needed, like a corner grocery in the neighborhoods of San Francisco. If she sat down, it was to knit or pray the Rosary; she had no time to read in her busy life.
The last few years, she has slowed down, stopping cooking altogether a few years ago, and last year, moving in with Claudia as she just did not want to be alone any more (Antonio her husband passed on ten years ago). And the last two summers and last winter she has come to live with us for a few months.
Well, this summer, there were many days when Laura was left alone for some hours while Aure went down the hill to do her “take care of’ thing. Laura did not want to just go up and down the hill, it was more comfortable for her to stay put, yet she began to feel bored and alone. So one morning Aure, in a bit of desperation really, handed her a book of Russian Fables, a large beautifully illustrated book that she was keeping for Anna when Anna was old enough to read, saying; “Well, mom, if your bored, read this!”
Well! Laura started to read, and read the book through, then another, another. By the end of summer, she had consumed every book we could find, fables from all lands, myths, legends, fairy stories, and more. And when you quietly looked at her, while she was reading, one of those looks where she didn’t know she was being observed, there was this small but distinct grin on her face.
Aure and I couldn’t believe she was remembering what she’d read; there were so many stories. But several times, we overheard her when she was alone with Anna and Guilly, telling them one of the stories she’d read.
So all of us walked up to Grangie, leaving Laura in the garden with a book of Japanese myths. It was a lovely day, not too warm, nor too cold, and the two children walked the whole way, a few hour walk, she several kilometers and 650 feet change in elevation up to Grangie. There were many stops, for looking and touching all sorts of flowers, bugs, rocks and stones . . . .
All the sorts of things us adults just don’t see anymore, but which the interest and curiosity of children help us see anew. Not to mention the wild berries, strawberries, raspberries, blue berries, black berries and more, many stops to search and munch. Finally it was becoming thirsty that moves all of us up the hill the fresh cold water of the fountain of Grangie.
Then a picnic at wood table with some benches on the grass near the fountain, and we all relaxed under the warm sun. Aure and I sat together a minute and commented on the real joy we saw on the faces and in the movements of these two children this morning. We know them very well, in there home, or when they come to visit with us in ours. They are children who have a lot of toys, a closet full each, and have dozens of DVD’s with all the children’s movies and stories; they have a room well decorated and full of stuff. I’ve played with them in this home environment and they become bored and tired of it all very quickly, needing some new diversion or game to keep something moving and alive. How different this morning! It was the world itself, nature, the flowers, the butterflies, the sticks and stones, all naturally provided by nature itself, and the kids were just radiant. There was no need to “entertain” them at all, or to put some limit on their running and jumping and exploring and then just laying in the grass and looking at the sky to rest. I really wanted to bring them to the mountains for this, more from my own memory as a child than anything else, but how limited my view, how restricted my vision compared to the ‘real deal’ of what was going on. And Aure was with me in this observation, she commented how distorted the world has become, that we substitute plastic toys for butterflies. And she looked a the old stone houses with a new look, wondering what it would be to find one, with just one big room or two, where we could come and live, without decoration, as she called it, all the ‘extra’ modern life has given us that insulates from the real life of nature, just like the children’s plastic toys.
My next visit to Grangie was a few weeks later and alone. Aure had become very involved in activities with family and friends, and I felt this call to go up to the mountains and have a little time alone, and I heeded this call. Up to Chialvetta, opening the Buscatoira, lighting the wood cook and heat stove in the kitchen with its sleeping loft above, the one room abundant for just one or two to live, and as soon as all was warm and prepared, settled in for a three day stay. I brought books and notebooks, wanting to use this time to make kind of a “stop” in my self, and take stock of things, with the kind of questions one feels sometimes. Like, “Who am I now?” What is important now” “In what direction do I wish or need to ‘intend’ my life? And I put these questions both on paper, and into the air and sky of the mountains to see if anything might respond.
The next morning, up to Grangie for my appointment with the sun. And after sitting and watching and feeling the sun arrive, I walked up the hill a few miles, up past the timberline to the big open fields above, where the cows are brought to graze in the summer. The air is different up here, and one can see for miles, over the tops of the lower peaks, and also way down, watching the sun as it pushes the shadow into the far corners of the valley below.
I felt a kind of peace and quiet in me, and as I started back down the hill this feeling came, or maybe I just became aware of it, that it was me here, me here in this place walking down the hill. Does this make any sense to you? Have you ever had this kind of moment when we find ourselves so inhabiting our bodies and with our feelings alive and the mind alert and active and not daydreaming of somewhere else? Like a childhood moment, except even richer now as an adult, as if all these alive moments that have happened before have somehow accumulated in me in some secret place, and just now, here in this place at this moment, they are all here with me wordlessly. I am here, wordlessly. And this could be savored and tasted, and so was, step by step, back down to Grangie, over grassy fields with cows, there big bells chiming around their necks, ‘round rocks and down into the trees, first the larice (larch) that grow straight and tall like pines, down to the trees around Grangie, big chestnuts and oaks and other spreading trees to the fresh flowing fountain of cold, clear water.
I buried my face in the water, shaking my head with dog like pleasure, drank a few handfuls of the fine water and looked up toward ‘my house,’ the one that had been for sale these last six or seven years. And it was open! The big wood door in the massive stonewall was open!
Because of the state I was in, that is, really at home and not off dreaming, what ran through the body in the next few seconds was very clear. All the ‘dream package’ that had been so alive a few years ago, that I thought was ‘put away’ somewhere came back in full with all the attendant emotions. Not as thoughts, but like shapes inside, full of feeling and sensation. The rebuilt house, the planted fields, even the smell of something good cooking on the wood cook stove were all alive and ‘right here.’ But also right here was me standing at the fountain, cold water dripping down my neck, the feel of grass under my feet, with some part of the attention watching all this house dream arise as if I had turn on the TV or like watching a movie. All very ‘real’ at one level and not real at all, at the level of reality of me, standing here, looking up the hill at the house.
And I remember muttering to myself, well, do you want to open all this again? And the question grew some. Some part was really interested in the feelings all this generated, but there was a separation from the house in front of me and the visions and images around it and the feeling inside. Well, maybe I can see what this is all about, I said to myself, and headed up the hill.
A side note here, or question really. What does an impression of ourselves like this do to us? Does it have some energetic consequences? Could we even ask if a moment of life like this is some kind of food? Lets look at this a moment. We put nourishment on our mouth and chew and swallow it many times a day, and it goes to the belly and what the body can use is separated out, the useful going into the blood stream for circulation all over the body, and the rest excreted. No argument here, right? But what about breath? We can go for some time without this ‘belly food” but how long without air? We know that the air goes into the lungs and some similar process of separation takes place. The body absorbs from the air what it needs and the rest is “excreted’ on the out breath. So why not consider air a food too? After all, it does go into the bloodstream like the belly food, and in fact, there are a bunch of chemical processes where the air refines and changes the belly food, one could even say transforms it, makes it into finer, more ‘energetic forms of chemistry for the life and healing and growth of the body.
But impressons? Can all we take in through our sensory apparatiss also be a food? What happens in all the glands, in the sympathetic and para sympathetic nervious systems and in the cells and nerves and mysterous corners of the brain when we receive all these vibrations from life? After all, what makes meaning in us? What makes our heart leap for joy or sink way down, what make the blood run or make the limbs feel like lead, the body full of life and yearnings or closed and dry like stone? From where comes the meaning and purpose that give life meanings or leaves us feeling lost, as if in a labrynth without end? Do we feel that somehow, out of all of these experiencings, something has grown is us that was not there when we started this life adventure? And if something is grown, is it not from some kind of nourishment, some kind of food? The food of our impressons of ourselves living this life we have been given. Do you follow me here?
As if this is so, if our impressions we receive are in fact a food, and that we have all tasted some growth in us due to the experiences accumulated in us from our own life, is there some more active role we can play in receiving these impessions? Do they provide more nurshment in these moment when, in fact, we are here and not off dreaming or “lost in thought.?” Is something “up to me” with regard to this ‘staying here?”
It seemed like the right time to ask this question, in this account, but back to Grangie.
I looked up from the fountan and saw a group of people next to the house, a man and his wife and child, sitting at the picnic table, an older woman about 60 or so and another about 30. As I walked up the dirt and stone road, the older woman came toward me and asked if she could help me. I told her I had seen the house a few years before, and asked if I could take another look. She said sure, go ahead, and are you the American my brother showed the house to? Yes, I said, and I told her we did not go ahead as there was no land with the house and the house had no value to me if I could not plant a garden. I did not want to go into all Aures resistance too, I figured these facts were enough.
So I spend an hour or so looking through the house while the sister and the other woman, who was introduced to me later as Carla, her daughter, continued their conversation with the people outside.
The house had been cleaned up some since Aure and I saw it and it looked very good to me. The sister, Ms. Rosano, joined me to see if I had any questions. I took it that the other couple that were looking at the house did not seem so interested so she had came to see what my interest really was. She said that she had thought about the land question, and did I know all the land to the west and north of Grangie was hers? I said her brother had told me that there was land but it was not for sale, but he did not say which land. So Ms. Rosano took out two maps, one of Grangie the village itself, and another one of a different scale of all the land around Grangie, for about a kilometer in each direction, and a good part of the land up the hill from Grangie and to the north was colored light brown, and she said, pointing to the brown areas; “All this is mine.” And quickly added; “It’s not for sale.” “But I would let a little piece go with the house, so come with me and I will show you.”
So we went just outside the village, and she showed me her families “orto” or house garden, and we looked at the maps together to see where this was on the map and the number of the plot. I must admit I love maps, from when I was a small boy. I would get the big Atlas of the World out and just pour over it, follow the rivers, find the mountains and I loved the names of all the countries. And these maps of Grangie and the territory around were really interesting; an nothing on them was linear. Each plot was an irregular shape that only had meaning when one walks with map in hand, and sees why this plot had this exact shape. Some are the shapes of level terraced land, carefully hand leveled in the side of the hill with walls above and below, following the contour of the hillside. Others are big open fields for the cows to graze or to cut the grass to put in the haylofts for winter. Others are rocky or very steep areas that were wanted by no one, and for sure, nobody wanted to pay taxes on land that could not be used. Others are strips of trees left to grow straight and tall to replace the roof trusses when they rot out or for new houses. And around many of the fields there are wood rows left to cut wood to feed the wood cook/heat stoves in the winter.
So I asked her if I could photograph the maps with my digital camera and she said yes, why not? So I did, and took a series of shots to make sure I could work with them later.
Ms Rosano was easy to talk to and open, so I asked her about her life and how she was connected with this house in Grangie. Well, she said; “I was born here, in that house. My family has been here for hundreds of years. I lived here until I was a young woman and was married, and since then I have lived down on the pianura. (The name of the big valley below of the Po River stretching all the way to the Adriatic) We had three or four cows, and some sheep, goat and chickens, and we grew potatoes, cabbage, and all kinds of salads, zucchini and other squash and while we had no money, we lived well here. But in the years after the war, life really began to change, and most of the people left these valleys to work in the factories and business below. When I was young, there were 35 or 40 people living here, many generations of people, and we helped each other.”
“In some ways, life was much more difficult. The young men of my father’s generation had to draw straws to see who would stay and who had to leave, and many of my uncles and great uncles left to go to the Americas. Most to Argentina, I think, and we never heard from them again, after a few letters or a generation.”
As we spoke we were walking around the other side of Grangie, across the tumbling stream, as she seemed to be heading somewhere specific. “Here,” she said; “is another piece of land I could let you have, it is my uncles.” And she took out the map and showed me some more plots that were not marked in color but she said we hers to sell.
Walking back up to the house, I asked about the ruins. There are three houses in a row, right in the center of Grangie, that have roofs fallen in, and walls that have tumbled down. The houses were build without mortar, so as soon as the roof starts to go, the walls are exposed to the rain and mud and sand placed between the stones washes away, and if the stones are not really well placed, the walls come down. She pointed to the ruin nearest the valley below, overlooking everything, and said; “That is my daughters, and it’s not for sale. Someday, she will rebuild it. Or her children will. The one in the middle, we really don’t know, the people here died without heirs, so it belongs to someone in Argentina now. And the last, that one there, belongs to somebody down the hill in Acceglio. “(This is a fact that is important as we go on)
So I thanked her and left, saying that I liked the house very much and the land too, but needed to talk to my wife. And I knew already, that Aure was not interested, so this whole few hours had been a balancing act inside. An exploration outside of the land and house, an exploration inside as I really wanted to understand what all this attraction in me for Grangie was really? Why was I moved so by this place and the images it evoked?.
It was not enough just to like it. We like a lot of things in life; we are attracted all the time to this and that. And, like I wrote, this pull here was much stronger than that. And because it was so strong, I really needed to go to the bottom of this pull to see what it is. And walking the hour down the hill, it came to me that the feelings evoked by the outer material object, in this case a stone house in very beautiful place in nature were really independent of the outer object. It was the feeling I wanted. And how easy not to see this, to substitute the outer object for the inner feeling. And confuse this swap so thourghly that I take some big risk to acquire something ‘out there,’ on the far side of my skin, when in fact, it is something in here, under the skin, that I really want.
Do you follow this? I’ve spent my whole life making this swap and never have seen it, and have ended up again and again with whatever it was I thought might bring me some joy or happiness or satisfaction and once I did all the work to get it, found it empty. Well no wonder!
I’m not saying that the outer things don’t matter, for sure they do. But something here needs to be kept straight, so I know much better what I am doing, what I is spending my hard earned time and money for.
But lets keep going with this account of Grangie, as we are getting now to the ‘nut’ of this story.
I spent the next two days of my visit to Vallone Unerzio with the print outs of the maps in hand. I traced the old mule trails up and down the mountain; I located most of the plots on the map, and could see the care and intelligence of the selection of the fields and really the skill of the mapmaker. The surveyor who made these maps really had to know this land very well, along with all the skill with instruments of measure and art of drawing down, in careful scale all the twists and turns of each plot.
A few weeks followed, at home back in the routine of caretaking and the daily house life. I spoke to Aure, giving her an account of what had happened but being very careful to almost hide all the deep feelings I had up in Grangie. I really did not want to fall in to the role of “selling” or “convincing’ her of anything. I know, from experience, that the inner taste of that “trying to convice another’ can spoil something very good, and also that Aure knows me too well, that the first ‘smell’ of salesman ship is a guaranteed turn off, on the spot.
Yet, this conversation continued about what we really want, together, for our life. This was our 21st August together, and our life has been through some interesting chapters. I won’t tell that story here, but enough to say that we know this current chapter is coming to an end and we need to find the thread of the next chapter of our life. We know we need to ‘moveon’ but do not know if this is an outer form or an inner change or both.
When we had just two weeks left in Italy, we realized we had spend no time together, just the two of us, and we felt we needed to take a few days before getting on the airplane. Aure suggested Chialvetta, and I easily said yes.
And here the real story starts.
It was a Sunday and Aure wanted to go to Mass with her sister. I had taken Laura the eve before, as the late Saturday mass is considered the same as Sunday, the old way of measuring a day from sundown to sundown. We left Pinerolo just after the mass, heading south toward Val Maira. Aure had been touched by the message of the Mass and brought the readings with her, and read them as we drove.
_____
(Here I have to do some research. The content of the reading was to help us and I do not have the exact words in English, so to add . . . . The gist of the reading is that God does not think as man things, so that what man values and considers real and important is not what God values, sees as important, and that man needs to take this into account as we so busily plan our lives.
________
We did not have many words to say on the familiar road, south through Cavour, Saluzzo and right at Busca, through Dronero and up Val Maira to Acceglio, the town on the main road where the turn off is for Chialvetta. I could feel that this was one of those time in a marriage when we really needed ‘not to talk.’ We were both a little tired, and Aure was worn out by all the work she had been doing over the last months. And a bit tired not just from the work, this summer had also been a time of much immense joy for her, and soon she would be leaving her home country to come again to California. She has many good things in California, but it will never be the same as ‘home.’ And I was also without anything useful or good to say.
Acceglio is a larger village, a summer population of three or four hundred, a year round population of 237, if I remember the web site info (http://www.ghironda.com/valmaira/rubriche/vmcard-e.htm) if you want to look. Acceglio is where to local market is, a gas station, a good bar (Bar in Italy is not like here, it means a place for coffee/expresso/capucino first and a drink too, if you want, but is not at all like an American bar) two restaurants and the local government building for the community of Acceglio of which all the local villages including Chialvetta are a part. And, it also so happens it is the only place a cell phone will work, just one spot or two, that one must find by wandering around until the phone works. I had found the ‘spot’ for mine when I was up here weeks before to call Aure each night and wish her a ‘buone notte.’
So just before we entered Acegllio, we turned left in front of the Pizza place and headed up into Vallone Unerzio. We arrived at dark, and soon after starting the wood stove and heating the stone house up a bit, we ate a light supper, then tucked our selves in up in the loft over the kitchen. Nice and warm, when the stove heats the room.
The next morning, I did not go up the hill to sit, I really wanted just to stay near Aure, as this was ‘our time’ finally to remeet each other. We sat together, ate some hot cereal and I had my cup of good coffee, and then we looked at the day ahead. “What do you want today?” I asked her, and she said, “Lets walk.” “Lets walk the old mule trail you told me about, that goes from Vivier to Grangie.”
I have not mentioned Viveir, as it has no place in our story except here. It is another small village, up the mule trail that follows the main creek, the Unerzio up about 3 kilometers to Prarotondo, then another shorter piece of mmule trail further up the creek to Vivere. In the days when there were no cars or trucks, the mule was the means of transport, and walking the only way to go from one place to another, so all the valleys, all the villages and borgates were linked by a network of well made trails. And the one up the valley here is still well maintained, as it is the main trail for hikers who want to head into the Alps from here now who want to head into the Alps from here.
“Sure,” I said; “let’s go.” We packed my small backpack with a piece of bread and cheese, a small bottle of water, a sweater each if the promise of the warm day turned cloudy, and I tucked my maps in, really with no motive. I did ‘take a look’ at myself, to see where all the “Grangie story” was in me and was very content to find it quiet. I was very content just to walk up this, path in this place, with my wife and meet the day.
A leisurely few hours later found us at the fountain of Grangie. A lovely morning. And what was to unfold next was one of those times in life when we are clearly “under a different influence.”
To be continued. . . . .
