CdP, March 6
The sun shone for much of today, after three days of torrential rain. It seems to go like that these days. Days and days of rain. Then a few spectacular hours just when you’re ready to scream with rain-induced frustration. I guess that’s spring. I’ve been prompted to look for average rainfall figures. I mean, can this be normal? The closest weather station I can find is at San Sisto, near Perugia. It says we’ve had 160.3mm of rain so far this year. It also says that 126.7mm of that fell in one day, February 1, the biggest one-day figure since January 2005, or maybe even longer. Where were we on February 1? Were we here peering out in despair at the downpour? I can’t remember. I find this figure slightly baffling, I I have to say: can all those other interminable days of drizzle since Christmas really only have accounted for 33mm? It seems unlikely. (Maybe I need a different weather station…) Anyway – at the risk of being terribly dull – average January rainfall for the past five years measured in San Sisto was about 65mm; for February it was about 75mm. I make that 140mm. (The weather station at Perugia airport says that the 30-year average to 1990 was 61 and 60mm respectively, so even lower at 121mm.) Either way, we have had more than our fair share so far this year. It certainly feels like we have.
Despite the gloom, I do feel like we’re approaching something special. It’s that moment of expectancy, when I know that I’m going to walk out the front door and see the first full-blown daffodil on the bank by the washing line. The buds on the apricot trees are just about to explode.
What happened there? Work intervened to some extent, but spring did too: whole sun-beating-on-back days outside over the weekend. By Sunday evening we both felt like we’d been run over by steamrollers, but it was a healthy, warm exhaustion of the kind that makes you feel coddled.
Two weeks after the event, I suddenly decided it was time to claim my other birthday present. Or at least to prepare for it. My first birthday presents were a beautiful mossy jade necklace, and an axe. L bought the axe in Rome. I wouldn’t know where to start looking for an axe in Rome, but he found a hardware store tucked away somewhere near largo Argentina. He said the man in the shop looked at him very oddly when he asked for an axe. I had a vision of L saying “it’s for my wife” and smiling, slyly, in slightly deranged fashion. And of the hardware shop man just waiting until L left the store to summon the police and have him arrested. But nothing of the sort happened. He wasn’t accosted or even avoided when he carried the axe home on the bus. It wouldn’t be difficult to arrange to chop up your wife in the city.
My final present is the most exciting one though: getting rid of the caravan. Vittorio never came to claim his chicken coop, so we’re resorting (once again) to Demolition Man. I mean, we called him once before, long ago, and he was coming. But then he decided to go on holiday instead and we forgot about it. Or rather we let it slide, as we do so many things. This time, however, we’ve got everything ready. I removed thick layers of leaves and washed-down topsoil, terracotta pots and discarded furniture, the odd dead animal carcass (birds, mice) and great handfuls of plants – Vinca major mostly, but also a brilliant green moss which seemed to be eroding away the surface of the old brick-paved area where the caravan is standing. It was nothing like the first excavation all those years ago – when this area, the concimaia (manure pit) wasn’t even visible: the hill behind it just continued straight down and it took days and days of carting away soil to get to the floor beneath – but you could see that it wouldn’t have taken much longer to get back to its primeval state. To make it feel like the caravan was really on its way out, we even spent a couple of hours on Sunday afternoon swinging the thing around, no mean feat in a space which isn’t really wide enough to accommodate the caravan’s length. When it was delivered many years ago (we used to stay in it while our building work was being done) the caravan was positioned in such a way that the door was facing straight into the sharp bank behind and there was nowhere to put an outside table and definitely no view over the valley below. I distinctly remember not really having all that much trouble moving the caravan through 180 degrees all by myself… or maybe I invented this memory. On Sunday, everything seemed terribly complicated. But with the aid of the jack from the car, we were able to haul the towbar just high enough to clear the little brick wall which surrounds the concimaia. (Our first attempt was stymied when we started swinging and the towbar wouldn’t make it past that horrible, twisted holey elm that I’ve been meaning to have cut down for the last five years or so. I had told L that there was no way we could swing it in that position without hitting the tree but he told me that my geometry was way out of whack… a moment of satisfaction, therefore, when the crunch came.)
So the caravan is facing in the right direction to be towed away. Next problem is: who and how? In an ideal world, Demolition Man would just bowl up with his tow-truck, winch the thing on board and take it away, never to be seen again. But it’s in such an awkward place now, after all my landscaping, that I don’t think a tow-truck would get down there.
A car could, as L insisted on proving today by backing ours down my lovely gravel path/lawn. When I made the lawns out there between house and chicken house, I got Giuseppe the Bulldozer Boy to create levels which were just wide enough to get a vehicle down in an emergency. And L’s experiment proved that they are; the only problem being that in the mean time the little triangular bed beneath the service tree seems to have grown wider and wider. There’s one point, between that bed and the steps up to the chicken house, where the level is precisely the same width, to the centimetre, as the width between the caravan wheels. And there was no way that I was going to allow L to risk trying to manoevre the caravan up there: if it hit soft soil and toppled, we’d be waving goodbye to my service tree, my roses and quite possibly bits of our house. Give him his due, L didn’t actually look all that keen on trying.
Tomorrow morning, then, we have to find a way of building that bed back out. We’re going to need a study wooden edging and a nice lot of firmly packed earth there to make it wide enough to get the caravan through. Why, I’m wondering, did I over-entusiastically cart away all the earth I removed from the concimaia, and take it (my exhausted arms straining at the wheelbarrow handles) all the way up to the veggie garden? Oh well, I guess it’s all downhill back to where it’s needed. Then we can haul the caravan up to the car park and sit back and wait for Demolition Man to do the rest. And an inexplicably long, drawn-out phase – the Caravan Days – in our lives will come to a close. Hooray!