25 September 2005

CdP

It’s hard to sit in Rome with frighteningly little work on, and feel blisters stinging and wish that you were up in Umbria working hard to create some more. I’ve certainly worked up a healthy crop this weekend.  The huge one at the base of my middle finger on my right is bleeding and weeping. And it’s all due to the tiniest patch of ground, right in front of the lean-to of the chicken house. This is, I keep telling myself, the grand entrance to the house. This is what you see as you descend the drive way (itself still a disaster area, seemingly designed to rip the undercarriage out from cars), this is the frame in which the house sits. And therefore it has to have a proper bit of lawn on it. Lawn dotted with fruit trees, I thought. Half of this area I cleared and sowed with grass seed a couple of weeks ago; that was the half closest to the house, a stony area too but nothing compared to the second half. Between the stones is perfectly acceptable earth. But the stones are enormous, packed well into the baked earth and complete hell to get out, surrounded as they are by smaller ones which hold them very cleverly in their places. It must be all of – oh – twelve square metres. It took me five hours to clear. The only consolation I can find is that the grass sown on the first half has already sprouted and is looking beautifully, mistily green. It’s a far cry from the seeds I sowed in July which, despite my daily drenching, struggled to come up. In this altogether more amenable period of the year the ants’ seed-stealing activity is at a minimum and the heavens open from time to time to provide just the right amount of watering. At least they have and I hope they’ll continue… but the last few days, including this glorious weekend, have been suspiciously lovely: badly-timed compensation for our soggy August?

This weekend I invested in a lawnmower.  Salesmen in the various shops I dashed to late on Friday afternoon looked rather incredulous. I had the distinct impression that they were trying to palm me off with whatever  left-overs they happened to have lying about. “Yes, but is it a good make?” I asked one about a very expensive machine he was pointing out to me. He looked bemused. “Beh… imagino di si.” Probably? Is that salesman’s patter? Is that meant to make me leap at at? It was at the last place I visited – the place where we bought our chainsaw many moons ago – that I decided I’d buy whatever they suggested. Not because I thought that their machines were better than elsewhere. But because they came clean. “You want a lawnmower? Now? But we’ve packed them all up and put them away. No one buys lawnmowers now.” They were fascinated by my tail of foolishly sowing grass in July. They were amazed when I told them how long and thick it was. And they willingly unwrapped boxes which had been carted upstairs in their great warehouse and let me take my pick. So I did. It’s red and magnificent. It’s trazionato – it powers itself up our slopes effortlessly. And it mulches, something that I insisted on much to the amusement of the salesman. “You’d never catch an Italian leaving bits of grass all over his lawn,” he laughed. Then took it with good grace when I pointed out that Italians were known for lots of wonderful things but not for beautiful lawns… that honour fell to the Brits.

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