Distracting ourselves from our lives began with the most beautiful Italian apartment. We overlook an awe inspiring view of the village, valley and the Apennine mountains.
As we stand here on the edge of a new beginning, we can feel our minds throwing off the stress and fatigue of our lives.
We can feel our general pessimism being replaced with childish wonder and excitement. Possibilities seem endless.
Our apartment is really just a small room. This room houses our kitchen, lounge, dining and bedroom. It’s charming and definitely “rustic”. It’s almost like “glamping” really only with a bidet. In recent times this was the storeroom. In previous times it was the kitchen for the villa, definitely also with the chickens, goats and mule in here in winter. It’s cosy in a rural Italian countryside/mountains/back-to-basics kind of way. It has no TV, no microwave, no oven, no toaster, no jug, no washing machine, no internal walls and one power point (not in the kitchen – so the hand held blender someone has left in the drawer is obviously a joke). It has a tiny mirror in the bathroom – I haven’t seen my torso for weeks. It has a teeny, tiny hot water system that heats three minutes worth of water at a time.
It has a pomegranate tree right outside our windows, resplendent with fruit.There is an ancient walnut tree and plum trees for fresh prunes.
Best of all, it has two small windows with a view that goes on forever over the valley, the mountains and the village. This is not inconvenience, this is living.
It has internet which we insist on in order to work when required. Oh and most importantly, to Google translate words we come across on large red signs that look important but are beyond our basic language skills. My sister who is dog-sitting, sends me updates on my dog and her stress at suddenly having a dog.
We immediately bring technology to this rural ambience by unpacking all of our electronic devices and running charging leads all over the place. It’s ironic that the rustic fireplace which is our only form of heating (and very welcome as September becomes October) is surrounded by leads and cords as it also has the only power point.
The old timber dining table houses our laptops, Ipad, EReader and mobile phones with accompanying charging leads. We sit at this table together with bad weather curling around our little rustic apartment and focus on our laptops. Every now and then one of us will swap to Angry Birds on the IPad or Stephen King on the EReader and sometimes we even move from the table to the sofa with a view of the fire. It’s sad that our life encroaches on the history of the place we have chosen to call home for a month. Should we be living like peasants just because peasants lived here? Is it bad to bring modernity to this place of simplicity? We have brought our lives with us to some extent, but it is a reality. Despite the romantic and exciting nature of what we are doing, there must be an element of practicality. (I say thank you to the internet. It allows me to do yoga classes on the floor between the kitchen and dining table, where Andrew has to step over me to make coffee).
I make this sound worse than it is. There aren’t a lot of days when this happens. Mostly we are hiking for hours following poorly marked “red and whites” tourist trials and getting fit, healthy and lean.. We suck up fresh mountain air, huff and puff and feel better about our lives than we have for a long time.
We compare diminishing waistlines and muscle tone!
Sometimes we take the car to a far-flung town for visits to frescos with various degrees of interest, ancient cathedrals, museums and castles also with various degrees of interest. We visit our local village by way of the stream and plod back up the hill with our backpacks laden with groceries like poorly conditioned pack mules. We do overnight visits to places we would like to visit that sound interesting on Google. We find local festivals and markets and then wish we had visited the place when it wasn’t crowded with tourists (like ourselves). We take photos of the most breathtaking views and post them online, only to find that no one actually cares except us.
In the interests of living a simple life, I have a pack of cards which we use in the evenings to amuse ourselves learning two person games off Google whilst drinking wine and eating liqueur chocolates. As the weather turns cool, the roaring fire is a backdrop to the somewhat old-fashioned scene one would see if one peeked through the shutters in the evenings. Two tipsy folk, surrounded by chocolate wrappers, chatting and childish card games. The technology is off, the fire is crackling and time just goes by.
Most of all we breathe. We spend time being together. We breathe some more. We exalt in this beautiful place we have found for ourselves.
We can feel the tight space our minds normally occupy opening up and suddenly we feel as though anything is possible.
We throw outrageous plans around about how we will change our futures and try to see a way to live our lives like this more.
We start a list of all the things we don’t like about our lives. Solutions come to us over time. As we distract ourselves from our lives, our lives become clearer.
