Spent Sunday morning
loafing about on the terrace in my jammies,
went to the beach later and
strolled about taking photos of the
flora and fauna,
(You can eat the red things, I understand. Going to try making Prickly Pear jam this year.)
The geraniums on the terrace: suprisingly hard to kill, but I haven't given up.
Remember the wisteria that wasn't at its peak? We're there.
Most of old Santa Marinella is being torn down and replaced with cheap, lousy apartment blocks (the kind with the cardboard and plaster-of-Paris walls that let the rain through) but
there are a few nice little houses left in our neighbourhood that have lovely gardens.
I missed a train and had an hour to kill, so I wandered around Santa Marinella for a bit. As I was passing an empty lot, I heard a racket that I took at first for a flock of ducks. Looking down, saw no ducks while the noise continued, quite loud. There was a pond, though, and I realised that the racket was coming from frogs.
Thousands of them. All very noisy and lively.
The neighbourhood nearest the beach has some
rather grand houses, and are obviously occupied year round
with people who can afford gardeners.
Catholicism is everywhere here.
Plenty of public access to the beach.
This is Italy: splendour and decay.
The sea the sea! The view (through a zoom lens) from the terrace.
From the end of the road. (So how's April where you are? Still snowing?)
This rocky beach is so very similar
to the kind I grew up around it was hard not to be transported in memory. (Note cool holes indicating bubbles of gas while the rock was still liquid...science! Cool!)
I can't tell you how odd it felt to be climbing around on the rocks, peering into tide pools and poking (the brilliant red, not green) sea anemones after all this time. It was as if I were ten years old again, and waiting to hear my grandma calling me to lunch on the veranda.
Grandma taught me to swim in a place that looked almost exactly like
this
...only with fewer palm trees...and probably a lot colder water.
Then got on the train and went to Rome and shopped. Mmmmmm Sunday shopping...
Got to a nice, blessedly short, low Mass for Palm Sunday and then ate Italian food for dinner and went home.
The perfect weekend.
5 comments:
"Blessedly short"? What has happened to your trad credentials: isn't such sacred dispatch just what the Council was all about? And the late-lamented liturgical reforms of Pius XII, already mucking about with our immemorial customs? Now in the good old days Palm Sunday would clearly have occupied at least 2 1/2 hours before you even thought of your breakfast.
Still snowing?
Yes, about 2 inches this morning.
Not that I'm bitter or jealous or anything...
Anon: Thhbbbtthhhtttt
(raspberry noise).
Sick of liturgy.
I have prickly pears growing in my back yard. Missouri isn't known as a desert region, but we do have small pockets of aridity.
The red fruit is edible, as are the green pads, which serve as a vegetable. Don't touch them! You will get tiny annoying prickles in your skin. Use tongs, leather gloves, or plastic bags to pick them. Burn those hairs off over an open flame.
In Pennsylvania, snow tonight. I grew up in Western New York, just across the lake from Toronto. As you know, there, it's really snowing.
Italy (where you are) looks beautiful, but a tad too much like Florida I'm afraid for my tastes. I'm still too attached to gray skies, warm fires, and ale in front of them. That WNY gloom hasn't left my blood. Too much sun makes me feel like an ant on a griddle.
Our Palm Sunday Mass at our FSSP apostolate in Harrisburg lasted a glorious 2 hours. Holy Thursday through Easter Vigil will be the same.
As for shopping on Sunday...tsk! tsk! The collapse of the West proceeds apace ;^)
~ Jon
PS - I'm glad you and your friends are okay.
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