Quake-a-versary coming up

I just came across this photo. To my right is Fr. Basil, to my left are a couple of friends. It was taken by some of the news people who were there that morning. It must have been about an hour after the quake.

It was still pretty early in the morning, judging from the position of the shadows, after the Poor Clares had come stumbling out of the rubble and dust cloud, the first time I'd ever seen any of them. One of their older members of the community, still in her fluffy slippers, had to be carried over the piles of rubble.

When we saw them come out the thought came into my mind, "This is it. It's over." We spent a total of about five hours in the piazza, mainly waiting for the firemen to clear enough of the main street so we could walk out. Eventually they brought in a small bulldozer and escorted us out in groups of ten or twenty.



~

Taking the adventure

The new garden; gardener of all I survey...

Well, that's it. The next phase is beginning. The house in Norcia is empty, and all my belongings are (mostly) jammed into one room in the new place in Perugia, so that's that done.

Spent the weekend lifting and toting. The biggest we could get was a 9-passenger domestic, and not the cube van we really needed, so it took us longer than we had anticipated. All together, it was three days and four trips back and forth

Job done. Katia, Emanuele, me, Christine and Christopher on Saturday.

... and four friends helping...

It wasn't the worst move I've ever done. I'll never forget the time I rented a house in New Westminster with two friends and we had to bring stuff to one location from four different parts of Vancouver. It took nine people, four trucks and three days. I remember sitting on the living room floor at the end of that, with four sofas piled up like a fortress around us, eating McFries and wondering when the nomad lifestyle would end. That was 22 years ago. When I turned thirty a couple of years later, I sat down and worked out how many times I'd moved. 40. I'd moved 40 times by the time I was thirty. Sometimes across town. Sometimes across the water to the Mainland and back to the Island and back to the Mainland again. Sometimes across the country. A couple times across the Atlantic. After that it slowed down. And I stopped counting, because that can really mess with your head.

My section of the garden directly in front of the shed. After that the fields of the farm and the hills beyond. Perugia is behind. There are three apartments in this complex, and it seems I'm not the only gardening enthusiast. The shed has a good sturdy work  bench with an old fashioned vice, and lots of room to work.

Anyway, here we are, done. I can't actually live in the place until after Easter, though, because they're rebuilding the bathroom and refurbishing the kitchen, so the kitties and I are staying in Santa Marinella until the middle of April. Then we rent (or maybe borrow) another car, and drive me and the kitties, a couple of suitcases and a houseplant or two up for good.

The survivors. Last year's pansies, snap dragons and day lillies. Also one rose and the sage.

But though it was not really my choice to leave Norcia in October, it has become, through an act of Providence, my choice to remain away for now. The grace of God is a funny thing sometimes. I had known for some time before the quakes that I needed to do some things, and to do other things differently. I had been trying to work out whether I could commute to Perugia (there's a daily early morning bus from Norcia even now) to enrol in the Italian language course there at the Università per Stranieri. It's an hour by bus, so in theory it would have been no worse than some of the city commutes in Vancouver and Toronto.

I also sort of knew the monks weren't going to stay down in their monastery inside the walls forever. They had that country property up the hill and I knew their goal was to move into it at some point. Rebuild the church and the old monastery. At which time they would more or less disappear from the integrated daily life of the town. I was thinking a lot about what that would mean for me.

The house I was renting in Norcia wasn't ideal either, lovely as it was. The garden was tiny once you took away all the vertical part you can't grow anything on, and being on the foot of the mountain the soil even on the little postage stamp of flat was pretty much non-existent. Stick a spade in it and you hit rock no more than a few inches down. Nearly everything I grew had to be in pots.

The position of the house was also not very good, since it faced directly back towards the town. Romans love noise, and in the summer Norcia turned into a kind of three month-long discoteque with the position of the house making it sound like the disco was happening in my living room. Every night until one or two am... "Whump-whump-whump-WHUMPWHUMPWHUMP-whump!!" interspersed with someone bellowing and screaming into a mircophone - and every night louder and louder. I slept in the living room with all the windows and shutters closed, a fan blasting on its highest setting next to my ear to drown it out, and industry-standard wax ear plugs in my ears. If someone had warned me about the noise in the summers, I certainly would never have taken that place. But of course, I guess that problem has been resolved now, at least for a few years.

So, I knew that things had to change. Of course, I was dragging my heels... as you do... but it had to change. Of course, God knows us pretty well, and knows I'm not very good at making decisions, good or bad. I really do have to be herded where I'm supposed to go. But it's nice to have a sign.

I learned at the end of February that I was not going to be able to move back, so spent all of March charging around all over Umbria looking for the next step. It finally came down to Perugia, and I went up to sign the lease documents and hand over some cash. The plans had all been set, all the details of buses and transport to make the commute to the college, the locations of supermarkets, the church in the centro for the Sunday Mass, signing up for the local Trad Mass weekly lectures, making contacts... all the preliminary work... I came back to S. Marinella and had an email waiting from Fr. Prior who had promised to keep his ears open for a place in Norcia. There was an "agibile" flat available inside the walls, 3 beds, for 500/month. The news was two days after I'd signed on the new place.

If it had come only two days before, everything would have been different. But the decision was made, and the course plotted and laid in. In all this time, and through all these thousands of miles, I suppose I've finally learned how to read the signs. Nervous as I might be about leaving Norcia and striking out somewhere new, it seemed only a confirmation that I was on the right track. My lease is for a year. In that time I think we've learned that nearly anything can happen.

And now that I've had a few days to recover, it's made me realise something else. When I was a Dumb Young Person, I think my main goals in life mostly revolved around finding a good place to hide. A traumatic upbringing had taught me that the world was mostly just a place of danger, mainly to be avoided as much as possible. But the mindset that always looks for safety more or less makes it impossible to accomplish anything positive. This attitude towards the world was the common one among my peers when I was young. We were a traumatised generation, we all grew up expecting the Bomb to annihilate us and everything we loved. We tended to retreat into nihilism, or at least existential despair, and refused to make plans or harbour hopes for the future. The entrepreneurial mind that looks on the world as a place of opportunity, a place to do things, was unknown to us.

But a conversation I had with Fr. Prior some time ago revealed the limitations of my thinking. In all this time I had been seeking self-preservation and motivated by fears. In trying to find a safe place in the world - 40 moves in the first 30 years - I had been stuck in survival mode all this time. And here in front of me was a group of men who had taken exactly the same situation - a world that was bent on destroying itself - and instead of seeking shelter had dedicated themselves to building something lasting and Real. The goal was not only to provide themselves with a place of safety, but to start building something for the future for everyone else. Benedictine life is a funny thing; it was never intended originally as a civilisational rescue operation, but in times of great crises the formula has served not only to preserve but to build up while everything else was falling down. Starting a monastery (the community was founded in 2000) in that particular place, and in times such as these was a deliberate sign.

We live in profoundly uncertain times, and nearly everyone is focusing on survival. Maybe it has to do with Generation X's systemic, innate uncertainty. We were the generation that our Boomer parents loved to terrorize. They dismantled an entire civilisation, like demolishing a house we were still trying to live in, and it left us with the core belief that we were all doomed. Even if our societies didn't collapse from social unrest, we would be incinerated by nuclear war before we were thirty. If we survived, we would "envy the dead" as we stumbled around blind and dying in a radioactive wasteland. This was the future our hippie parents taught us to expect. None of us made any plans, few of us got married and had children. We are the generation that has no belief at all in the future and very little trust in the present.

And now we're in our 40s and 50s, and more or less in charge of the world. Is it possible that this is where the western world's sudden malaise of anxiety has come from? Perhaps. I know that all my life I've had to fight the urge to retreat into the safety of despair. But a Christian has no business indulging in despair.

I have resisted talking about the earthquakes in St. Benedict's home town as some kind of metaphor. There are real people - people I know - whose lives have been flattened by the quakes, and they deserve better than to be turned into a rhetorical gaming chip. But if you think about it for a moment, it does seem like a mad thing, to think about building in a time when all around you is crashing down. And of course, those monks were doing exactly that 17 years ago when they first arrived. The quakes - coming at the same moment as the worsening crisis in the Church and the world - have simply made the reality that much more obvious, and made the task that much more clear.

Whatever the World is doing, we are called to the same thing as believers; we are called to build up the Kingdom. Now, while all the world is either willingly participating in this civilizational self-destruction, or trying to find a place to hide, we are being given quite a different sort of task, wherever we are.

On my own two feet, and by my own choice.

When I got, essentially, an offer of a place to continue hiding it just became clear that the time had come to do the next thing. To go voluntarily and so take the next adventure that's sent.

[All pics, H/T Christine Broesamle]


~

I'm here, and ... it's awful...

I got off the bus yesterday in the brilliant sunshine, and a feeling of gloom and hopelessness settled over me like a dark fog. Fr. Benedict said in an interview recently that people have been very depressed, and I can understand now why.

The town looks like one gigantic construction zone, with piles of masonry everywhere, scaffolding, cranes and people in hard hats and steel-toed boots... in which the world's biggest circus has come to camp for the winter. Norcia has become a strangely silent and depressing place. The centro is open, (and the blessed pizza place is running.. thanks be to God!). A few shops, a couple of restaurants are running, but at night it's a ghost town, with most of the piazza blocked off and full of carefully preserved, numbered and labelled masonry from the basilica laid out, piles of rubble and equipment taking up the rest.

I was awake half the night, my mind racing around and around over the same territory. There are at least 3000 displaced people in Norcia, nearly all of whom want to come back, and 70% of the residential structures badly damaged, "inagibile," or outright collapsed. Many, many people with a good deal more 'natural right' to be here than I can't come home.

I just kept going over the options over and over and over - maybe a year in Perugia to study Italian; maybe a stint in Narni where there are at least affordable rents and a Mass to go to (albeit, SSPX); maybe Spoleto and take the bus up on Sundays to Norcia to come to the little Mass in the container here at the monastery... Really, anything... ANYthing but summer in Lazio - that miserable swamp of sweaty tourists, heat, humidity and mosquitoes...

All night, round and round and round... all interspersed with unpleasant dreams [again... sigh] of being trapped in a collapsing building carrying a huge box of cats. Aaaaand about six times this lovely state of mind interrupted with earthquakes... just in case I forgot what this was all about.
I'm sitting now in the hall of the agritourismo - one of only two places left able to receive guests - listening to Blue Oyster Cult and having my coffee, and nearly despairing. Thank God for coffee... thank God for kindly Umbrian ladies with beautiful, sturdily reconstructed country houses...

It seems impossibly selfish of me to even imagine I could be the one Special Person who could find a house or flat to rent, while so many people are still sleeping in campers and trailers and anything else they can find. Or living in hotels unable to return. Really, what am I thinking?

But then the roundabout starts from the beginning again: where else is there to go? What else is there to do? For good or ill, no matter what, this seems to be my place, and I've spent my whole life looking for it. I found it and now it's been taken away.

It reminds me with rather grim humour of a conversation I had with Fr. Cassian once after Mass on the Basilica steps: "Everything is so perfect, the only thing I'm worried about now is that some catastrophe will take it all away. A piano will fall out of an airplane onto my head..."

Who knew? Apparently me.

I'm really not very good at making decisions. I have usually done things by the Sherlock Holmes method of figuring out all the things that are impossible, and doing whatever is left. But this is a puzzle, a conundrum that is nearly stumping me.

Everybody so inclined, I could use some help. This puzzle is more than I can figure out. I need some kind of miracle, a sign or at least a clear path. I'm praying to St. Philip Neri - who has never let me down before, and to Sts. Scolastica & Benedict, St. Anthony to "find" a solution, St. Joseph who knows all about how important home is.

Money talks

This, by the way, is the guy who has offered to pay for the rebuilding of the Basilica of San Benedetto in Norcia: Brunello Cucinelli.

Cucinelli had bowled into Rome that morning from Umbria, a mountainous region north of the capital, where he lives in a hilltop village called Solomeo. Solomeo is not far from Perugia, and dates to the twelfth century. Its population in the last census was four hundred and thirty-six. Over the past thirty years, as his company has grown from a one-man operation to a business employing five hundred people, with an annual turnover of more than two hundred million dollars, Cucinelli has been renovating the village. He has enacted a peculiar fantasy of beneficent feudalism, with himself as the enlightened overlord, and the residents, many of them his employees, as the appreciative underlings. A castle with walls of honey-colored stone, several feet thick, has been converted into a factory; its chambers hum with the sound of knitting machines, its basement rumbles with ceaseless laundering. A Renaissance villa close by has been turned into a dining hall for employees; with a vaulted ceiling and views of the hills, it is often mistaken by tourists for an attractive restaurant. Cucinelli contributed to the restoration of the village’s Church of St. Bartholomew, which was founded in the late twelfth century and rebuilt in the seventeenth. He has repaved streets, restored squares, and built a woodland park. In addition, he has constructed a two-hundred-and-forty-seat theatre, crafted in the architectural vernacular of the sixteenth century. It has a pseudo-classical portico whose large Latin inscription, “B. CVCINELLI CVRAVIT A DOMINI MMVIII,” recalls the façade of the Pantheon, in Rome.

I'm rather in favour of enlightened feudalism.

I was horrified to read a story in an Umbrian newspaper that the local bishop - who shall remain nameless but whom I've long since nicknamed Bishop Skinny McFancypants - who is well known for his great love of his local tanning salon - suggested that in order to make the "new basilica" into a "global tourist attraction" it should be rebuilt as a synthesis of "modern and ancient" styles.

I was briefly in despair until I remembered the fact that Mr. Cucinelli had already called dibs on the Basilica and was close friends with the monks.

This is the Chiesa di San Bartolomeo in Mr. Cucinelli's village of Solomeo, just outside Perugia, which he paid to restore.


I would call this acceptable



~

Heading home

And each town looks the same to me, the movies and the factories
And every stranger's face I see reminds me that I long to be,
Homeward bound...



I got a call from my realtor in Norcia saying that the city engineers have cleared my house as safe for occupation. Or at least, the middle floor flat is, which is the one I live in. I think the upstairs flat will have to be repaired. In any case, I’m going back to Norcia on or around February 15th. I’ve been in Germany, flat and cat sitting for a friend for a week but will be back to Italy tomorrow by train. After that, I think we are going to try to rent a car or a small SUV to get me, the little bits of stuff we brought down and the kitties back home as soon as possible. (More.)

Keep praying though, that the quakes stop, or at least that the house doesn't fall on us.

But the supermarkets are open again and they've started opening the centro. The time has come.



~

Bad news and good news

I got an email from my realtor in Norcia who says my house has been declared "inagibile" by the civil engineers. There's structural damage that wasn't immediately evident when I was running about throwing the kitties in their carry-box.

This means it's going to be a lot longer to go home than I had first anticipated. The good news is that the municipality has suspended all taxes and utilities and is footing the bill for rents and compensation for people stuck without a home. I only rent, but it means I won't have to keep the rent up for the time I'm away (if I got the Italian right.) I have to go and fill out a form.

The realtor could have sent me the form by email, but we're going up tomorrow in a rented car anyway, so it'll be easier to do it in person, and then we can get additional information. I can go into the house no problem, but can't live in it. He says it will be fixed "before a year" but of course, there's no way to know exactly. So, new plans must be made.

(Something that's pretty awesome about Italy is the relationship you have with your realtor. The guy who finds your home - whether rented or bought - becomes like your manager for all matters pertaining to your domestic life after that. He helps you hook up to utilities, finds you the guy who sells firewood, gets you the right forms and things from the government and walks you through all bureaucracy (often just does it for you) and becomes your trouble-shooter for every conceivable thing, from noisy neighbours to permits.

He's also the guy who knows everyone in town, so if you need a plumber or vet or doctor or bike repair he'll be the guy to talk to. And in a situation like this, having an advocate who is a native speaker and knows all the ropes and all the local officials is indispensable. This is the way things are done in Italy; no one is a lone wolf. It's ALL about the community. Sandro and Luca Amici, father and son team, have been great from the first day, and I'd recommend them to anyone who wants a place in Norcia or the vicinity. They kept working and helping people sort things out, even after they were themselves living in tents in their front garden after the August quakes.)

At least this news and info clears up ambiguities. I was all muddled not knowing what I could expect or what was happening withe house, so not really knowing exactly what plans to make. I rented a nice little holiday flat for cheap (off season) in Santa Marinella, the town on the coast north of Rome where I lived for several years before moving up to Norcia. But it's not possible for it to be a long-term thing. Good for a few months, but not for six months or a year. So will have to start making some serious plans.

Also, because the lease will be suspended, and because the house isn't so damaged that my things are exposed, I can just leave all my furniture and things and come home to them when it's all taken care of. I can also make visits and even probably stay over night now and then when necessary. So, for the moment, though the kitties and I aren't really settled anywhere we're not homeless and at least I don't have to lug my furniture and 40 boxes of books into storage. And I won't lose the house.

But I'm finding that after the initial shock, I'm actually feeling more relieved than I expected. This means I am finally able to get out of the uncertainty zone and start making concrete and realistic plans for the longer term, which is a huge relief in itself.

At least I can hold my head up in Norcia. I was feeling pretty badly for all my friends whose homes are either destroyed or inagibile and who have been shipped off to live in hotels and resorts on the coast and Lake Trasimeno, or who have gone to camp with parents and friends. I had been thinking that I could just saunter back to my house whenever I wanted, and it was all up to me. Now we're really all in the same boat, all together. Now I'm a real terremotata, and I feel less bad about having left. I'm part of the Norcia Disaspora now, and feel all the more solidarity with my fellows.

We're going up tomorrow with a load of plug-in heaters I bought for donating to the people stuck in tents and little portable houses. Going to stop by the supermarket on the way and get some groceries as well to give to the volunteer distribution centre. I'll fill in the forms, and we'll take a drive around and see if we can find my friends whom I've been a bit worried about. Some of the older people are still there and I want to know they're OK. I'll take the camera up and dig my voice recorder out of the house and do some interviews and see if I can write it up so the world can also get a better idea of what things are really like up there.

And I'll be able to pack up the house and get it ready. The studio will come back down with me, since I think this should be taken as an opportunity to get painting. All the books should go in boxes and I've got a bunch of bubble -wrap for the pictures. The spare bedroom is more or less a storage room, so we'll just shove everything in there. Pack up Great Grandma's china, the glass wear and breakable bits and pieces, all in boxes and in the little room. At least this way when the workmen have to come and fix things, this stuff won't be in their way.

After that, I'll just pack up all the clothes and coats and boots and art supplies and things, do whatever I can to winterize the garden, and come back down.

Then what?

I've got a few ideas, but nothing confirmed.

More later.


~

  

Before the quake - Norcia the blessed

I've been meaning to post some pics of Norcia, the garden and our hike up Monte Patino just before the quakes.

Pumpkin ("zucca") flower and friend, in the garden.

I am particularly proud of my squash. I germinated six plants from seeds I saved from a bit of squash I bought at the market.

Mullein and morning glories

Variety of common verbascum. Not Verbascum thapsus, but similar and you can still make a good bronchial remedy out of the flowers and leaves.

Most of the garden is nearly vertical, so wildflowers are the way.

Vertical gardening with kitty.

White scabious and wild garlic, blossoming all over the vertical part of the garden in late summer.

The wildflowers go in a cycle, and one of the great joys is watching it run through its annual pattern.

With the wild garlic, you can just pull up the bulbs, but they're tiny and have only a few cloves. Pick the globe-shaped flowers instead when they are still a nice dark purple. Tie them up in bunches and dry them, then when you want a nice sweet and subtle garlicky flavour, pick off only a few of the florets at a time.

Wild morning glories on the upper slope.

They don't like the really hot weather, so die off in late August, but come back again with the rain a few weeks later.

Masses of these beauties all summer.

A welcome visitor on the broccoli.

I watched as he caught a hoverfly. Like lighting!

About a week or ten days before the August pre-quake, I took a hike with two friends up Monte Patino, that's the peak that overlooks Norcia with the cross on top. We started at six am. No fun hiking in the afternoon in August! Even this high in the mountains it gets REAlly hot!

Piano Santa Scolastica at dawn.

Little town in the cool morning.

The Cross above all.

I can see my house!

Not as close as it looks.

Alpine beechwood 

A wild variety of digitalis, foxglove. Pretty, but don't eat it!

These wild pinks can be found at the highest elevations. They are humble little fellows and can be hard to spot, but the fragrance is heavenly!

A nice place for a rest. Half way.

A ways to go yet.

Last stretch. Can you spot the sheep fountain? Good for humans too.

Good morning little town!

Nerd!

Look who's talking!

The way back down. 

Little town, we miss you so!

Santa Maria Addolorata, the Oratory Church of St. Philip Neri, the day before it fell to rubble.

October 29th, taking the cross down from the roof after the Wednesday pre-quake. 

Savino and Elisabetta, my friends, after the August quake closed their bakery.

Just before the quake that brought it all down.

Last day.

Consulting. The next day it fell. 

Inspecting.

Rose window.

Tympanum and saints.

The novusordo tent from the diocese. Cheery, eh? 

Mercy.