I Blame The Shed

Looking back, I think I know what made me stop blogging for a while. It was clearing out the shed. Odd, I know. But let me explain…

Carrying out that most mundane, unappealing and tedious of homeowners’ jobs slightly over six years after Casa Girasole became ours (and Casa Girasole became Casa Girasole, in fact) seemed to shout ‘settled’ to me in a way that extended well beyond simply ‘time served’.  And well beyond so many other things that might be an emblem of ‘settled-ness’, like the waitress in our favourite café knowing our breakfast order by heart, the local carabinieri waving us on when performing roadside document checks, no longer needing to spell our surname in the bank, and mis-addressed post still reaching us; beyond the path Mr Blue-Shirt has worn to the woodstore, or our bedroom curtains now faded from the sun, or the myriad now well-established routines that have come to mark the passage of the year, from olive-pruning to chimney-sweeping.

No, there was something about the task that seemed to signal the end of a journey that had brought us from uncertain newcomers to established Monteluponesi; from making-do to making our house truly our home. For throughout that journey we had been adding. And as we improved, repaired, replaced and completed one element of the house or another and our forever home took shape, we steadily gathered and accumulated a huge amount of what can really only be described as ‘stuff’. And we just kept on cramming it into the large but saggy shed we inherited from the previous owners alongside all the gardening equipment it already housed.

As well as the materials the previous owners had left behind that we had thought ‘might come in useful’, there were sundry plumbing and electrical fittings from the house that we had kept for possible re-use; left over tiles, left over grout, off-cuts of timber and hundreds of recycled screws; half-finished pots of paint, a collection of paintbrushes, tubs of this and rolls of that, packets of… something, and jars of God-alone-knows-what-that-is. The result was that by early this spring I had to move a bike, a wheelbarrow and a bundle of timber (having first squeezed past the lawnmower and barked my shin – again! – on a cobweb covered rotavator) just to get at the bloody secateurs: we had clearly reached ‘peak stuff’.

There was no more we could add. The circle was complete. It was time to start throwing out. Our journey had ended. We were settled.

And with that, I suddenly felt I had nothing more to write about. All the novelty and discovery was over. The primary colours of adventure had mellowed into the pastel shades of routine, the jagged edges of alien rounded into normal.

Only over the intervening months I have realised that I was wrong. Not about all the crap in the shed, of course. That definitely had to go. Or the sense of being settled. But wrong about the adventure being over and there being nothing more to add. Maybe not much more that is tangible, but plenty more of what is intangible, like friendship, travel, people, knowledge and experiences. So that also means that there is – and always will be – plenty of bright colours and plenty for me to write about. Like visiting the cave-houses of Matera, and being held hostage by wild dogs. Or taking a ten-hour train trip through three countries, Tilly’s special friend Emanuela, and driving the Cinquino through the peaks of the Gran Sasso. And that’s just to be going on with…