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Few things are as much fun as watching a cat stuck up a tree. This is Orsetta in the higher reaches of the big walnut, which caused much merriment.
I can't make the layout work how I want it to, but never mind. Other than cat diversions, it's been haymaking time. Very, very hot and for once none of the looking anxiously at the sky and calculating the odds of it raining before the bales are in. Mario spent a morning making around 50 small bales for me (well, for Cass) and then got bored with the time it was taking and lugged out his other baler that makes huge round bales and finished off the job in less than an hour. Meaning we have these huge rotoli this year, which is ok as they're cheaper but not so ok as they're less easy to store (won't fit in our barn because of access difficulties) and for the fact that they're impossible to shift without a tractor. Mario has deposited five of them along the edge of her paddock and says he'll bring more as and when I need them.
Cass was not at all happy at the rotoli suddenly appearing, and when she came up to look at them she got too close to the electric fence and got a hefty electric shock, which sent her squealing away across the field. Then she came back and stared at the rotoli in horror, snorting and tossing her head, and you could practically see her thinking: That fence was fine till they came, they must be really, really bad. It was very funny, actually, except that when I took her out the following day she was very, very wound up and jumped about all over the place as if things were about to leap out at her from behind every tree. Even letting her tiptoe up to one of the bales and take a bite out of it hasn't helped much. Sigh.
The mornings are cool and fresh now with a hint of the hot day that’s to come. Mist in the valley when I go down to feed the horse, quickly burning off. I love this time of year. We have our own strawberries! (OK, just a few, but fab all the same.) The land went from being a mud patch to a lush jungle in about a week, and the long grasses are all going to seed already. The farmers have started to cut the hay and everyone’s planting up their veg patches like mad – late start after the rainy spring, but the ground is now so warm that whatever you put in grows very fast. We’ve rotovated and dug in a lot of manure, and the earth is finer this year though still very heavy. We’ve put in 40 tomatoes and a load of cucumbers, courgettes (green ones and yellow ones), patty pans and various winter squash. Still need to plant peppers, aubergines and salad. Currently eating lollo rosso and swiss chard which have made it through the winter, and waiting for the broad beans to be ready – couple more days should do it. John has created an asparagus bed but you have to wait at least two years before you can eat the crop!
It’s been too hot to do much during the day but I’ve been taking Cassie out to the riding ring, partly to let her munch down the grass in it (otherwise she just eats while she's meant to be working) and partly to actually work her. I’ve been trying some loose schooling with her, making her go round the ring without being attached to a rope, and it’s a lot of fun. I've got her doing walk, trot and canter on command. She seems to like it and it’s making her more responsive. I’ve been looking at a lot of riding chat forums on the web and people talk about playing with exercise balls with their horses – now that would really freak Cass out, but if I can get hold of one I fancy trying it!
Time has whizzed by as usual, I seem to have been busy doing who knows what, and I haven't written for ages. Easter was good, with fine weather and our first apartment guests of the year. Alessio got a week off school and we had various English friends around to have some fun with. In fact we had two or three weeks of sunshine and got quite used to it, and then it suddenly turned cold again and rained solidly for a week – last week, which was unfortunately the very week that my parents were staying.
Because of the grim weather we've been unable to progress with the veg patch and it's still bare earth. John has rotovated it once but needs to go over it another time before we can plant. We dumped quantities of horse manure on it to try to improve the soil quality – it's heavy clay, which forms impossible-to-work clods when wet and dries very fast to a concrete-like consistency. Hopefully a few seasons of manure will make it less clay-ey and more amenable to growing tender veggies. We've sown our courgettes and squash seeds in pots but will buy all the rest as seedlings.
We're thinking about getting some chickens to mix in with the remaining ducks, as it seems to be impossible to buy point-of-lay ducks to replace those that were lost over the winter. You can keep chickens and ducks together and it would be nice to have a mix of ducks' and hens' eggs. Ducks are a lot more amusing to watch so we wouldn't want to just have chickens though. Maybe we'll get a couple of ducklings now as well, and hope we can actually get them through next winter alive and in one piece . . .
Speedwell, chickweed, goosegrass, deadnettle . . . I spent hours, or what seemed like hours, this afternoon weeding and hoeing the veg patch and seemed to get nowhere. I excavated the two very small gooseberry bushes and the two very small currant bushes, which were almost drowned in chickweed, and I salvaged what I could of the raspberry canes, ditto, and I attempted to hoe amongst the broad beans, but it’s a somewhat dispiriting task with the ground so hard (despite the rain) and the weeds so tenacious. And my tennis elbow so sore. And my back. And the little toe of my right foot, where Cass trod on me again last week.
. . . As I write, the house has just shaken again with another big earthquake. The death toll in Abruzzo has reached 280. The original big quake woke us up in the middle of the night, though we couldn’t tell how bad it was till the next morning when I turned on the news. Since then we’ve felt all the large aftershocks — 5.5, 5.3, 5.2 on the Richter scale — big, scary earthquakes in their own right, although our house is strong and we don't worry that it'll actually collapse. There’s no structural damage round here and certainly no lives lost, but everyone remembers the Assisi quake of 1997 and all the damage it did in this area — for the first few years we were here, the skyline of Camerino was defined by cranes rather than medieval towers, the town council was housed in the bus depot, and people were still living in containers. Now L’Aquila and the little surrounding villages will have to go through it all — all the reckoning with the fear and the pain, the years of rebuilding and recovery. But first the burials and the mourning. And meanwhile the speedwell and the chickweed grow apace across the trembling earth.
On Saturday night we took part in Earth Hour, WWF’s turn-your-lights-off-for-the-planet worldwide symbolic gesture, at 8.30, eating supper by candle-light and playing Scrabble in the dark (candle-light is dark!). Watching Alessio light the tealights was terrifying. Who’d have thought it could be so hard to get the hang of matches?
That was also the night the clocks changed, and the evenings are now light till about 7.30, which is great. (The adverse effect of course is that it’s now back to being almost dark when we get up at 6.30a.m., which is not so nice.) With all the blossom and the wildflowers there’s a proper sense of spring now – or there was till a couple of days ago, when a cold depression blew in, and a cloud has been sitting on top of us ever since, and we're back to mist, rain and mud. We’ve turned most of the radiators off but I’m still wearing two pairs of socks.
Not so many cuckoos here, but we’ve spotted the First Hoopoe of Spring. Hoopoes migrate here for the summer and are stunning pink birds with black-and-white striped wings and a crest. They tend to return each year to nest in the same place, like swallows; no sign of them yet, but our resident pigeons are nesting in their holes in the outside walls of the house, and there's a great deal of small-bird activity, blue tits and finches flying about with twigs and moss in their beaks. The sun has to come out soon. . .
The ducks played a little duck joke on us last night. We couldn’t find them at dusk to put them away: they’d just disappeared into thin air. For a fox to have come and taken both of them in broad daylight without leaving any trace seemed almost impossible, especially as both the dogs were around and would surely have barked. We looked all round the garden and in the woods, in the barns and outhouses and all sorts of nooks and crannies but no sign of them.
This morning I looked out of the window hopefully, in case they’d arrived back during the night and were pecking away in their run, but no. Thinking sadly how much we really are the kiss of death for ducks, I went out to feed the rest of the animals. When I was getting Cassie’s hay from the barn I heard a little quacky noise, and then the male duck popped up chirpily from behind a bale of hay. He looked at me with a kind of “Yeah? So what?” look. He and the girl duck must have spent the night in a cosy corridor squeezed between the bales and the wall of the barn.
Very funny, ducks.
In reality, they were being very clever: right at the back of where they’d slept, I found an egg. Her first egg since they stopped laying in December, and proof that she has recovered from her recent near-death experience with the fox.
It was a gorgeous, starlit, warmish evening, and I was out looking for the dogs when I had this really bizarre, Harry-Potter-like experience: my torch picked out a pair of bright green, glowing, apparently disembodied eyes gazing at me from the walnut tree. I had Maxim on the lead and he wasn’t bothered by it at all so I figured it couldn’t really be an evil witch from the land of the dead come to suck my blood . . . so I continued to stare into the branches of the tree and the eyes stared back, occasionally blinking. It wasn’t scary but it was totally, totally freaky. My first thought was that it was an owl; but an owl would have flown away pretty quickly. What was so odd was that I couldn’t see any form or body around the eyes at all, even when I moved the torch beam. Just the eyes and the tree branches.
I gradually circled down and closer to the tree and the eyes followed me . . . And of course it turned out to be a damn cat — not one of ours — when I got beyond its comfort zone it leapt down and ran away into the night. Ok, that doesn’t sound like much but it was a very weird experience.
Alessio did the illustration for me and it's pretty accurate.
