For the first time in perhaps 15 years, today, I saw the beauty of a windstorm.

Without fear.

The Garden was stolen from me, the link broken. Storms hold no fear today. They will... in days to come. But not today.

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off -- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. "

H. Melville, Moby Dick

There, sums it up nicely, no?

But apart from the morose mood I feel these days, there is more to this plan.
It is becoming a pattern, a recurring thing: I long for a home to call mine, but I don't seem to ever feel home anywhere, at any account, not for long. May be I am more of a natural rolling stone than I thought, although admittedly I wish I could roll away with all my carefully hand painted furniture, and my garden and, most of all, my library.

I lived in Norway for some months in 1999, I remember the heartbreaking feeling of having to chose a mere handful of books to bring with me. And the deep deep joy of the reunion, when I went back to Italy, and in my room, all my books twinkled and winked to me through a thin layer of dust, waiting, welcoming. I felt my brain could expand again. I love the feeling of having to only stretch a hand behind me, to the bookshelf, to pore over the familiar words of my favourite authors, pick a fitting quote, get lost in the flow. Once again. I am a re-reader of books. My favourites are steady friends, that I meet regularly. That is why I generally wish to own them, physically, in a paper incarnation.

If my library is home, then I am in deep **** here: how many books can I possibly pack on one of the Shuttles, among firebox, camping cooking implements, sleeping bags, tent, winter clothes, summer clothes, water canisters, Eric's dulcimer, cat transporting case (we will come to this), assorted tools, watercolour kit, rainproof tarps and foldable buckets, spare tires, spare horse boots, food supplies, inflatable mattresses, and... and...

Well, you get the idea.

The world of books is divided in two main categories to me. Books that I use mainly for reference, and books that are deeply, emotionally "home". Books where I can curl in, and be at peace, whatever may be storming outside. Of these "The Lord of the Rings" is one, as you may have guessed by now. "Possession", by A. S. Byatt is another. The Aubrey-Maturin series is the third big pillar of my paper castle. Now, "The Lord of the Rings" is a mighty tome in any edition, but the paperback I will surely fit somewhere. "Possession", too. Jack and Stephen... now, there's a problem. 20 and 1/2 books. I have a complete edition, divided in 5 tomes, in a box, that is probably the slimmest available, but is still a terrific lump of luggage. By the weight of it one would never believe that it is made of paper. After all the specific weight of paper is not supposed to be comparable to that of lead. It is the density of words in it that creates a little black hole in the universe, I am sure of it. I could probably fit weels under the box, and trail it after the cart. It is probably massive enough to carry some luggage of its own. However tempting the idea may be, I fear a different solution is needed. E-books? Audio-books? It's not the same, I know, But it will have to do.

I had not set out to write about books today. I had intended to reason about home and homeless-ness and exhile. Duh! Curious how such a theme immediately brings up books to my mind.

Ass of Spades

Yesterday evening we were so completely crumbled by the unloading, assempling, disassembling of the Shuttles not to mention the manhandling of the things into the worksop that we were not up to any cooking more complicated than hot dogs, but since the evening was sweet and the light wonderful we decided to cook outside in the meadow, on the firebox.

We had a plan to place to box on the grass this time, to test the impact of the thing on a living carpet and I set out to diligently cut a little rectangle in the turf (well, in the coarse grass, rather) where to place the box. Eric designated that this should be done with the foldable spade he got two days ago together with the Shuttles and that I did.

Now. I am not a soldier, not an outdoor expert, I am a gardener, so I guess I am biased here. Gardeners are after all an eminently sensible bunch of people on the whole. We know about digging the ground and came up with the best solutions for it. I realize that packing a full size spade for a camping excursion may not be practical. But. I don't know what the inventor of this thing was thinking when he (I am certain it was a he) invented the thing. There are some sophisticated mechanics involved in this, so I suppose that some kind of thinking was indeed sloshing arount in the bildge of his brains. But this thinking had nothing to do with digging. Only an opinion, mind. Well, Lets say that I manage to scratch away a couple of cm of top soil and peel back the grass, all the time grumbling to myself about the wonderful array of razor sharp spades in my porch, the three different digging forks and the heavy hoe I recently endowed with a new handle. It was a frustrating feeling that I never felt when cooking on the firebox just out of my well furnished kitchen. Teaches you the difference between ingenious, efficient simplicity, and ridicoulous gadgets.

I am not saying that the foldable spade is utterly useless. I am just saying that the common garden trowel, a modest, ubiquitous item with no bigger ambition than serving its purpose, a thing designed not for hard muscled survival experts but for any housewife with a windowbox, will give you the same service with less hassle.

The hot dogs were very nice. Spring onions finely cut and mixed with a little creme fraiche are the best thing for hot dogs, together with sweet mustard.

I have a foldable spade for sale. Really good occasion.

The Shuttles

The shuttles are home, disassembled on the floor of the workshop, ready for cleaning and painting away the military look; no repairs needed except a few minor thing. SOme worn leather straps, a splintered board.

Damn bombproof swiss engineering. More, swiss mlilitary engineering. Much older than we thought, they were apparently produced in 1918. No rust no rot. They are as sound as the day they were first turned out of the factory.

These things are not the flimsy showing carts you see these days. "You buy this ship, treat her proper, she'll be with you for the rest of your life". You can see that they were meant to go through hell, and come out from it untouched. For a lifetime. Or,like in this case, more than one. The ad stated a weight of 70 Kg. First rule of cart ads: don't trust anything they say about weight. Whatever they say, may or may not bear some relation to the weight of the cart stripped of its weels, shafts, any easily movable accessory and cover, and may be a couple of not-too-essential boards for good measure. But my opinion is that the relation, if it exhists, is thin. We stripped them to the bone in preparation to scraping and repainting, but they ain't 70 bloody kilos, granted. Me and Eric can handle, lift, and flip over these things, but it is not a healthy sport, believe me. The Swiss army was clearly not made up of whimps like us. Those were the days were the carts were made of wood (mostly) and the men were made of iron. Tut-tut.

On the other hand, when they were assembled-for-trial in our yard, they were pretty easy to manouvre around. They are tiny and really agile, once they are allowed to stand like good decent fellows, instead of lounging upside down on a pallet, without weels (duh!).

I love how robust they are: I am absolutely confident that we will grow tired of rugged woodland paths long before the Shuttles will. The scantlings (to put it in ship terms) of these carts are terrific. Modern cars look like cheap tincans in comparison. Pins and clips are all chained to the cart to avoid loosing small parts in the grass. They have solid oak shafts for hitching a horse or a mule, and a single, shorter shaft for being pushed or pulled, or just manouvered around by a person. This shaft is stowed in its own compartment underneath, safely secured and out of harms way. They can be attached together so that one horse can pull them both. They have sturdy, no nonsense brakes (ever seen a Swiss mountain path?). Imagine a governess cart built like a tank, and you are getting close enough.

The Shuttles - in tandem

They smell like the back of every brocante shop I visited in my life. They cut a shabby figure in the garage of the retailer, piled over one another, weels off. Zoe lingered ghostly beside us "Did you pay money for this, sir? On purpose?" I don't know why all these shops smell the same all over Europe (can't grant for the rest of the world). I think it is a bottled "OLD CELLAR" scent that goes with the business. I love and hate this smell. It is the smell of old furniture waiting to be restored, and therefore very exciting to me. But it is also the smell of age-long, mummified disuse. It's a smell of dead things, left behind and abandoned. Time to brush the old dust from our Shuttles.

PS According to other sources this model is from 1940. I have no idea, not being in any way an expert or a collector of military mementos. WHo cares anyway. They serve our purpose to perfection, whatever their age!

Serenity

The name of this blog is Serenity because both me and Eric are so utterly in love with the TV series "Firefly". Whatever vehicle would carry us in our "Gipsy life" to come (or more exactly, our luggage, we intend to carry ourselves, i.e. walk), we wanted to call it Serenity. It ain't much, but it is home.
For a short period we entertained rather lofty plans. A western horse-drawn style Planwagen (a very very miniature version of the all famous Conestoga wagons), crossed our dreams.
Unfortunately such a lovely but bulky thing would limit our choice of paths to rather large and well beaten ways, and that is not what we intended. SOmething smaller and nimbler is in order: we came up with two tiny, ancient things that will exactly do for us: infantry carts from the World War II.
They are too small (and there's 2 of them) to be called Serenity... I guess they will have to be "the Shuttles", lol.

We are fetching them tomorrow. Can't wait to start restoring them.

The Firebox

Taking up walking as a lifestyle sounds very natural, healthy and antropological, not too mention romantic, but the truth is one cannot live of mere walking. One thing I am not ready to give up is decent food. And, yes I do intend to keep cooking my food by myself.

It's curious how some things define "home" much more strongly than walls and furniture, although I am very - very - attached to my walls and furniture. Mushrooms soup and applepie are some of the most essential attributes of the "home-idea" that I can think of.

Walking along the countryside these days, mushrooms (and apples, wink, wink!) are a plentiful and inexpensive commodity. If they could be easily turned into soup in a campfire setting was a different question. We set out to explore the possibilities. We felt very hobbit-ish, I have to admit.

We recently aquired a Liard Firebox from a rather lovely shop:

http://www.absolut-canoe.de/Oefen.php

Our first trial was a grand success.

I was never much of an outdoor person. My parents always liked confortable holidays. Adventure, tents and sleeping bags were never to their taste, I don't think they ever - ever - slept a night out of a solid house, not even in a camper, and barbeques are something done once a year in the backyard, with the fridge and the kitchen processor close at hand. I never learned to start a fire before we moved to this house, but I took to it with a passion. Eric calls me "my little Balrog", I am sure that is really an affectionate nickname (mostly). Well, certainly sweeter than the Mouth of Sauron.


Starting the firebox was no mystery then. I was thouroghly honest: no paper, no paraffin cubes, just a handful of dry leaves, dead grass, and shredded bark. Whatever I could find in the radius of five meters from the box in our back yard. We recently scooped up all the wood that could be any use for the stove, so there were only bits and pieces left, a few overlooked sticks. But they served. Oh they served!

The box is a lovely thing: the concept is startling in its simplicity, and throughly efficient, both in the practice and in the construction. Made of 1 mm thick stainless steel, cleanly laser cut, it's a sleek creature, that packs away in little case and magically unfolds (no pins no screws) into a stable, circa shoe-box size, metal wonder able to safely contain and concentrate the heat of a small fire: a little heap of tiny sticks was more than sufficient to cook our soup in a heavy cast iron pot, in little more time that it would have taken on our hyper-high-tech induction field.



A potof water in front of the box was kept warm throughout the cooking, and the last heat from the coals toasted our croutons to smoky perfection. A hand-crank blender is the only thing missing to make outdoor-no-electricity soup a complete reality. Such blenders exhist, and I *really* want one. A good blender is the only sophisticated kitchen tool that I cannot imagine how to do withou, but it doesn't need to be electrical.

The Liard Box is supposed to be resistant to both rusting and warping. It certainly did not warp so far, amazing for such a thinly constructed contraption. But every sheet is pierced and cut in complex patterns that (I suppose) confoud the warping forces generated by the heat so that the metal is unaffected. They also provide ventilation to the fire while containing it (and the sparks), so that three sides of the box are really safe for sitting while cooking, and most of the heat actually does go in the cooking.

I love this box of ours. Supposedly it can be used to bake bread, and while this task will mainly be performed by the soon to come Dutch Oven, it is still something that I have to try.

My out door cooking career is at the beginning, but it seems promising.

The mushrooms soup:

About 1/2 kg of wild mushrooms.

A medium onion, a clove of garlic.

Olive oil, salt, pepper, stock powder (a tea spoon), 1/2 l water

A few dried porcini

1/2 tbs of fresh thyme, stalks discarded

A few spoons of fresh goat cheese (or creme fraiche, or even greek yoghurt)

Fry the onion and garlic lightly until soft. Add the mushrooms, roughly chopped, the porcini (previously soaked in the water) and fry for 10 more minutes. Add the stock powder, the thyme, and the water. Let simmer for 20 to 30 minutes. Blend smooth, return to fire, season to taste and return to boil. Mix in the cheese, and set aside. Toast sliced bread (or whatever bread you have) over the grill. Serve in mugs or bowls.

I suppose the whole village of Macken is wondering why two adult persons are sitting in the rain cooking dinner on a Firebox, with a perfectly confortable house behind them. Let them wonder. It's good exercise for the brain.

About walking

After the last disaster with our landlady, when rage and worry was threatening to overwhelm us, we went for a walk.

This is significative. It is our usual reaction to quarrels, strifes, difficult moment of any kind.

Walking is healing, and it is a form of healing me and Eric can share, unlike gardening. There is something soothing in the rythm of the walk; the slow change of the scenery, perceivable as landscapes and minute details, distracts the brain just enough to allow some choerent thinking in the turmoil of emotions. It encourages constructive reasoning and conversation.

There is no other kind of travelling with these qualities for me.
Cars and trains are too fast, detatching you from the landscape. It is alienating to travel that fast, and yet motionless. It's a trip all concentrated on the arrival, the substance of the travel made worthless. There is no scope for unfolding complicated thoughts in a car. If I am driving I need to concentrate on what I do (or I should... sometimes I don't, and this is an expensive attitude, although very profitable for mechanics and car sellers). If I am a passenger I am soon bored, and unconfortable, the noise makes talking difficult, the view changes too fast for me to actually register anything, so that in short all my thought turns into a puddle of frustrated and confused misery, and I just hope for it to be over.
Trains are only marginally better. I find a train incourages self murderous introspection rather that clear thought in me. May be it is because the train moves on and on following (more or less exactly) a time table, and its moving has no relation to my will. I always feel fatalistic when travelling by train. The world is comingto an end, and nothing I can do will stop it. This is the usual sum of my train thoughts.
Bicycles are fun for a short while. They give an illusion of free, controlled, organic speed, of conquered superiority. That illusion in my case fades in a matter of 15 - 20 km, when my ass (pardon) begins to feel like something one does not want attached to one's body. More than that and the bike becomes a killer. I long for a closer contact to the surrounding, the tiny creeping sedum by the side of the road, a lovely glade of lush greenery, a curius stone, and there, it's done, my weel misteriously ends up into something hard, I swerve, I curse, and I am down, entangled into my own rucksack, trying to save the camera from harm. It doesn't need to be so bad every time, but it is a concrete risk. I had some really embarassing biking accidents in my time.

Walking is a way of moving around that is right for me. I am less of a danger to myself and others, and I earn something by the process that is more, much more than simply relocating myself from place A to place B.

Why is walking so good?
In the next days, I will have to read Chatwin again. He is guilty, guilty. If you want to live your life in a cosy flat, work yourself to safe (?) retirement, never wondering "What if...?", don't ever - ever - read Chatwin.

The Scary Smile

My life has been hit by minor disasters more times than I can count. It is something that happens all the time I guess. But this time is different. I cannot say, really what the difference is, but I feel like a change in nature has occured. Until last week life could have gone on, sailing through its various troubles with minor course adjustments. No more, apparently. For some reason the back of the ship has broken, and I can't seem to be able to stay afloat any more. A drastic change is needed. Sailing won't do now. It's time I learn to fly.

This could be the "bad novel style" start to this new blog.

The realistic start is shorter, and just plain grumpy. I am fed up.

I discovered that in the last weeks I developed a natural inclination, (and some real talent) to imitate the charming smile exhibited by Bruce Spence as the Mouth of Sauron in the Return of the King. This cannot possibly be a positive sign. Worse: my husband loves it.

It cannot be healthy. But I am putting the cart ahead of the pony... as you will understand, in time.

Where to start the tale? It is a difficult thing. I am 31, and a complicated person, and there is number of things to say, but would you bear with me? Perhaps not. In any case this should not be the story of my life,but the story of how I came to consider to alter it... completely.

I have always been a moss gatherer... can you change and become a rolling stone? Literally?

I alway fidgeted with the idea that exile was my true home. Could that be the truth? Could it be that those roots that always bound me, with a mixture of bliss and pain, to my home and garden will one day grow so thin taht I can snap loose and just be... free?