I ordered a second phone line and some jacks here weeks ago. I was told they might happen today, so I wait. Once I have these I'll be able to get online NPR or work on my blog and still have a phone line free.

The days have been very dry and crisp, not cold. The nights, though, drop into the teens. Every morning a sea of ice crystals glitters around us.

I have my little pickup truck back now, and the van is being repaired. Later today I'll jack up the truck and put snow tires on it. I hope they're still good. I'll probably have to inflate them. They've been waiting for this truck to come back online since 2001.

There's a petition up to prevent the Feds from shutting down all the little rural post offices around here. I suppose rural delivery will continue, but, unless we can put a stop to it, soon anyone between here and the Oregon border who doesn't want a mailbox on the highway will have to drive to Alturas get get their mail.

Always I have loved being in the cold cold, and took comfort in snowstorms and weather that might prevent anyone's approach to my little havens. Lately, though, my thoughts turn more and more to warm places. An article by Lucilla Borio in the UK magazine Permaculture, which I bought when I was in Chico that day, has triggered this shift, I think. A group of 15 Italian and German eco-idealists pooled their resources and bought an abandoned village in Ventimiglia, Liguria, Northern Italy. The village was called Torri Superiore and comprised a 17th-century stone labyrinth of 162 rooms built on eight levels into a steep mountainside. What has me dreaming of warm places isn't so much this, but what they are doing around the structures. In the 1600s the rising ground behind the village had been terraced and shored with stone to create planting areas:

"On the countless narrow, steep, fragile terraces we have found real treasure, the local gold: hundreds and hundreds of old, overgrown olive trees, planted all along the valley."

They've set to work shoring up these collapsing terraces. The trees had been ignored for ages, and they've been bringing them back into production, and after four or five years of pruning and attention, the trees are bearing again, and a cottage industry of sorts (so far, all products and byproducts are used on-site) has been born.

I keep thinking about living in the warm, in a stone house, with olive trees all around, and the scent of rosemary, and sun-baked earth, and people's voices nearby, and gardens.
10:09:08 AM    comment []