Mountains

      I ran this morning, on the first single-digit day in the countdown to my departure. I didn't think I would. I didn't think I could. I got home late last night. 1:15 AM, my neighbor, Fernando, told me whenI greeted him today. He watches me like a hawk. He raises his eyebrows and corners of his mouth and wags a finger at me when he reveals the hour at which he clocked me returning home on any given night. When this first happened, I didn't know if I should be offended or creeped out. But I came to see he is just looking out for me. Last night I went to the opening night of my favorite summer festival - Valfino al Canto, the Fino Valley in Song. It is a musical unleashing of traditional Abruzzese music, dance, song, food, and crafts that floods the streets of tiny Arsita and sweeps everyone in them up in a tsunami of jubilation. The whole community prepares the town for this event two or three days prior to its start. Men, women, children, teenagers, old folks set up tables, assemble decorations, prepare arrosticini, pasta, and coatto (mutton slow cooked in tasty to ato sauce) and oversee the construction of puppets to be used in the opening procession. I was willingly swept away in the festivities. I ate a lot. I drank a lot. I danced a lot. I slept a little. My body was not in a running mood this morning.

Spontaneous song and dance

Content Participant

         Then I threw open the shutters of the bedroom window. That has seemed an innate gesture since the first time I did it on my first trip to Italy. It harkens back to an archaic memory, one that has been buried so deep and for so long in my DNA that the memory rings like a tuning fork in the core of my being. It echoes all the gestures of all the people who did them and stored them in their own DNA to be echoed in me. The open shutters revealed the mountains. They are clear today,
calm and steady after a summer of tumult. Capricious or angry or sullen or unexpected storms. The most recent seems to have been their last release of pent-up winter force. The rain was a wide, grey, impenetrable curtain twisted every which way by winds that bent Signore Gambacorta's eight foot almond try nearly to the ground. Lightening pierced the ridge just south of Montefino, narrowly missing impaling its bell tower. Hail tapped insistently at the bathroom door. But for the past few days those massifs have been gentle giants. Only a puff of a cloud resting on a peak or a shoulder tells of the past rants and  rages.
       The mountains are my strongest and steadiest companions here. I had to run towards them, like a child on her first day of school who knows she'll soon be torn from her mother. I ran towards them with an open heart. They stayed as they were, accepting me, guiding me. I was hot, sweaty, at times a bit giddy from the effort. But I kept running. Running and
running past my usual turn-around point. Wanting to run I to the arms of those mighty, scary, powerful, soothing beasts. On my way back, panting, soaked, leaving droplets of salt water in my wake like Hansel and Gretel's breadcrumbs, I recalled that the author Ignacio Silone had remarked on the mountains of his native land. Back at the house, I looked up his words:
"   The destiny of the people living in the region of Abruzzo.....has been defined mainly by the mountains...the people of Abruzzo have experienced a common and singular destiny, characterized by persistent loyalty to their economic and social
ideas, even beyond any practical utility; all of which would be inexplicable unless we consider that the constant factor in their existence is the most primitive and stable of all elements: nature. Yes, Signore Silone, and nothing defines or dominates nature like mountains. I saw, heard, tasted, felt this primitive and constant life force in the exuberance of of the singers, the joy of the dancers who pulled anyone and everyone, including yours truly, into the dance to partner with them in that joy, in the blurred lines of boundaries as strangers became dining buddies at the food tables, in the laughter and stories that erupted there as we connected in any language that served us. The Abruzzese people are those mountains and
the mountains are those people. In nine days both will be gone from me. I had to run. I had to throw myself in the mountain's embrace. So it can sustain me for whatever waits me in the months to come.

The Gran Sasso d' Italia mountain range