Lying Fallow

It's mid-winter here in Puglia and life has settled into a quiet routine.  I'm teaching three days per week now in Ostuni and work is building up.  On my non-teaching days I'm continuing my desultory decluttering campaign, filling a bin liner most days with grimy unwanted junk, much of it coated in dust and hairs from our little dog Milly, who died three years ago.  With each sack dragged to the communal refuse bin, three hundred metres up the road, I feel a bit lighter.

I feel like I'm lying fallow, hunkering down in our little stone house recharging my batteries for some new and as yet unspecified expedition into the outside world.  Sue is studying hard for her Masters and with not much money coming in we're leading a frugal lifestyle with our main outings being country walks and Friday trips to Locorotondo market.  It's been good to renew our relationship with the countryside around here, which after ten years still continues to grow on me.  Even in winter it's fertile, the little patchwork of fields dotted with rows of growing things like brocoli, fennel and artichokes.  On many days it's grey and wet with low cloud scudding over the limestone ridge on which we live, but then, the sun breaks out and suffuses the land with a pure bright light you never see in Northern Europe.  On the sunny days you can stand in a sheltered corner and feel the Sun warm your aching winter bones like magic.

A couple of times we've had a big black slobbery lodger called Jairo.  We take him for long walks and at night he sleeps on a trampoline-like bed at the foot of ours, snoring and farting contentedly into the small hours like an old man.  Sometimes it feels like Dad is in the room with us, rather than in his new hospital-type bed, which he is winched in and out of by his homecarers.  Sometimes when hobbling around the house I catch a glimpse of this old bloke looking at me in the mirror, bald and creased and wrapped up against the cold and I think surely I'm too old to have a Dad.