RECONNECTING

I’m thinking of how Persephone’s eating of one pomegranate seed bound her to her new home in Hades. At certain times of the year, like her, I am able to go back and forth between homes. For me, however, this is paradise, and to mark my reconnection to my *new/old home, I need to start weeding. Then I know I am really here.

*I feel as if I need to think about why I found myself using “new/old” twice in my first blog of the summer. In terms of the new/old, gauzy, flowered culottes mentioned above, I realize they have some connections to the “in love with France, at home in Italy” subject of my blog. The bottom half of an old outit that I had bought in Paris when I was teaching there in 1988, this resuscitated garment was on its maiden voyage to my new home in Umbria.


 It is also new/old in that this is its first trip anywhere in a l-o-n-g time. During the decades it was waiting for both of us to end up here, all of the elastic went out of its adorable, smocked waistband, leaving it wearable only by someone with a 52” waist. I am not quite there, yet…. But just before leaving for Italy, I found a lovely seamstress who was able to put new elastic in not only this, but also in the Paris skirt that matches my magic “flying” shirt—the one that keeps the plane aloft, and without which I do not dare travel. That shirt must have really been lonely on all those trips without its bottom half. This time, both joined forces to get me here safely,and in style. Superstitious? MOI?

Now, about this being my new/old home. Well, of my nearly 64 summers, this is just the third in this renovated ruin that dates back to ??? Let’s just say that there is plenty of evidence that the Etruscans used to hang out here. And if you ever saw the only two “roads” by which anyone can access this house, you would know that I do not exaggerate. But as old as I am, I feel renewed whenever here, which is why new/old, like my skirts that have a new lease on life, seems to fit.