What Matters
One morning I arrive at her table [in the Orvieto marketplace] as Tomassina is taking cherries, fat as walnuts and chastely pink, from a pasta strainer and placing them on a small, unpolished silver tray. I ask her to choose a melon for me—for my lunch—from the small pyramid of them built up next to a newspaper cone full of dusty blue plums which she’d laid down like a cornucopia. She dismantles the pyramid, pulling and pinching at the stem end of each melon, shaking her head, gazing at me once in a while, hopelessness rising. When she has inspected all of the navels of all the melons she looks at me, a surgeon with tragic news.
‘I have nothing that will be ripe enough for one o’clock.’ Holding up one in the palm of her hand, she says, ‘Perhaps this one will be ready by eight this evening. Surely it will be ready by midnight. But nothing will be ready for lunch.’
Speechless in the light of her specificity, I simply nod toward the melon still resting in her palm. Tenderly she wraps it in brown paper and then in a sheet of newspaper, pleating the ends in intricate origami folds, making a cushion for it. She comes around to the front of the table, opens my sack, places the melon inside. She looks up at me, then, ‘Wait until midnight if you can.’
I need this woman in my life. I need to learn more about melons and much more about timing and patience and what matters and what doesn’t matter at all. I have a midnight melon in my bag, its flesh ripening as I walk in the Umbrian sun . . . .
Marlena de Blasi, The Lady in the Palazzo
Dear friends,
I didn’t meet Tomassina at her Orvieto fruit table. 15 years or more have gone by since Marlena purchased her midnight melon. But I was there on a market Saturday morning this past October. The day lives gold in my memory in a year of incomparable abundance—and of improbable moments that keep me looking for what matters—and asking whether I live what does.
I booked the trip to Italy—my first ever outside this continent—after my good Bozeman friends gave me a European guidebook, a day pack, and money belt for Christmas. Their open-hearted encouragement came in the wake of a Yellowstone National Park concessionaire guide’s cruder challenge. I’d gone on an “easy” group walk around Norris Geyser Basin that late December afternoon. While others kept their footing, I managed to pitch off the frozen path into snow banks half a dozen times. When we got back to Mammoth, I thanked the guide for his patience, and his exact, perfectly timed response was, “I’ve seen worse. . . .” After just a little indecision, I signed up for “Village Italy”—and ultimately made friends with our local YMCA’s treadmills and barbells!
The tour laced 24 of us through Padua and Ravenna, Montone and Assissi, Orvieto and the Umbrian countryside, Chianciano Terme, the Chianti region of Tuscany, Lucca and Pisa, Siena and Volterra, Portavenere and Levanto and the Ligurian seacoast in between, the marble mines at Carrara, pottery shops in Deruta, Lake Orta next to the Alps. With help from millions of adoring tourists before me, I’d pictured the golden sun and sumptuous food. Until we climbed daily up streets that served Etruscans and Romans and Renaissance artisans and a thousand Tomasinnas, I’d forgotten how deep and tangible Italy’s past would be. Or its beauty. My current favorite moments:
- A concert of Beethoven piano sonatas – sunlit notes raining down on us in an ornate, three-story, 19th century music hall;
- Puccini arias lighting a night-dark 12th century church;
- Carrara’s marble mines—glorious and gory for the price humanity’s paid to produce great art and countertops;
- Padua’s Anatomical Theater;
- Portavenere’s seacoast swoop of castle and color;
- Church bells; city gates; shops with sweaters arranged in perfect paint chart layers; shutters; sweet onion focaccia; clock towers from centuries without watches; cascades of geraniums;
- And, yes, Orvieto—from its medieval market to its breathtaking duomo– golden mosaics ; 15th century frescoes brilliant in artistry and intelligence; the stone rope tying us to eternity.
And the whole year’s incomparable abundance?
Some small re-immersions in history: I got to share a road trip with Montana Historical Society friends to judge Montana students competing in our revived National History Day program and to distill themes from the oral history work that Dave and I did at the CPS Glacier Camp 55 CPS reunions for a MHS History Conference session.
The girls: Are enjoying the same geographies as a year ago. Emily, Memo, and Mattie in Boise; Amanda and Mat in Lingle, Wyoming, joined by Morgan and Mija periodically; and Heather and Coby in St. Louis. I hear full-tilt, invested lives all around.
Visitors: After our intolerably icy winter and long, gray spring, Montana put on her best summer dress for cousins and colleagues and college friends and their children. I hope I did the same. What better way to see this land and its history in new ways than through others’ enthusiastic eyes and through our shared histories.
Travel: A trip to Arizona’s blazing sun at the end of April when winter seemed unendurable; an August one to Seattle when light off the Sound was especially sweet; a dozen dazzling Montana road trips—including a post-Italy October outing that let me celebrate the breadth and mountain light of home.
Work: After almost two years of a steady work schedule at Rocky Mountain Development Council, of course it was time to change. In August, I subtracted senior center duties, added hours to my community outreach work, and acquired a great new office mate close to our Head Start classrooms.
Music: Corb Lund & the Hurtin’ Albertans in Bozeman (as quirky and they sound). The Red Ants Pants Festival–a summer weekend’s feast of music on a ranch outside tiny White Sulphur Springs— 2,000 of us celebrating Montana unknowns and song-writing legends Guy Clark, Jerry Jeff Walker, Rodney Crowell. The local theater troupe’s astonishingly great take on Cole Porter.
Friends: When I stumbled off the plane here in Helena, 9:30 at night, 24 hours after leaving Milan, a clutch of incredible friends met me to celebrate. And all of you were there in spirit. At the end of a day, at the end of a trip, whatever our ties—this Italian adventure, family, history, Dave, landscape, work, the magic of helping each other see midnight melons or stand up when we pitch into the snow—you are all what and who matter the most. Thank you for the abundance and the patience of your friendship.
In this dark winter night, in all the seasons of your life, I would wish you the salutation that Marlena heard in Orvieto on the evening before the celebration of the Miracle of Bolsena:
Sleep well and rise early to an exuberance of bells.
