Orion Magazine - January/February 2012

Orvieto, Italy

THE ANCIENT ETRUSCANS called it Vel- zna; in medieval times it was Urbs Vetus; now we call it Orvieto. According to my address, I live there on that island rising from the fog. I do, and yet I don’t. Depends which side you look at. Home for me is like a coin, with its obverse and reverse.

Obverse is that city on the rock that Etruscans, cardinals, and popes have all passed through. Where the houses have been waiting patiently for centuries to be lived in again and loved. It’s the gra;ti on the tufa walls, the people who greet me every day when I pop down (or is it up?) for shopping or co=ee and who make me realize I still exist, like my lawyer friend who is always reading some ancient Roman author and delightedly tells me about it, or Don Marcello, whose bride is the church of Sant’Andrea. It’s the fragrance of the linden blossoms in June, the smell of roasting co=ee, of wet tufa after a summer rain. It’s the view from Ripa Medici over the valley to my house.

Which is the other side of the coin: that little stone house across from the city, no more than fifteen minutes away, where I spend most of each day.

From here I can watch the shadows creep up to engulf the city in the afternoon, or the morning fog rise and fall in the valley, breaking whitecaps against the cli=. The linden branch outside my window shakes as if it had palsy. The wind passes through the treetops, rustles the bamboo by the gate, bringing me a shower of wisteria blossoms in mid-May. In January it’s the unexpected whi= of calycanthus blossoms from down by the garden. Later crocuses, wild anemones, and cyclamens carpet the chestnut

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

TODAY I SAW A swather laying down a heavy windrow of barley and felt the old pull of harvest. Memories of dust hanging in windless air, the puffed-wheat smell of chaff and broken straw, white hills of oats above a truck box, and a combine roaring toward a horizon.

It’s a life I’ve left behind, but having grown up in it on the Saskatchewan prairie, having been on harvest crews throughout the Midwest, having worked for a dozen years as a grain buyer, I was once intimate with prairie harvests.

My harvests are of the garden variety these days. A tomato picked this evening for tomorrow’s breakfast with toast. A delight that suits.

But I confess to a blood connec-
tion with a ripening field of bearded
barley—the twisting of a fistful of
oat straw to determine dampness,
dry heads of wheat rubbed out in my
hand, a kernel between my teeth to
test the readiness, fat windrows of
canola running around a dry slough, a
stubble field, dirt on my face and chaff
in my hair, a trail to a steel bin, an au-
ger motor, the squeal of the V-belt, a
hopper and shovel and hot Septem-
ber days lying still and dry through
the night; a radio on the dash play-
ing Creedence Clearwater Revival, the
truck’s warm hood beneath my back,
the falling dusk, the flashing lights on
the combine, the timed race to catch
it and the drive beside with a stream
of durum hitting exactly one foot from
the end gate, moving slow toward
the cab; an all-night restaurant and a
Tammy Wynette song coming from
the kitchen, the smell of grease and
fuel after breakfast, a fresh t-shirt and
a new sun shining on a rust-red swath,
the pickup moving it to the cylinder
drum and concave, the rub bars hit-
ting the great rope of wheat, shattering
stocks and heads, loosening a million
kernels from their glumes, the separa-
tors shaking everything free, the grain
dropping through and gathering, the
combine’s flying tail batting straw an
acre wide — and the dust, in warm still
air, hanging forever.

woods before the hordes of dancing da=o-
dils my mother planted years ago gladden
my days. Nightingales mark their territory,
and fairy firefly lights beckon from deep
in the black velvet woods. A fragment of
the night flutters over the trees, and across
the way is the necklace of lights of Orvieto.
My home is here. But also there.