(With a contrary nod to the Oxford comma)
Tauron, Lancia, Dacia, Berlingo, Kangoo, Twingo, Elf, A3, 207. . .
You’d understand that list if I Americanized it: Accord, Elantra, Taurus, Sierra, RAV4, Corolla — clearly, they are the names of cars. The cars in Europe, in France, here in Saorge, are a source of perplexity to me, so different are they from the vehicle names I grew up with. I have long wondered if there was a specific job, the job of Naming Cars, and this person or persons sat around everyday just spitballing: How about Galaxy? Constellation? Stardust? Oh, I know! Pinto! (oy) This is a job I think I would enjoy, for a week or so.
Most all of these strangely-dubbed Renaults and Peugeots and What-Have-Yous are small cars, even smaller than American sub-compacts. They have to be, both by virtue of the teensy parking spaces they are expected to wriggle into, and the price of gasoline here in a non-oil-producing region. About $7 a gallon right now. Feeling luckier, American friends?
I know it’s difficult to feel lucky when you’re “sheltering in place,” home quarantining so as not to catch this nasty Coveed-deese-neuf, as we refer to it here. Weighty issues of grave illness, mortality, job loss can press in on us in the very long day-to-day. But I find that many — probably most — of my thoughts are small ones. Like staring at cars and trying to spot yet another weird name. I find myself caught up in musing on, oh, I dunno, the Great Clothespin Game.
There are no dryers that I know of in Saorge. If I hadn’t spotted one in an Air B&B a few years ago in Florence, I’d think they were banned in Europe. Given the non-oil-producing issue and the resultant high electricity rates, that makes sense. So: We hang our laundry out the window to dry. On clotheslines. Attached with clothespins. And since most of these clotheslines are some distance from the street below, it’s inevitable that clothespins fall. They fall to the pavement — I know, because I’ve watched them fall, from my very own clothesline. And if you don’t go down directly to pick up your fallen clothespins, they disappear. Poof, into thin air.
Except I’ve figured out what happens to these clothespins, because it did not take me long to join in the Great Clothespin Game. It goes like this: I’m walking up the street, and I spot a clothespin lying on the cobblestones. I pick it up, and then I do one of two things. After I look directly upward to see if I can spot a clothesline, I either place the clothespin carefully in a doorway — or I tuck it into my pocket.
In this way, I maintain a rough equivalence between Clothespins Lost and Clothespins Found. I always feel a little frisson of guilt when I pocket a pince รก linge, but it’s not as if I know to whom I should return it. There aren’t many separate abodes here; Saorge is essentially a number of really long stone buildings with many windows and apartments stretched along their length. Many, many clotheslines, and the frequent dropping of clothespins. (Although I also feel a bit of self-satisfaction when I pick up the Found Clothespin and put it where I hope the owner will quickly spot it.) Which reminds me: Elisabetta, I think I owe you a few clothespins. One day a month or two ago, I came outside to find multiple clothespins on my stairs. There are no apartments directly above us, and I was thrilled with my Gifts from the Wind, but now I think maybe they blew from my friend’s balcony. Like her favorite black brassiere did one day (we returned it, after consulting her on our find. I guessed it was hers, since I was sure it did not belong to our nearby, petite American neighbor. Hrmm . . . )
When I’m not joining in these laundry games, I’m out walking along the mountainside, where I often stop to gaze at the flowers. There are so MANY different kinds here, and to my great joy, many of them are shades of purple. Light, lilac-y purple, deep purple, purple shading to blue, purple shading to pink. One of my favorites is a reddish purple, a clumped flower on a long stem that almost always grows directly from rock walls or the rock wall of the mountainside. HOW? I mean this flower doesn’t look stunted, or as if it has a difficult life, trying gamely to poke forth from almost-non-existent soil. No, it looks hardy and healthy, as if it positively THRIVES on its placement. If my Mom had been a flower, I think this is the flower she would have been.
Another flower I really enjoy looks like a tiny daisy. It’s usually white, but sometimes there are lavender daisies growing alongside the white flowers, and peer though I might, they seem to be coming from the same plants. I’m a few parsecs removed from being a botanist, so someone tell me: Can two different colors of flowers grow from the same plant? Because that’s the sort of Petite Pensee that can extend my insomnia.
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