When you are living your best life, you don’t always stop to let it sink in.
I think I’m living my best life, although I barely stop to notice it. We are surrounded by mountains and look down into the valley to see a gorgeous winding green river. These are constants. Occasional mist or clouds around the mountains lend an air of mysterious beauty to the ridiculously awesome panorama.
Other constants include lightly soiled clothing. Accustomed by birth to the conveniences of a middle-class life in the United States, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I’m not as spoiled as I would have guessed. There are no electric dryers in our little mountain town, so after I wash our clothes in the tiny complicated washer hidden behind a curtain in the bathroom, I have to hang everything out to dry on our balcony. I have become quite intimate with every color and size of clothespin out there. Only once have I forgotten to bring in the clothes before it rained. That once is today, and I arose just too late at 6:20 AM to stop the deluge from soaking our shirts and underclothes. My current plan is to simply wait it out. They will be sodden by nightfall but hey, maybe with 24 hours of wind and the occasional burst of sun, a miracle will happen tomorrow. In the meantime, I don’t entirely hate this ritual.
Another thing Americans who are comfortably well off take for granted is central heat and air, neither of which exist in these medieval buildings, where two feet of stone is intended to provide all the insulation you could want. Sometimes I want more, especially on cold and rainy days like today where the temperature will not rise out of the 40s. On the other hand, this is as cold as it gets. It might drop to freezing overnight but that will only last for a few hours. Normal winter days hover at around 50°F, and we have probably at least 300 days of sun a year. We are not far from the Mediterranean, so I suppose that means our sun is largely Mediterranean. It is certainly warm enough in the winter, a far cry from the Kansas City hellish winterscape that we we recall fondly as we gather around our beautiful blue ceramic Godin wood-burning heater. Everyone raves about these particular heaters, but while ours is gorgeous, it barely heats the air around it. Still, it pleases me aesthetically. Beauty over function, I suppose.
We’re usually not here in July and August, when it can get hot. Not hot like Kansas City summer hot, but uncomfortable without air-conditioning nonetheless. Our little abode stays cool enough with the help of standing fans. I have yet to see a ceiling fan in this village, which I think is less a failure of imagination and more a problem of electric wiring. We actually have a 40 amp fuse box which is supposed to provide all our power needs. Electricians here are prohibitively expensive. We have fantasized about paying for an opulent working vacation for our friend Jorge, an electrician, to see if he can figure out how to rewire the house. I think there are visa or immigration challenges with that idea.
Our little town boasts a tiny grocery store and a cheerful husband and wife who run it. They also take extended vacations, and there is no one trained to take their place while they are gone. The wee shop is simply shuttered, and I wonder how the inhabitants of our little village who do not own cars get by for two or three weeks at a time.
Depending on the day of the week or whatever hours the proprietors have chosen that particular week, you can get good food or a cup of coffee at three or four different places in town. We often drive to another town, in Italy or France, for more lavish meals. I suppose sitting very close to the sea and watching the waves roll in while sipping wine and noshing would also go under the rubric of living one’s best life. Yet I’ve learned that it is possible to take beauty for granted if it stretches out before you, one lovely twilight succeeding another. I try to remember to summon awareness.
The people who surround us love their little festivals, and they often perform ancient dances that please and confound me. The steps are not difficult, but I am not the extrovert my wife is. She will simply throw herself into the dance and cheerfully perform as many missteps as it takes to get through a tune.
A little town just down the mountain had a Christmas festival this week, and it was quite enjoyable walking down the main street stopping at the little stands to sample or buy homemade wares, passing merrymakers sipping from tiny plastic glasses of wine. We returned that evening to a fireworks display, which, while short in duration, was the best I have ever viewed. That was because I was about 50 feet from the place where the fireworks were lit. They literally exploded over our heads, to our oohs and ahs of delight. We were standing next to the local fire trucks and pompiers, the friendly firemen. I might have been even more tickled than my son Jonah. Certainly I was louder in expressing my enthusiasm.
Jonah finds his best life in traveling. The destination doesn’t much matter to him. He enjoys the travel, whether by car or train, bus or plane. He enjoys tramping about town, holing up in an Air B & B, visiting markets and eateries. And he really enjoys churches. Over here, it is just a question of degrees of ancient glorious church architecture. We rather expect to be wowed when we step in the door.
Although he is young yet, at this point in time Jonah plans on an around-the-world adventure when he graduates high school. I am still hoping that if he chooses college, he will go to the Sorbonne, where education is practically free, rather than saddle himself with the absurd debt college grads take on in the United States. Whatever he chooses, I hope he continues to choose his best life. It took me long enough to do that.
