My Moon

    October is my birth month. As usual for this unusual year, the weather was sensational. My moon huge and clear as a bell. Thankfully, my birthday was celebrated very low key and almost slipped by unnoticed.
     One would expect that such perfect conditions would set the stage for a tranquil setting where one could write peacefully, reflecting on all one's good fortune and using the creative time to improve conditions in the greater world.  But disruptions always have a way of shadowing bright plans, and that most valuable commodity, time, is the first casualty.

     My good fortune includes Bob Henry. He is a subject all of his own and one day I'll have the time to devote a proper description. Bob belongs to my remote past in Hartland, Wisconsin where I grew up in my High school years. He was classmate to and friends with my brother Matt. He has been staying with us here in Italy since the middle of September. He arrived on the same day that his daughter was being sentenced due to a drug related mishap in her apartment. Bob's got 'issues' most of us can't imagine, and he doesn't deserve them. He asked to be excused from Workaway obligations and, in fact booked himself with Dan and Miranda up the hill as a bed and breakfast customer. Nevertheless, he devoted countless hours to our welfare and showed up at evening meals bearing wine, flowers, enthusiasm, conversation, and dishwashing. He drove us everywhere in his spanking clean rental car and took our other workaway refugees under his wing. We are big fans of Bob Henry. Luckily, Bob's stay overlapped that of Bryn and Lisa tying in two diverse portions of my history.
     A new Workaway volunteer arrived hot on the heels of Bryn and Lisa. Giles got his room back and Tom, the new guy, moved into the camping trailer. This always requires a flurry of bed making, room cleaning and laundry service; but luckily Bryn and Lisa didn't have enough time to get a good mess going. New volunteers always need some adjusting to with their needs for food, comfort, computer access, electricity adapters, physical space, conversation and a job description. Giles, who fits in easily, has a seemingly endless capacity to exhaust all tasks placed before him. It takes a keen mind to organize the jobs to keep ahead of him; but with the added manpower of Tom, management became my main task. I'm not a good manager. Ask anyone. Further, Giles works best by himself. Our best manager, Alex, when faced with a full house, becomes a galley slave, imprisoned partly by our own idiosyncratic kitchen methods. The water rules are so staggeringly complicated that only those fully brainwashed by the underlying philosophy can possibly understand how to flush the loo. Helping out in the kitchen, with it's added layer of food resource complexity, just isn't possible for the average volunteer. So, rather than helping with the goal of constructing the underfloor heating system on the ground floor (which is the main goal at the moment), Tom got put to work moving the growing mountain of firewood that Bob Henry was producing. On the 15th, Tom moved on to another workaway host which happened to be on the next hillside.
    A week later, Bob went on a solitary bike ride to nearby Panicale, where, guess what? he broke his shoulder falling on a downhill corner. At my familiar hospital, he opted out of surgery in order to make his flight back to the states bound up like a mummy! Poor guy!
   October finished with a visit from some of our most encouraging friends, Robin and Steve Cavagnolo. Last time they were here it snowed in the night and we had a very crude woodstove to keep things going. This time we were at least able to provide a finished room and a warm supper, but the highlight was a day at the rustic public baths below San Casciano dei Bagni, a little spa town overlooking the Val d'Orca to cure Robin's hangover!
      Below surface of the diary of vacationers and visitations another story was brewing. Since Alex and the girls returned from their visit to the US, a disruption in our household slowly became more inevitable. Perhaps it was the experience with the luxuries of American life colliding with the lack of progress in our work here, but we began to discuss our arrangements with Marco, our "resident builder," until it came time to announce it's termination. A difficult moment because Marco, Elda and ourselves had developed a close relationship; but it was clear that Marco, Elda, and Martina had established themselves as a family and that Marco's time was no longer ours alone. Luckily they found a vacancy in another apartment on the leCoste Estate so their disruption was minimized and a moving date was set for the first of November. We were getting our first floor back along with our dear apartment, it's bathroom, shower, kitchen, modern windows, and insulation - three years after its completion. And I was getting my old job back as principle builder.