For the past 10 years or so, everybody we know has enjoyed some form of warmth during the winter months at the touch of a button. Many of our Italian neighbors are facing $1000 per month heating bills if they live in a house like ours and push the button, but then some people seem able to burn that kind of money. Especially for warmth. After food and clothing it's shelter, after all. For the past 10 years we've been warm in winter only if we are prepared to cut, split, haul, and dress in lots of layers. With windows glazed in picture frame glass and casements with half inch tolerances, a cold and windy night requires some shivering upper lip. But after 9 years or so (one in England, one in South Umbria, and 7 here in West Umbria) we've actually hardened to the task: order in 35 quintale of lumberyard scraps, let it age for three years, get Bob Henry to saw and split it, and then keep warm hauling it up two flights of stairs to the one warm room in our quarters.Then, two winters ago, we noticed a wonderful change. Our kitchen was being heated by more than the occasional sunny day. It was Elda downstairs living in our finished guest apartment and keeping it toasty warm with her own wood fire. Our kitchen floor was her sitting room ceiling. This was a new level of luxury for us. So much so that we hardly noticed when our own fire began to ease to embers. All that survival instinct panic was slipping away and winter seemed not so serious.
Well, this winter things have changed again. We still have the wood stove, and Bob Henry sawed and split a mountain of fuel; but Elda and her fire are gone. She, Martina and Marco moved into their own place on the other side of the estate and took their wood stove with them. I wanted to move into the apartment; but the cold, vacant rooms required us to wrestle our own wood stove into the apartment along with a new stove pipe. Tough decision since it would leave us stoveless upstairs and the apartment already has underfloor heating (that is, there are pipes buried under the paving stones, but there's still no heat source). Further, the clean and bare rooms are ready for a summer vacation rental or two if we could keep our greasy mitts off.
We moved our stove in. We moved a few kitchen utensiles, but we decided to continue to sleep upstairs. And we committed a travesty. We bored holes in our lovely ancient walls and installed a modern heat pump to take advantage of our solar electricity. It looks like a big, white air-conditioner mounted on white, metal supports 10 feet up the back wall. It's decorated by white insulated pipes unsuccessfully hidden in white plastic conduits. When the sun shines, we push a button and it pumps hot air into the apartment. In summer it will pump cool air into the apartment. If we watch our meters, the heat is free and there's still some left over for the world. But it's the ugliest thing you've ever seen.
