Vita a Samothraki

What can I say about our life in Samothraki, I wake up whenever the sun decides to wake me up -what if it rains? I sleep in, what else?
We like to have breakfast in the garden, because outside is warm while inside, between the thick walls, winter is still lingering. Outside is spring: things happen!
Bees greedily suck from the Cabbage yellow flowers, which never made the cabbage and if it is Colza it will never make. To the beehive in the back yard a second floor was added, soon bees will be many -did you know that if you want to move a beehive you have to move it at least 4 km away from the initial point, otherwise the bees will go back there and you end up with a empty hive? Well, I didn’t know-.

After breakfast I like to have a tour of the garden. I grew up in a world where you don’t need to be able to recognize a small carrot plant from a parsley one, or a turnip one from a strange salad -or the plant that the snakes eat from spinach, but this is another story-. And, without any surprise, I’m not able to tell the difference between any of this plants. Did you know that after a while the rocket leaves become some strange pod? What is inside this pod? I don’t know yet. Did you know that the Calendula flowers close up as soon as the sun goes down? Yes, I also knew it, but have you ever seen them doing it?!

I was asking myself what I could say about our life in Samothraki. I can say that potatoes don’t grow in well piled up hopesack inside the supermarkets and that digging out carrots from the ground is not so easy. I can also say that hens every morning make one egg -and every morning is a surprise- and every hen makes the egg of one specific color, and not always of the same size, and the yolk is Orange -yes, with the capital O- not yellowish, and chickens get eaten by weasels, and here is when the men are needed, and the hen house, not to mention Stefano the cock.

No house is a house without cats. The cat Portokali decided that the neighbour was eating more meat and moved. All the female cats got pregnant. The Bufa gave birth inside the chimney, 2 Bufine, and she is happy. Manula gave birth in front of the door, this morning, and the mii-mii of the first lilliputian kitten woke us up. And after another one came -and his placenta- and another one and another one again. And us staring. And at every mini blob that she delivered, my eyes were blurring with tears, because have you ever seen a cat giving birth? Mini moles that yet don’t know much about life.

In the afternoon is nice to sit in the sun making clay balls. Inside every ball there is a small seed, so this balls dried out in the sun will be thrown here and there and when there will be the right condition for the seed to sprout, it will sprout and it will become a small plant. And all this small plant are all so damn the same. At the university I attended Political Geography, I don’t know what it taught me, I don’t remember, waisted time, it didn’t teach me how to recognize a sprout from another, waisted time.


We learned how to tan a goat hide, black with two small white spots -Erika-, to work on it for two days and to burn it at the last step, the smoking -I already said that a second floor was added to the beehive? There, this and the smoking of the skin are two simultaneous events. Its complete destruction a slightly succeeding one-. Then Cecilia came and it’s brunette and beautiful, it was a pleasure to tan it and the Squaws were working quite hard to get all those hides soft, just like me, but they were working buffalos I was working goats. Involution.
And here there is the sun. Not that in Milan there is no sun, but here there is more. And during the daytime the telephone rings in vain: from the garden we cannot hear it.

And today is the 1st of May, which is holiday, and it’s time to go.