To Subasio!
/Gabe worked on this post for quite some time, learning about active voice over passive voice, how to pace a story, and how to provide detail to pull a reader in. I think he did a great job!
To Subasio!
I stepped back from our squat plastic tree, hung with borrowed ornaments. Every other Christmas of my lifetime, my family and I would venture into the countryside to cut down our tree, bringing it back to enjoying heaps of peanut butter blossoms and snickerdoodles, all while decorating our new tree with ornaments that are older than I am.
But the Christmas season in Italy is different from that in the United States. As a religious country, Italians treat it as a time of religious observance. Think of it as playing Ave Maria as opposed to a Michael Buble Christmas album or displaying presepes (nativity scenes) instead of wreaths. Certainly Italians still decorate in the way that I’m used to, but they do so more as a side note.
This is how I found myself, on December 5th, putting up a very short plastic Christmas tree. Since we are only here for a year, the tree and the ornaments came with the house, and don’t have the same emotional significance. The last ornament hung, we stepped back and gazed upon our work. Breaking the silence, my dad suggested we drive up Monte Subasio to try and find some natural decor to spruce up the tree (ha).
It was a fairly warm day in Spello, so I wouldn’t have even brought a jacket if my mom hadn’t instited. We drove up the mountain, passing olive groves, fading into towering pine trees, and finally we arrived at a barren landscape with intermittent patches of snow. My dad parked the car at the summit and I got out to take a walk and look for holly or mountain laurel to put on the tree. I stretched and looked around to get my bearings. I scanned the bare landscape. All I could find was dry grass, stones, and horse feces.
Not exactly Christmas material.
But we continued on anyway, hoping to (at least) find some beautiful views. Suddenly, a huge wind picked up, rustling the bare trees. I, being the shortest, stumbled sideways and almost fell. The winds were the painful kind, the eye watering and jaw hurting kind. My hair, uncut for nine and a half months, stung my face and eyes like needles. We soldiered on, determined to get at least something to decorate with (at that point I was all in favor of turning back, having very few layers). We climbed up onto a grassy ridge with a stunning view of the Apennines, the second tallest mountain range in Italy. These dramatic peaks dwarfed our small mountain, which seemed like a hill in comparison. These mountains glistened with snow, cascading down their rocky cliffs.
My sister and I noticed an indentation in the earth, almost like a bowl on a ski run. I told my family that it would be less windy in the bowl, as the walls sheltered it from the elements. I battled the wind towards it, my eyes looking deeper and deeper into what seemed like an endless drop. I blinked. Finally I reached a point where I could see the bottom and saw a stone spiral design leading all the way down to the base where there was a loopy artwork of rocks.
Later I discovered the bowl is called a “Mortaro,” a large sinkhole that water flows into and ice forms. In the centuries past, townspeople climbed the mountain to harvest the ice to sell in the markets. After marveling over the sinkhole for several minutes, we continued along the ridge, wind blowing me to the very edge, almost to the point of falling off. It reminded me of the time I visited the top of the Empire State Building. By this point the wind had frozen me to the point where my fingers were numb. Bushes, leaves, and sticks flew across the grass. We decided to move back down to the car to drive a bit further across.
Up here it was even colder, I sensed the cold even deeper, but somehow I couldn’t help but notice that it felt magical. The wind brushed the dry grass, birds flew overhead, and I could barely make out snow dusted mountains in the distance. It felt like we overcame the cold and now I saw the beauty.
It’s hard for me to see beauty when I’m preoccupied with other enjoyable things. However in this case the bitter cold made the experience all the more entertaining. I realized then that when there is something unpleasant happening around me, in this case the bitter wind, it helps me focus on the beauties that you might not ordinarily recognize. I looked deeper than just the superficial beauty and began to genuinely enjoy myself. Up here it wasn’t as conventionally beautiful as the alps. Here I wasn’t on top of a towering mountain, I saw no lush snow covered forests. But, in ways that I can’t convey easily, the experience meant more, the memory will last longer, because the unpleasant forces made me fully present in the moment.
As I stepped inside our house, I thought about what we had done earlier. With a new eye towards what I had just learned, I stared at our squat little tree. It was beautiful.
