Elemental

Twice I got up in the middle of the night to shut the blown-open French doors leading out to the terrace. The wind all night whistled through persiane; jangled wind chimes, knocked about unseen objects, made cats howl and my dog bristle under covers. It was a storm without rain or lightning, the gusts unexpectedly warm given I dreamed I was navigating frozen tundra, moving against arctic gales. Not once did the heat kick on, despite the sudden blasts of raw air from the terrace.

I’m told such weather is a consequence of earthquakes and I’ve no reason not to believe. There was indeed an earthquake Sunday—mild as they usually are, negligible, nearly indiscernible. The tremor came mid-morning as I lay in bed reading. My house in South Georgia—a Victorian barn—shakes, the windows rattle, when a truck passes on the busy street out in front of it. The rattling windows of this house on Viale Matteotti reached my half-attentiveness as comforting reassurance: You are home. Then I realized the house here is solid stone with no trucks passing on the quiet tree-lined avenue; the earthquake was the third I’ve felt since August. I wasn’t quite sure how to feel about it. I inexplicably liked what I’d experienced: the earth making its presence known, giving its little shudder, reminding me of something primitive.

“Aw, I missed it. I still haven’t felt one,” my friend Michelle was half amused by herself, expressing such regret over having missed the earthquake. She and her husband are restoring an 18-room bed and breakfast in Piandellenoce; the house next door to hers, owned by a dear friend of ours, was rendered uninhabitable by the 1997 earthquake that so devastated Assisi and other areas of Umbria. We shouldn’t welcome these land-seizures and yet they offer us something, a thrill, a moment when the world could collapse beneath us—but doesn’t.

My son, coming in November from L.A. where he has yet to experience a California earthquake, also expressed envy of my being situated on such a lively fault line. “I still haven’t felt one,” he reiterated Michelle’s tones of regret and I recognize that I, too, would feel left out, less in-the-know, had I not somehow been a kind of witness. But how strange we are—to want to live so close to the edge of doom.

This morning an eerie orange light suffuses the living room and I am sure the sun is doing something different, sinking lower to the earth, turning its furnace up, maybe dancing in the way some mystics claim it does in the presence of the Madonna. It has rained since daybreak, a fine misty rain, and now I see that the orange comes from the way the sun strikes, permeates, reflects off the terrace’s wet terracotta. It’s hard yet to know what way the day will go: sunshine is promising, but dark clouds still loom to the east, roiling over the crest of Monteluco, away from us or toward us, I can’t tell.