The clocks have gone forward, the witches and the pumpkin lanterns are behind us. We slide into November, the month of the dead.
The first of November is All Saint’s Day. The parish priest sent me a card saying they would remember my beloved father in mass. Â I cannot think of my father as dead, but only that he is not longer suffering.
In Rome people used to take candles and picnics to eat at their loved ones graves. I like Italian graveyards. They are sociable places all the dead put on shelves with fresh air and views not buried in the damp earth.
I have always loved  Italy in November. The streets are emptied of blow-ins, the cobbles shine and welcoming interiors begin to glow.
It rains.
The November rains are different to the end of summer monsoon with its crashing thunderstorms and the sighs of parched earth. The  November rains are hard, no spitting, no drizzle or mizzling, none of the half hearted dampness of graveyards. They are fierce, passionate, life giving  water pummelling the ground, changing roads to rivers. When they are done, the sun comes through rain washed skies, as bright blue as in summer.  Quenched, warmed, plants leaves unfold again and bask in the short days of autumn sunshine.
A week before we arrived BB came up from Rome to collect some winter clothes. The dark roads are quiet now,  filled with drifting leaves, people shuttered inside. She was driving her friend to see Lucca, the  torrential rain no deterent for someone here just the once. At Ripafratta railway station they caught sight of a wolf. It was huge, grey almost white, dragging a carcass across the road. Thankful of being in the car she stopped but it had disappeared into the undergrowth. Imagine a lone white wolf, and bloodied carcass appearing out of torrential rain, stepping out of a fairy tale into her path.Â
If I ever wrote a ghost story I would do so in November when the mists drift silently threading through castle ruins, when doors bang shut somewhere in the villa, when the chandelier glass tickles with footsteps over head, when ungodly hollowing and groans are heard throughout the house. When  we can snuggle under a blankets, in front of a smokey fire.Â
But I don’t need ghost stories to feel like the old, the weathered, the undead. Noooo, for that I have the fruit of my loins. We said that Archie and BB, (Mac being stuck at work), could have a belated 21st Birthday party at the villa during the University half term. Now, in my time  I did perhaps have the coronet of Party Queen. I have indeed crooned into a microphone, danced on tables, drunk the house dry in my time, albeit that I have always loved my bed. GS can out-drink and out-party any one I know. Sufficiently lubricated he launches to a dance floor like a truck with failing brakes.
I did not expect 19 carefully selected ladies and hockey players in their early twenties to be quite so…raucous? Ye Gods.
It was lovely to have them. It was lovely to be able to share this milestone. But, crikey.
The first night, they drank the entire wine stocks dry before starting on their duty-free Vodka and Limoncello. I feared lives would be lost with the hot tub and November pool swims. At 3am I was dreaming that I was in an asylum and that the inmates were rioting and trying to escape. Once awake the sounds turned out to be real. I went down the to find my son standing on the kitchen chairs I had upholstered in lemon damask. He and his friends were singing a ‘song’ to raise the dead. A troop of howler monkeys could not have made a worse din. GS? Partied like a teen, slept like a baby.
The second night, the glitter mics were out for more Kareoke. After this died down, once again at 3am I was awoken. Drunk twenty year olds beneath me were arguing with the articulation of the sweary parrot on YouTube. I called BB, silence fell in the room below me. ‘Go to bed’ I growled. So the twinkle-toes went upstairs and tiptoed around bouncing the beams to that the chandeliers tinkled and swayed and by 8am the next morning some of them were thinking of going to bed.
GS? Partied like a teen, slept through it all.
The third night after three days without sleep, they defied the Lucca rains and then returned drenched to crash in front of ‘The Holiday’ GS? Fast asleep.
But it was my Achilles heel, tennis, that was the deepest cut of all.
Once my darling tennis partner and I played often but equally often I was injured. So what possessed me to think I could play a woman a third my age and probably a third my weight? Who wanted new balls – like I’m happy with flat wet ones that don’t go too fast. So I tried to raise the dead, raise the spectre of the girl who used to run around the court and leap around like a wild salmon.
Oh, it was fun. I even managed to get 2 games across two sets. I even walked off court rather than lie in the clay waving a white flag.
In Italy, they say that back ache is a ‘Colpo Delle Strega’ that a witch has hit you with a stick. Â Well I think that stick was a tennis racquet.
I had an emergency appointment with a chiropractor who said that my jaw was out of alignment, my neck seized up, my skeleton twisted, my arms, and legs different lengths and tennis wasn’t exercise but ‘sport’ and I should lay off the carbs, and that means no morning croissant. What!Â
A bit of load cracking and human origami later, that’ll be Euro120 and come back on Monday.
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Quiet has descended once more on the villa. We miss the sheer energy and larger-than-life madness of the twenty one year olds. Gradually the beds have been made, the stickiness has disappeared from the floor and the bottle bank has been emptied. My tennis racquet is safely back in storage.
The  groans, the oohs and ahhs around the villa?  That’s the groans of me  lamenting attempting to find my lost- or maybe only mislaid – youth.
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2 Comments
Love, love, love your writing Pia! You’ve transported me right back to the villa in November, but I’m glad I visited in quieter times!
Thank you so much- last year was such fun too! X