Living in Sicily
What didn’t fit in this month’s letter from Sicily
I sat down to write this month’s letter of everyday life in Sicily, as I always do. I was thinking I would tell my subscribers about a birthday lunch in the Sicilian hills near Corleone. I did tell them that story. But it led me back to a village we visited years ago in South Africa, which in turn reminded me of Borgo Parrini, not far from Palermo. I told them how Parrini had come back to life after years of abandonment, and how we went into its bakery looking forward to buying bread but left empty-handed after spotting flies beneath the glass counter. I reported on the eleven new…
The day my garden turned into a lake in Sicily
One Saturday recently we woke up to find a lake in our garden. It had appeared overnight. The cracks in the earth created by the summer heat were gone. Replaced now by shimmering water that was soaking the ground and moving towards our actual lake as the ground fell in that direction. Thankfully, our own lake has an overflow pipe, otherwise the damage to the property could have been far more extensive. Where had it come from? With no rain for months, this was not that. On closer inspection, the water was gushing from a large pipe used for agricultural water, provided by the province. It is a service we…
