the big catch-up

Season's shifted, time to blog. The trees aren't carrying that tentative idea of green anymore, they're brash with it. This little paved town is sprouting more grass than it knows what to do with--it bursts out of gutters and chimney pots like hair in an old man's ears. Wild poppies are coming up in ones and twos along the roads at the edges of town--they're that headfuck red that seems like a source of light, not a reflection of it--like a light shining through from another place.

I spent Easter on an alpine lake with the other teachers. Beauty in all directions, with the mountains rising and rising around us, far too high to be real. After winter, we've all got too much energy in us--do you realise how much fun it is to throw stones at a pylon--little waves lapping around--and hit it? Ting! Tung! It's not from the wrist--you have to throw with your whole body.

On Easter day we had the idea of going to mass on the ancient church on the island. There were so many nuns--really young nuns, hunched old nuns, all singing. We four squirmed guiltily in our pews, eyeing the patch of sunny sky we could see through a single clear pane--when they started communion we snuck out and ran twice 'round the island in sheer relief. It was a week of frisbee and guess-that-film parlour games. We drew cartoons of everyone we work with. Paul's picture of me was of an indistinct shape hunched over a laptop behind my locked classroom door. Appunto. We ate violet-flavoured gelato and got sun stroke playing mini golf. We opened tins of beans with kitchen knives and ate them with the plates propped on our knees, lying on deckchairs.

I like having frisbee- and parlour-game-partners. I like that any walk through my town takes me past a few friends' doors, and that I can actually ring the bell and find them home. I have spent the year comparing this town unfavourably with Sydney, but things like this could reconcile me to small-town life.

There's an Australian girl living here, a dancer. We met in the doorway of my hostel when I first came to town--I held the door, said prego, and she picked my accent. She dances with a company called Aterballetto. Last week I managed to see an open rehearsal, and felt very sneaky and privileged. There was no stage, no proscenium, just the wide, white room with barres running down opposite walls. They'd run through a piece, intent, moving like cold honey, or like warm honey, or like metal grinding against metal in a busted machine. Then they'd break to work one move over and over, mugging when they screwed it up, pacing it out in their minds and then flinging back into it again. In breaks they lounged on the walls or drifted absently like dust in the sun, scratching elbows, rolling the balls of their feet against the floor. Francesca got me a ticket to the premiere--it'll be spectacular, but it won't have that fly-on-the-wall frisson.