When autumn comes

This was the beginning for me. Even though we had more clouds and rain this summer than any other summer that I have been in Italy, these clouds were not summer clouds at all. Autumn falls… that’s so no matter which culture you belong to, you’ve got the season.

The weather cooled instantly as if someone turned a switch on September 1st. Winds came up and blew the dry dust of summer around. Wasps flew in through the windows and bashed into things. They investigated anything with a scent and often if they landed on something, they died right there and then. I find this inexplicable.

Calabroni are enormous hornets that sound like small airplanes when they fly around. I hear their venom is powerful in early summer, but by now is much reduced in effect and they don’t seem particularly interested in stinging me anyway. They, too, are up to idiotic behavior. One has taken up life on the cable that connects my monitor to the computer, right where it fastens to the monitor. Is he getting some kind of a charge from it? Is it warm? Another flew over my bed for hours last night. Nothing interested him. When he came close to my head I felt a breeze on my cheek.

Several moths took up positions on the tilework behind the lift-up glass cover of my cooking range. They were alive, but listless.

I saw powdery explosions on my just-cleaned full length mirror in my bedroom at the bottom of the stairs. I finally figured out that moths were flying into it at full speed. Presumably although they lost a lot of wing powder they survived, because I do not find dead moths underneath.

Some nights so many wild animals gather in my garden and vocalize that I can’t sleep. What are they saying? Why are they there?

These are all mysteries. Life is mysterious. I find it mysterious that people in the USA can’t understand that no one thinks that healthcare system is good except those who believe the insurance and drug companies. I find it mysterious that professed Christians who have healthcare coverage don’t care that some 40 million do not. I find it impenetrable that Berlusconi is playing the clown on the national and international stage and still Italians support him, even some I respect very highly. Asked why, I was told that he had arrested several top Mafiosi. He arrested no one. The police did, and they did it after years and years of work and after cleaning out some of the courts– the very courts that Berlusconi is trying to make ineffective so they can’t touch him.

Watching the sky provides a calming reminder of what is among all the mysteries of what isn’t or is or who knows? And it costs nothing.