Tomorrow they say it will rain. The weather is changing. With the first rain after mid-August, old people used to say: the season has broken, as if it were an object shattering — a glass gone into pieces, a cup suddenly fallen to the floor. In the mountains it’s like that: the climate shifts abruptly and in a moment comes back a stronger wind, evenings turn cooler, mornings wet.
Yet the crickets will keep singing and we’ll keep listening from the half-open windows at night.
When summer is fading and holidays are ending, silence returns to the mountains.
“What do you do in winter?” ask those who leave, to those who stay.
We read. We build. We invent. We mend. We wander.
We observe.
We walk.
We stay alone, too.
Because that is needed as well: learning to enjoy the company of oneself.
That’s how it goes: there is the noisy summer and the peaceful time of other ways, other rhythms. Another season for the soul.
Meanwhile, here we are preparing our nest for the days to come.
I’m Maddalena De Bernardi, an Italian freelance journalist and mom living in a small village of the Apennines mountains. Many of my stories begin with a coffee and a question, talking with my son in our day. What was the world like once? What was the world like once? Why do we do things this way? As our grandparents and great-grandparents lived their everyday lives, their stories became intertwined with the great events and figures of world history.
Where will the road take us today? We follow tales through geography and historytravel, writing about culture, slow living and quality of life.
Find The Route is my collection of moments, questions and discoveries: a place to travel through geography, history and imagination, one route at a time.
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