Last year the cinghiale trampled my zucchini. At first I was delighted to know there were wild pigs just outside my front door and did not care about my mangled courgettes. Then it happened again, this time to the lettuce. And again, to the carrots. The cinghiale would trot up under cover of darkness, snuffle and forage around for the sweet delights I had planted, dig and stamp with their cloven hooves, bite and snaffle their way along the row of delicacies, thus destroying all I had created in one swift frenzy. So this year I got a fence. Sam went off in search of useful things with which to deter the saboteurs. He came back from the scrap merchant with twisted bedheads, rusting grills, wrought iron flourishes, bent gates, things once made by hand and since discarded as usless. He began, with care, to cut and join them into some kind of order. Soon my fence emerged and as dusk fell and the cinghiale were heard snorting in the bosco, a strange thing happened. It occurred to me I had seen my fence before. I ran inside the house to check. Placed on the piano was a 1950s postcard of our village, admired because it depicted a building, photographed in the heat of summer, with a brand new crazy-paving style fence, only we knew the fence was no longer there. By a curious twist of fate it was here, in my field, and with a new purpose befitting of a fence; to protect my strawberries from those greedy Italian piglets.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Miracles of Le Marche: 3. fate of a fence
Last year the cinghiale trampled my zucchini. At first I was delighted to know there were wild pigs just outside my front door and did not care about my mangled courgettes. Then it happened again, this time to the lettuce. And again, to the carrots. The cinghiale would trot up under cover of darkness, snuffle and forage around for the sweet delights I had planted, dig and stamp with their cloven hooves, bite and snaffle their way along the row of delicacies, thus destroying all I had created in one swift frenzy. So this year I got a fence. Sam went off in search of useful things with which to deter the saboteurs. He came back from the scrap merchant with twisted bedheads, rusting grills, wrought iron flourishes, bent gates, things once made by hand and since discarded as usless. He began, with care, to cut and join them into some kind of order. Soon my fence emerged and as dusk fell and the cinghiale were heard snorting in the bosco, a strange thing happened. It occurred to me I had seen my fence before. I ran inside the house to check. Placed on the piano was a 1950s postcard of our village, admired because it depicted a building, photographed in the heat of summer, with a brand new crazy-paving style fence, only we knew the fence was no longer there. By a curious twist of fate it was here, in my field, and with a new purpose befitting of a fence; to protect my strawberries from those greedy Italian piglets.
