Stormy Weather
By Jacqueline Goyette
July 15, 2023
July 15, 2023
"What is the meaning of life? That was all - a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one."
- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
1. We are lying in bed and we are happy and it is the middle of May, a cold May, a May that is wearing November clothing: fog and floods and stormy weather. Our side of Italy was hit harder than the others, and Cesena, just north of us, is flooded. Entire beach towns hold the sea like a cape, and mornings are spent in mud and sunshine and new found waterways, new lost souls. These are the disasters of everyday here. Floods. Avalanches. Earthquakes. Our house shakes and wakes us up, pushes its feet firmly to the ground and quakes like the leaves on a tree. There are sleepless nights. There are the nights that we slept in the van, you and I, down the street because the quaking wouldn't stop. There are nights when I wonder if the whole house will collapse around me. Will I feel it? Will I wake up, make it down the stairs? Where will we go, if we never wake up?
2. But that is not tonight. Tonight it is 10 pm and we are under the covers and I still love you like I always have. We have been together now for almost twenty years, and I still feel like a child sometimes, like I've grown up right here, in these very clothes. You are fifty-nine -- you were in your mid thirties when I met you, years ago, at the front door of a bar called Le Quattro Porte here in Macerata, when I was a cheerful American student studying abroad and you were out for a drink with your friends. Oh how the years have passed. Here we are, older now, faded and worn. It was your birthday on Monday and we are talking about our own mortality as we lie in bed and your arms are around me and we are both falling asleep. To be fair, I don't say it like that. I don't come out with it, but I nudge you. I pull my body into a curl and hold you, and I ask how many more years do we have like this? Your eyes turn soft. You are older than me but we are both old enough now. Sometimes the years go by in a flicker. Sometimes they go by in a flame.
3. When do we feel most alive? I curl my toes over the edge of the diving board and stick my arms in the air before jumping into the pool at the Y. I run in the fields, arms open, ride my bicycle through the hills of my childhood, skin my knees. I tiptoe under the bridge off Pleasant Run to pick up crawdads, to feel my heels tickled in the soft flow of summer water, to listen to the creek as it whispers and grins. All of childhood makes you feel alive, the kind of alive that you don't notice -- how do I even recognise alive when I've been nothing but? Later in life, it's different. It's after the long training runs I did before my 40th birthday -- not while I was running them, but in the afternoons later when I lay in reverie, dreamlike on the couch and the whole of the room shook and shimmered in summery daylight. My feet felt like they were still alive, after all of it, my legs could tell stories, the places where my skin was pink and raw and proof that the morning had happened, that my body had survived this, and so much more.
4. On a Sunday morning after your birthday party (at the bowling alley in Civitanova -- the only man I know to celebrate with neon friendship bracelets and cheesecake in the parking lot), we make pasta late in the afternoon -- spinach ravioli that we bought fresh at the pasta shop on Corso Cairoli. I make the sauce your mother used to make: 1. Cut up half an onion. 2. Chop a stalk of celery. 3. Cut carrots into little cubes and add polpa di pomodoro, the canned tomatoes you can find aisle after aisle of in the grocery stores here, every possible kind. 4. Add sea salt to the water before you drop the ravioli in. 5. Cup it in your palm to measure it (you show me how). I remember lunch at your mother's house on Borgo San Giuliano, the windows open, the noises of a day drifting in from outside, while water is boiling, bubbling, chopped cicoria is steaming on the stove, the first sounds and smells of Italy that we shared, back when this was all brand new.
5. In Rome in early May we walk through Parco Celio with your brother Sandro and our niece Valentina. Have you been here before? Valentina asks, as we walk through the park, stop in the churches in this side of town. She lives here, but I have my own memories of the city -- from family, from my father's visits, when he stays here for three months in a small apartment in Testaccio. Before that, before my mother died, we came here together. These are the roads we walked, and I can feel the stones, under my feet, like ghosts that have been summoned and rise to greet me. In the trees above us I spot bright green parakeets that are flitting and flying and squawking at us. They are in constant motion, falling in love. They are out of place. How did they get there? Sandro, my brother-in-law, asks as we walk. I shake my head. It feels personal, I say. A question like that.
6. Late afternoon in the middle of May, I think I see my mother in the reflection in the bedroom mirror -- not my face, but hers -- over in the corner, sitting on the chair. I see her out of the corner of my eye and when I look closely, it's just a pile of laundry and a grey dress that's been folded over the back of the chair, maybe the color her hair might be. I wonder what she would look like now, or what she would be doing, why she would be here in the room with me, sitting like that and waiting as I curl my long hair, patient as she always was, waiting to say something, to make a comment, to stand up and come over and run her fingers through the ringlets, straightening them out. The sun is barely here, just one long pale stripe of it along the tile floor. Sometimes I cannot see her in my eyes anymore. Sometimes I forget the shape of her smile. She is gone. It hits me all over again. Forever and ever, she is gone.
7. I ask Valentina on the drive from Rome to Macerata if she ever wonders how she'll die. We're reading questions from a magazine, and this is number 9. Some questions are easier than others. This one is tough. Sandro in the front seat balks and says he never thinks of death at all, but Valentina, at 26 -- she does. She says she thought it would be a car accident, and I feel my fingers curl tight around the seat in front of me. But no. It will be a slow death, won't it? As if living every day isn't slow death enough. But in that moment, I am ever conscious of this life. Of the drive. The sound in the tunnel. The blue black sky all around, with one bright ribbon of moonlight. I can feel it -- pinpricked on my skin, in the tremble of my lips. The whirr of the engine and Valentina's soft voice, her Italian which is the only language that I can think of at the moment. The only words I know. Andiamo. Andiamo. Under mountains who have lived here their whole lives as we move, unbeknownst to them, underneath. Through mass and form and thick of rock, we speed right on through.
2. But that is not tonight. Tonight it is 10 pm and we are under the covers and I still love you like I always have. We have been together now for almost twenty years, and I still feel like a child sometimes, like I've grown up right here, in these very clothes. You are fifty-nine -- you were in your mid thirties when I met you, years ago, at the front door of a bar called Le Quattro Porte here in Macerata, when I was a cheerful American student studying abroad and you were out for a drink with your friends. Oh how the years have passed. Here we are, older now, faded and worn. It was your birthday on Monday and we are talking about our own mortality as we lie in bed and your arms are around me and we are both falling asleep. To be fair, I don't say it like that. I don't come out with it, but I nudge you. I pull my body into a curl and hold you, and I ask how many more years do we have like this? Your eyes turn soft. You are older than me but we are both old enough now. Sometimes the years go by in a flicker. Sometimes they go by in a flame.
3. When do we feel most alive? I curl my toes over the edge of the diving board and stick my arms in the air before jumping into the pool at the Y. I run in the fields, arms open, ride my bicycle through the hills of my childhood, skin my knees. I tiptoe under the bridge off Pleasant Run to pick up crawdads, to feel my heels tickled in the soft flow of summer water, to listen to the creek as it whispers and grins. All of childhood makes you feel alive, the kind of alive that you don't notice -- how do I even recognise alive when I've been nothing but? Later in life, it's different. It's after the long training runs I did before my 40th birthday -- not while I was running them, but in the afternoons later when I lay in reverie, dreamlike on the couch and the whole of the room shook and shimmered in summery daylight. My feet felt like they were still alive, after all of it, my legs could tell stories, the places where my skin was pink and raw and proof that the morning had happened, that my body had survived this, and so much more.
4. On a Sunday morning after your birthday party (at the bowling alley in Civitanova -- the only man I know to celebrate with neon friendship bracelets and cheesecake in the parking lot), we make pasta late in the afternoon -- spinach ravioli that we bought fresh at the pasta shop on Corso Cairoli. I make the sauce your mother used to make: 1. Cut up half an onion. 2. Chop a stalk of celery. 3. Cut carrots into little cubes and add polpa di pomodoro, the canned tomatoes you can find aisle after aisle of in the grocery stores here, every possible kind. 4. Add sea salt to the water before you drop the ravioli in. 5. Cup it in your palm to measure it (you show me how). I remember lunch at your mother's house on Borgo San Giuliano, the windows open, the noises of a day drifting in from outside, while water is boiling, bubbling, chopped cicoria is steaming on the stove, the first sounds and smells of Italy that we shared, back when this was all brand new.
5. In Rome in early May we walk through Parco Celio with your brother Sandro and our niece Valentina. Have you been here before? Valentina asks, as we walk through the park, stop in the churches in this side of town. She lives here, but I have my own memories of the city -- from family, from my father's visits, when he stays here for three months in a small apartment in Testaccio. Before that, before my mother died, we came here together. These are the roads we walked, and I can feel the stones, under my feet, like ghosts that have been summoned and rise to greet me. In the trees above us I spot bright green parakeets that are flitting and flying and squawking at us. They are in constant motion, falling in love. They are out of place. How did they get there? Sandro, my brother-in-law, asks as we walk. I shake my head. It feels personal, I say. A question like that.
6. Late afternoon in the middle of May, I think I see my mother in the reflection in the bedroom mirror -- not my face, but hers -- over in the corner, sitting on the chair. I see her out of the corner of my eye and when I look closely, it's just a pile of laundry and a grey dress that's been folded over the back of the chair, maybe the color her hair might be. I wonder what she would look like now, or what she would be doing, why she would be here in the room with me, sitting like that and waiting as I curl my long hair, patient as she always was, waiting to say something, to make a comment, to stand up and come over and run her fingers through the ringlets, straightening them out. The sun is barely here, just one long pale stripe of it along the tile floor. Sometimes I cannot see her in my eyes anymore. Sometimes I forget the shape of her smile. She is gone. It hits me all over again. Forever and ever, she is gone.
7. I ask Valentina on the drive from Rome to Macerata if she ever wonders how she'll die. We're reading questions from a magazine, and this is number 9. Some questions are easier than others. This one is tough. Sandro in the front seat balks and says he never thinks of death at all, but Valentina, at 26 -- she does. She says she thought it would be a car accident, and I feel my fingers curl tight around the seat in front of me. But no. It will be a slow death, won't it? As if living every day isn't slow death enough. But in that moment, I am ever conscious of this life. Of the drive. The sound in the tunnel. The blue black sky all around, with one bright ribbon of moonlight. I can feel it -- pinpricked on my skin, in the tremble of my lips. The whirr of the engine and Valentina's soft voice, her Italian which is the only language that I can think of at the moment. The only words I know. Andiamo. Andiamo. Under mountains who have lived here their whole lives as we move, unbeknownst to them, underneath. Through mass and form and thick of rock, we speed right on through.
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Jacqueline Goyette is an English teacher and a new writer from Indianapolis, Indiana. She is currently living in the small town of Macerata, in the Marche region of Italy, with her husband Antonello and her cat Cardamom. Her work has previously been published in Cutbow Quarterly, The Cosmic Daffodil Journal, and Eunoia Review.
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