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Snow in Umbria.

Article Excerpt
Call it fate. Call it nature. Call it luck.



Call it unrepeatable euphoria. Once in a hundred years, there's a freak snowfall in the olive groves of Umbria and I, by dint of miracle, was there. (The windfall that had paid my charter fare: an actual publication.) Even the moon colluded in my spell of perfect fortune-- full that night, or one night shy of full, deploying all its silver on the overthrow of silver olive leaves by silver snow to capture in their triple silver thrall the footloose ghosts marooned at Trasimeno. And I was scheduled to leave the very next day-- on a non-refundable ticket--from Ciompino, which meant that I would have to make my way (after hitching six kilometers to the station-- unplowed--a brave trucker took me on) through that elaborate blankness into Rome, undaunted by its profligate amalgam of incompatibility and union, the mild vistas I had learned by heart trammeled by this mesmerizing upstart, my mute but intimate companion on that static one-way crawl to Rome. Each stalled motion of my leaden train, another used-up portion of my lifetime's unexpected share in that terrain-- so shot through with sun--once it came up (I hitched and caught the local in pitch darkness, dawn broke as I changed for the express) I yielded to its dazzle the entire trip-- half convinced that it was inexhaustible and half that it was pure hallucination, in no...

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