Completely Sophs

A snippet from 'A thousand days in Tuscany' by my 'author of the moment', Marlena de Blasi...

Later, we drive over the mountains to Sarteano. A jaunt to watch the sky change at end of a day. Just beyond the road’s peak, I notice a bramble of blackberry bushes, their rain- washed fruit preened in the leaving light.

‘Can we stop to pick some?’ I ask.

We climb down into a mud trench. There is a miasma of berries. Branches and tendrils wound and woven together and bound up in thorns, the berries overripe and dripping juice at the barest touch. We pick them, carefully at first, placing a berry at a time in the bucket we keep in the trunk for such events until we taste one and it’s so sweet, a besotted sweet, sweet like no blackberry before it and so we scrap the bucket and go directly from hand to mouth, picking faster and faster, damning the barbs of the vines now, laughing so the juice runs out of our mouths, trickles down our chins, and mixes with the blood from our thorn- pricked fingertips.

Thunder, great ponderous cracks of it. Raindrops. Large, plopping ones, healing ones that feel like tenderness. Climbing up out of the ditch, we head for the car with every chance to outrun the storm. I don’t want the dry port of the car. I want the rain. I want to be washed by this water that smells of grass and earth and hope. I want to be drenched in it, made supple in it like a shrivelled fruit in warm wine. I want to stand here until I’m sure that my body and my heart will remember the privilege of this life. Never minding that we are cold and wet all over we tramp through the skirring furies of the storm and I think, once again, how much I want what I already have.

Marlena de Blasi, a thousand days in Tuscany