Battle for the Backyard
When you walk through the door of Casa Cugni, it transports you to another time.
There’s a slanted tiled roof, the light comes in strange ways and makes strange shapes on the distorted stone walls. You start picturing the life that used to exist: a kitchen with a stone oven to make bread and cook, a work room with a giant volcanic millstone and an iron press to make olive oil, a storeroom for odd objects (strollers, bikes and extra chairs) that maybe aren’t used so regularly, a backyard to grow small vegetables, fruits and herbs to eat.
Everything covered with a thick layer of dust.
It’s incredible. Like being in a museum, you feel bad about moving or touching anything.
What do we do with this place?
It’s a pity to move or change anything.
But without moving or changing anything, it’s impossible to sleep inside.
(Also, it costs a lot of money to even think about rebuilding anything. Money we obviously don’t have)
And so, we started with the backyard.
One of the first things we did was to try to figure out where the backyard was/what it looked like.
The plants had grown out of control and made a little forest; when you exited the backdoor you were blocked by a living green wall. The plants had grown on top each other, in the walls, on the walls, through the walls and started to take over the little cement patio as well. It was difficult to understand where the boundaries were, if the ground was inclined, which trees and plants were actually growing etc.
It was a battleground of ivy and cactus.
Using Massimo’s grandfather’s tools (an axe, a sickle, a hacksaw and a pair of small shears), we started at the closest identifiable tree at the edge of the cement patio and started cutting a path.
We were cutting for a month.
A month of battling cactus and ivy for victory over the backyard.
We started to see some walls, started to understand the lay of the land (literally).
And we found some cool ass things.
The ivy had grown everywhere and literally started to distort the trees.
There was ivy that had grown on top of each other making strange, beautiful wooden sculptures.
We found almond trees being suffocated by the ivy that had completely distorted: one was going horizontally on the ground with the branches shooting out vertically.
The cactus had grown in such massive sizes that a part of the backyard is still inaccessible because they are too dense and too many to fight.
A month of cutting and pulling and digging.
I’ve almost always lived in a big city, and so this kind of work is not something I’ve done before.
You start feeling your body, start understanding your muscles, while you’re outside in the sunshine, in the clean air, silence except little animals and birds and the sounds that you are making.
At the end of the month, we built a fire and burnt all the cuttings.
The backyard had been half reclaimed.