[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_72

Sustainable this, sustainable that, Stacy Alaimo, 2012

Winters in Northern Italy were very harsh, at least until twenty years ago. From my grandparents' room window, you could see Pian Cavallo, the mountain that marks the beginning of the Alps for those living in the Po Valley's northeastern part. Whatever time of year you looked at it, Pian Cavallo was always covered in snow; even in summer, you could see its tallest Spiers glittering white against the blue sky. Over the years, the snow has visibly decreased, so much so that the mountain peaks only turn white around December.

I remember that one of the beauties of winter, for me, was walking on meadows covered in frost and feelingit crunch under my soles as if it were not grass but threads of thin glass. The other great fun was skating on the frozen canals. I didn't have skates, and I went there with regular shoes; for this reason, I had a special supervisor, Aunt Susanna, who probed the thickness of the ice by testing it with her weight before letting me go, pointing out the free access areas and then supervising me from the dam. My great enthusiasm was not linked to skating - I have never liked sport in any form - but rather to exploring an uncommon place. I used to see the canals from above, from the bridges; the ice made them walkable, and this allowed me to study all the plants that grew along the banks of the water, spy on the fishes that moved under my feet, and observe everything that had remained trapped by the frozen sheet.

The canals stopped freezing when I started to get older; at the time, I took it as a sign that my childhood, fading away, also brought with it this happy moment. The summers also changed from year to year, becoming more unsustainable.

Today, humidity reaches very high percentages, and the temperature touches 36° C for endless weeks during July and August. In the 1990s, humidity was a relatively recent phenomenon in the Po Valley, and, above all, it was episodic. Such high temperatures, moreover, were only recorded in Southern Italy, never in the North.

Today for me the idea of spending a summer period in Italy has become a nightmare, rather than the dream it used to be: summer was for me the most beautiful moment of the year because you didn't go to school, you could swim in the sea and spend all day playing football. And then there were the outdoor dinners my family organized for their - very numerous - relatives and all the people who helped them with their work in the fields. A long table was set up in the field behind the house; the women spent the day in the kitchen after having been working with their men in the field. On the other hand, the men rested in the shade of the house, commenting on the weather and the harvest and having long chats about politics with a glass of wine and a cigarette in their mouths. I remember that we used to eat a lot. There was so much food on the table that there was no room to move. And everything that was left over was packed and given to the guests, always with the same ceremony: "Here," "No, it's not needed," "I insist," "Thank you, but you don't have to," etc. When it got dark, the most magical moment of the day arrived: as the lights went out, the fireflies lit up. And so I used to run to get lost in the darkness of the fields, chasing these mysterious little animals, trying to capture them only to feel them scamper between my hands and to spy their light from the cracks I opened between my fingers. Then, exhausted, I would lie belly up on the radiator of some car parked in the courtyard, waiting for the second show of the evening, the shooting stars. The sky was clear and dark, and there were many stars. I felt dizzy every time I saw one fall as if a part of me was falling with it. The desire to continue feeling that thrill kept my nose glued to the sky for hours.

Back then, summer evenings were incredible, and you needed a heavy shirt to wear. That's why I lay down on the radiator: the heat released by the car protected my back. In that warmth, between a shooting star and a wish, I fell asleep, with the chatter of the adults in the background mixing with the roar of the cicadas.

Today, many people sitting at that table are no longer there. The ties between people in country communities have changed, becoming looser, partly because the older ones, who carried on the tradition, have died, partly because the economy has changed, shaping people's psychology towards greater individualism, partly because women have stopped doing all the work that tradition imposes on their shoulders alone.

Today, summer evenings are spent indoors with air conditioning. The atmosphere feels like a radiator that dries your saliva and takes your breath away as soon as you set foot outside the air-conditioned rooms. The fireflies have disappeared; they were the first to disappear, together with the ice, the snow of Pian Cavallo,and the older men sitting at the head of the table. The stars, no, they are still there. But it's hard to see them. Humidity and pollution cover the sky with an impenetrable opaque veil. And even when it is not there, the expansion of population centers and the increase in lights make it almost impossible to see over the roof of your house.

When my mother told me that, when she was little, goldfish swam in the ditches, and turtles were even found in the garden at home, I felt bored. The world she described to me seemed like the one illustrated in storybooks, and her chatter, the nostalgic ramblings of a person no longer young. For me, goldfish and turtles were the decorative animals you found in the fake swimming pools of the shopping centers, not native animals of our territory. Today, at just thirty years old, I have the same conversations, looking at a recent past that seems very distant.

While I was reading Alaimo's article on the concept of sustainability and on the mechanisms that people are adopting to survive the apocalypse that is galloping towards us psychologically, I thought about all these memories, of all those emotions that, however small, however silly, manage to make a moment or a place precious, building our emotional maps and our respect for life.

The ice under my feet, the heat of the radiator on my back, the fireflies in my hands: it was everything that made me feel at home, that made me feel part of the world I lived in, and that, above all, made me perceive that same world as magical. If I think about the children who will come, I feel a strange bitterness at the thought that they won't be able to ice skate or look at the stars in the evening, that they won't know how it feels to see the night dotted with fireflies’ intermittent spots. It is a strange bitterness because it contains the uselessness of my testimony, like my mother before me, and our displeasure in the face of a change that seems ineradicable and unstoppable.