The longest winter

On one of the days of the lockdown, I found myself in front of a pumpkin, but not the Halloween one, luckily canceled by the emergency. No, a pumpkin like those of the past: as big as a giant cabbage, full of protuberances, perfectly assembled, made into regular wedges, similar to slices of watermelon, full of signs of a beautiful, good, healthy nature. I have observed it for a long time. Very long.

I reflected yesterday's values: patience, silence, substance, creativity, contemplation, poverty and wealth, dignity and humanity, faith and hope. They are those of our fathers and mothers who, born in war or immediately after, have breathed the misery, the nothing that was on the table to eat ("the scent of anchovies"), non-existent transports, afternoons and evenings without end. But I seemed to see the frankness of the smiles of children or adults, of the wealthiest or of those with nothing. I saw their eyes radiant with happiness; I could hear the laughter for centuries old stories. Almost all of them had clogs on their feet: those reshaped and resoled by the cobbler with a piece of hard leather, fastened with rough nails. But they were all serene, children and adults: they understood that, like pumpkin, you have to know how to wait a long time: eternal minutes, endless hours, endless days in order to then be able to pick the fruit and transform it into soups, risottos, fried, velvety, stuffed for agnolotti and sweets.

What days those! No one would ever want to relive them so as not to see men again, in winter, spend the afternoon beating the scythe with a stone to make it sharper for the summer or immerse themselves in those hours fiery and bare during which people went to the countryside with water and vinegar in the haversack. Furthermore, none of us would like to savor those past winters with clothes, especially coats, turned inside out, shortened or elongated, and cloth bags cut out in the corners of torn towels.
I have observed the pumpkin for a long time, a very long time.
I have seen the impatience of our generation that has experienced neither misery, nor wars, nor the melancholy of those "San Martino" and not even the "moves of the twentieth century" when, on a cart, we went to another farmhouse with little money and a lot of fat. Today, this existential impatience prevents us from experiencing the new "curfew" as a way out of the biological war we are experiencing. We run, we overtake with the car without a reason, we swear, we protest (sometimes even rightly), we get angry about nothing and we do worse. We learn from our elders, from that generation that left alone, like in Bergamo, on military trucks. Let's learn the superfine art of patience. We learn from the pumpkin that is there in the meadow, abandoned by everyone for weeks and months, but in the meantime it does not give up to grow, to acquire flavor and shape, to become mature, in discretion and recollection.
The same moods that, in the surreal days of the coronavirus, we should learn to grasp, are: silence in front of the world, the richness and beauty of life, the smile and innocence of a child, the stupendous mystery of breathing , the hope of faith. It is a bath of humility, of essentiality, of sharing, of fraternity, of love for nature, so well understood by Pope Francis in Laudato si'.
We are prisoners in the house but it will pass with fear, we cannot run who knows where to buy but we have the essentials and perhaps we begin to appreciate it more: like the manna in the desert, like the pumpkin, a poor but alive, beautiful, nutritious fruit that it has overcome, in its path, everything from rain to fog, from drought to snow to get there, where I found it, the true image of life. It reminds me of the large piece of wood that my grandfather used to put in the fireplace after Christmas, before going to midnight mass. When he returned he had filled the rooms with heat and light like the lamps of the wise virgins in the parable. Like the pumpkin, even that piece of wood will help us to welcome the Lord who comes in this long winter, so extraordinarily poor and gaunt, but true.


Gian Mario Ricciardi
NP December 2020