Seize the Day Before the Coronavirus Goes Away

I live in a little borgo (borghetto) in the Italian countryside. It's a clump of houses set in the middle of cornfields, olive groves, vineyards and woods. Across the road from my tiny house there's what I jokingly call a housing complex. It's a big piece of land with a fence around it and inside are four single-family homes. The grandpa and grandma live alone in one and their three kids live with their families in the others.

My favorite neighbors are Emma (9) and Bianca (6). Yesterday they were running around the complex in their red rubber boots searching for tiny wildflowers to make a tiny bouquet for their mom. It would have been fun to help them pick, but it's off-limits due to the coronavirus lockdown. They know they have to keep their distance from other people, but wanted to talk anyway.  They stayed on their side of the fence and I, certain there'd be no traffic, sat down in the middle of the road on my side.

Emma and Bianca's only comments about the pandemic were that they couldn't wait for the coronavirus (pronounced corona vee-roose) to go away so they could pass that silly gate at the end of their driveway. That's all. There was no need to plug my ears or interrupt the gory details because the coronavirus conversation stopped there.

They told me they had homemade pizza the night before because their mom said that right now they couldn't get carry out.  I had frozen pizza (I have no yeast) for the same reason.  They said they couldn't get to sleep because they had watched a scary cartoon (not the scary news) but in the morning their fear had passed (instead of grown). I watched an old DVD of Dead Poet's Society (L'attimo Fuggente, which is the Italian translation of the Latin term Carpe Diem, which in English means Seize the Day).

Emma told me about last night's cartoon and Bianca included the important details like when the giraffe farts (my mom wouldn't let me say that word). When the story was over, I asked Bianca about the hole in her pants.  She said it happened climbing a tree, but Emma insisted it was when she fell off her bike trying to ride no-handed. They asked me how to say bici (bike), mazzolino (bouquet) and albero (tree) in English and just to confuse them I asked how to say pizza (pizza) and spaghetti (spaghetti) in Italian.

Important conversations like these have been lacking in Italy for more than a month. Everyone wants to keep themselves free from the coronavirus, but I'm one of the few trying to keep myself free from the coronavirus news.  Friends update me on the important stuff, but if there is news I can live without, I prefer to live without it. It's the only way to keep living.

When the girls were called in for lunch I sat in the road for a few more minutes thinking that we are the only three kids in the borghetto doing our best to live without the virus.  Just like Emma and Bianca, I'm waiting for the day that they can pass that silly gate. I'm waiting for the the day it will be unsafe to sit in the middle of the road and the day we can all get back to dangerous stuff like riding no-handed and climbing trees. But until the coronavirus goes away, our only option is to seize the day. And hopefully we've all learned that's what we should have been doing all along.