On 23 August, it was eight years since the little house on the main street, at number 106, became ours.
The date is easy to remember because, by coincidence, it is also my grandmother’s birthday. She has just turned 98. There is no way of knowing the exact day when the house began its story, in 1850 or perhaps even earlier, so its “birthday”, the day when we raise a glass of wine to it, is the day when its story continued with us.
“Became ours” is only a manner of speaking. Saxon and Romanian families have called it home throughout its long existence, living within its walls through joys and sorrows, beginnings and endings. Now we are here, but this long-lived house will belong, who knows to whom, when we are no longer here. Seen this way, the house seems in fact to belong to the village, and to stretches of time far greater than those contained within our small lives.
This year, on the 23rd itself, we arrived in Alma Vii in the evening. We were with some old friends, all of us tired from the journey which, in August, somehow seems longer and slower. But the light was beautiful, and I suggested that we walk up the cart track, where I knew that beneath a sky scattered with small clouds we would see great round bales of golden straw, countless gentle ridges of hills, and forests in the distance. That idyllic view has always had the gift of shaking off the numbness of a long journey and the weight of so many complicated things I have carried with me without meaning to.
Perhaps it was chance. Perhaps it was something deeper and harder to understand. I do not know. But that evening, on the hill, a gesture from someone in the village made me feel, deep in my soul, that I was finally where I was meant to be.
Throughout my life, I have had, and will probably always have, a kind of liberating detachment, or perhaps a sickness of the soul peculiar to those who are born and live in big cities: that feeling of being equally foreign wherever you are. It gives you the strength to adapt anywhere, but it can also make you feel alone everywhere.
And yet, in that sunset light, on the hill, for a moment I felt that I belonged there. Out of the corner of my eye, I would say, if the soul has eyes, I glimpsed something important and difficult to define. A kind of harmony brushed my shoulder in passing, then melted into me and filled tiny and infinite empty spaces in my cells.
It was Mihai’s gesture. He is a man of this place. He and Simona, to our great good fortune, were our first friends in the village. If they had not been the people they are, perhaps we would never have had the courage to become so deeply attached to Alma Vii. For a long time, they were the only people we knew there. And we thought then, as we still do now, that in this little corner of paradise, they were exactly the right people to find.
Mihai knew we were up on the cart track and came to meet us. Of course, he did not know that it was exactly eight years since we had bought the house, a house that Simona, his wife, had first pointed us towards. A mountain of a man, in stature and in kindness, he brought us an old roof tile, saying simply that he had thought it might make us happy.
That was all. Simple and natural, without the noise of unnecessary words. And we, too, could not bring ourselves to disturb the light and quiet of the moment with any noise of our own.
What an extraordinary gift, this two-hundred-year-old roof tile, on a day that could not have been more fitting.
That small moment on the hill is, in our lives, a great and luminous one. A moment when we felt overwhelmed by Mihai’s kindness, and by the kindness of all the people who have chosen to be our friends. A moment when we felt that, however difficult things had sometimes been, the road that had brought us there had been the right one, and that all along we had somehow been held by the hand and kissed on the forehead.
That our wise builder had always been right when, at just the right moments, he told us that we were not alone, that the road was not accidental, that the strength did not come from us.
In this vast world, where we have so often felt hurt and lost, there is this small patch of earth where we feel loved and protected, far beyond anything we could ever deserve.
The end of a full summer. At AlmaCalma, old friends and new have come from near and far. Our parents have come. From every corner of the house or garden, something left behind by someone dear to us seems to smile back.
And we feel as the trees of Alma Vii must feel when their branches are heavy with fruit.
