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From Jonathan Buoni, Marketing Associate:

Last month, while I was waiting impatiently for the first hint of spring, I remembered another time that I had pondered the changing of the seasons. It was three years ago, and I remember it vividly. I was hiding out in a small town in Tuscany named Lucca. One particular day, I felt especially far away from my family and friends in America, and from the life I had left behind. It was a cold, rainy afternoon in March during one of those periods where the sun seemed lost forever. My body felt colder than the stones that paved the ancient streets, and my spirit was damper than the terra cotta shingles that covered the medieval buildings.

The quiet solitude of my small apartment and the echo of my own thoughts became too much for me, and I reluctantly opened up a copy of the International Herald Tribune that I had picked up earlier that morning. I went searching for a taste of the Anglo world, and for something to bring my American home a little closer. "News from home," I thought, "This should help me feel connected." The news articles didn't help, but the title of an editorial caught my eye. "A Corner is Melting" it read, compliments of The New York Times. The very first line brought a smile to my face. The piece wasn't about New York, but Berkshire county, the place where I had grown up, home to Tripod. As I read the editorial, the miles between Italy and home were reduced to nothing. I suddenly smelled the very earth the author described. Here's what I read:

It has been as ugly in the Berkshires as open, undisturbed country ever gets. One day the temperature reached 47 degrees Fahrenheit (8 degress Celsius) in the afternoon, with steady rain. The ground was frozen and still partly covered by snow, which had turned porous and grainy. A dense vapor clung to the tops of the snow banks. Water streamed across the earth and pooled in every depression. In every ditch, every hollow, a tea was steeping, a cold sepia tea of last year's leaves in a basin of discolored ice.

There is a limit to how ugly Manhattan can get in that kind of weather. The light can only fall so far in the rain before buildings begin to glisten, and oddly, the city never feels quite so immense, or so familiar, as when the fog closes in. But on a cold, wet night on the edge of the Massachusetts woods, the opacity is shocking. This isn't the deep sky darkness of December or January, when the emptiness of space seems to reach right down to the horizon. This feels like some suffocating, damp antithesis.

On late October mornings, when the grass suffers a brittle frost, the earth remains soft, although it tightens underfoot. A few days ago conditions were reversed. In the fields, the long grass looked like Ophelia's hair, caught by the current in which she drowned, yet there was nothing pliant about the earth to which it was rooted. No give at all. The ground was still frozen solid.

On Thursday, however, all at once, the soil would take the print of a foot. Not a deep print. A walker could feel a thin layer of soil sliding over the frost-bound dirt beneath it, like the flesh of the forehead over the skull. By the next day it was treacherous walking, mud over shoes in the wet spots. On drier ground, there was suddenly a remarkable sense of leniency. The soil felt almost buoyant, like a gymnast's mat. It invited a fall.

Winter always feels like the still point in the rotation of the seasons. In these tentative days of mid-March, one never knows if the snow is simply in remission. But when the frost starts to leave the ground, when a day with heavy fog holds the light longer than a clear day in late December, nothing is still any longer. A corner of the planet is melting.

Although this was not the first time that I had been so far from home, it was the first time that I had realized that time did not stop just because I wasn't there. Winter was beginning to give way like it always does, like it did again a few weeks ago. While reading this article, I felt like I could hover above that familiar ground and observe that long-awaited metamorphosis. The author's description was so vivid, it was as if he had painted those familiar sights and sounds right before my eyes. Up until that moment, I hadn't felt connected to what was happening at home. After reading it, I knew that no matter what was changing in my life or at home, nature was taking its traditional course. I felt connected again. I was comforted.

I wonder if moments like these, arising from solitude, will soon be lost forever. If I were in Italy now, I would have my laptop with me, and family and friends would be only an e-mail away. I would have local news from local sites to help me feel connected. "What a shame," I think at first. But then again, I guess it's a small price to pay to have the world at my fingertips.

—Jonathan

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Read more "Letters from Tripod" in the archive.

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