Spring in Sardinia

Spring in Sardinia. We arrived just on the cusp, and for the first few cool days we thought it had been a mistake. In Olbia we had a ground floor apartment in an old stone and stucco building in the narrow cobbled streets of the medieval center. In the morning, as the Mediterranean sun flooded the nearby port, our apartment was dark and cold. Outside the sweet air of dawn brought birdsong, while we huddled in darkness.

Across from us an older Sarde woman stayed inside her small dark house all day--we could clearly see her flat screen TV on from early morning, what they call the "cathodique religion." She was visited frequently by a small man on a bicycle, perhaps her son. When he left she came out on the narrow street to watch after him long after he had disappeared. Life was titrated in stingy doses through those close cobbled streets, whereas when we would move (halfway through our journey) to Cagliari, to a spacious beach condo of marble and slate, it would burst upon us with an almost unbearable intensity. But we began only at the cusp of it all.

People were taciturn but smiled easily. Walking at sunset along the bay the mountains were etched in crystal air even as a slight haze clung underneath soaring pink clouds that piled into heaven. History seemed to sit like a foreign presence. We heard little about personages, stories or memories. It felt as if those stories were in the villages themselves, in a language we don't understand, and in legendary vendettas and feuds that we could never understand. We saw timeless fields and sheep and newborn lambs frolicking, beautiful brown and white cattle on idyllic slopes.  We felt a remoteness of the land, its people and its secrets.

And then: Spring. Incessantly perfumed air, baby animals that had just been born, dewy tender grasses growing through the crevices in the Nuraghe--and the wildflowers. To my untrained eye, these are but a few of the flowers throwing their fragrances all about us:

Mostly brilliant yellow, in contrast to the indigo and turquoise sea, like the reverse of camouflage, but also: hydrangeas, red poppies, lavender poppies, cacti blossoms in crimson and yellow, succulent blossoms in neon magenta, mimosa, wisteria, blue blossoms of flowering rosemary, yellow blossoms of flowering fennel, tiny pink orchids, some of them striped, bristling stalks of pale star-shaped blooms, sometimes divinely fragrant, in other places smelling vaguely like dog pee; daisy-like marigolds, deep purple azaleas, fragrant red-violet blossoms in bushes of enormous geraniums, the tender heady yellow blossoms of wild freesia--everywhere, but it is called here the flower of Corsica; brilliant red violet jacarandas and similar blossoms on faux-plum trees, hollyhocks and sturdy zinnias of a violent orange; purple thistles and fragrant bushes of marguerites, and red-violet blossoming thyme. And apple blossoms, and the overwhelming fragrance of orange blossoms. I can only name part of what surrounded us. And I'm not even sure of their names.

Then there were the baby animals: mostly lambs, who really did frolic as if their legs propelled them in near somersaults; tawny handsome calves; piglets who ran toward our car while their huge mother backed off; beautiful young asses with markings like antelope.

We stopped by Costa Paradiso, which was once a hippy haven and is now a gated community with international real estate signs everywhere, only to see an immense wild boar and her little babies scamper up the steps of the climbing homes and disappear. They are very intelligent creatures.

A magnificent white horse who seemed like a unicorn--we spotted each other from afar. He galloped back and forth in his space, and fixed me with a direct gaze. I longed for him. We watched each other across a field. Then we drove off.

Puppies tumbled around their fierce mothers, and the stray cats who were not pregnant nursed kittens.

Then we left just as the religious festivities were to begin. Any Sard we spoke with, even our soft-spoken intellectual guides who seemed like scholars with a fierce pride for their island, were excited. They would take part, they would walk in a procession for four days from one church to the next, as mannequins were carried, dressed in finery none of these people would ever possess. It was, to them, being Sard.

But we came only at the cusp.