This pure luck

A fluke, pure luck. If Sonia had planned this photo, had framed it, metered it, the image could not have turned out better.   It had been taken by a serendipitous and unfamiliar version of herself : Curious Sonia, Artistic Sonia. Romantic Sonia. That was one of its small miracles.

An evening in a Tuscan village. Two lamps, one above the other - the nearest, a white hot flare against the sky. The other, honey warm like a lover’s secret, hangs from delicate wrought iron drawing the eye to a corner where a steep lane bends to the right. Stone walls in terracotta hues glow in the lamplight and fade to shadow. Even now, Sonia can still feel the rough surface of the alley walls radiating the stored warmth of an Italian summer day. In some places the walls narrowed to the width of her outstretched arms, and as she walked she could brush the stone with fingers of both hands as people had done for hundreds of years before.  There’s a single window, like a closed eye, in the wall of a house, as if the village was devoid of life. Yet out of shot, she can picture the old woman in black sitting at her open window overlooking the piazza, watching the activity, silent and inscrutable.

A concert event was being set up as Sonia took the photo.  Rows of white folding chairs were lined up on uneven cobbles, a rickety scaffolding built as a stage for the orchestra. The bustle was nothing to do with her. She relished being able to turn her back on it and focus only on the photo opportunity.

Yet even as she marvels at the image, she acknowledges the metaphor, the cliché. Framing tiled roof peaks, beyond the mystery of the unknown path before her, the evening-blue ridge line of the distant hills, as familiar to her as the Taieri and the Maungatua, calls her home. She resists, strains against it. What did she expect, Sonia wonders?  That she could leave life behind unreservedly? Beyond this village that was like nowhere she had ever been, as real as the hills, was life waiting to be resumed. Not yet, not yet.  For now, there was only this fluke, this pure luck.

Rosemary McBryde