From Sequins to Sackcloth Weekly Summary: Week 1

The sequins are all gone except for a few hiding between the couch cushions or under a rug pad. Those memories linger but the sack cloth walks on.

As we stepped back. onto the Via Francigena a voice in my head screamed: “Oh, we are doing this again?” It was particularly weird because this question, in my mind, was posed in a British accent, a cross between Alistair Cooke and Stewie from the Family Guy, with just the right mix of rhetorical skepticism and condescension. Edward recounted that the night before leaving for Italy I woke him shouting “What the F&%$” in my sleep.

I may have had some insecurities about the walk that I needed to resolve, but I can tell you after one week walking in the Po valley: we are good. The routine is reassuringly similar to Phase 1. We wake early. Getting dressed is simpler: the grey or tan shorts, the white shirt or the other white shirt. I usually go white on grey. We have drastically reduced our wardrobe from our last trip. However we have also eliminated rest days from our schedule which means no romantic trips to the laundromat. We wash out our clothes each evening and hang them out of our window to dry. We are keeping it classy. But I digress.

Once dressed, I turn my attention to my feet. The Sonny Liston analogy still holds: they are a crime scene without the yellow tape. However, each morning I take great care to lather and slather, carefully ministering to the sick. This process reminds me of Kamala Harris as she explains her brining and buttering technique for the thanksgiving turkey. First goes on the cream, then the lambs wool and then the cotton tape. By the way, lambs wool in Italian is sweater. It is not sold for foot care. At this point my feet look like the hands of a prize fighter and at the end of the day I am like Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction, frantically unbinding his fists.

Then we start walking. Like an orchestra warming up for a performance, each instrument plays its own notes until they merge to create music. Each body part has a comment until we all agree to set a pace. Edward and I are like a Zebra and a Wildebeest the ultimate reciprocal relationship. I am looking down observing life around us at ground level, while Edward looks ahead. So I am saying “Oh wow, is that a spider?”; and “How is that poppy growing through the asphalt?”; “what are these ants?”; “is that beetle dead?” While Edward is saying “There is a truck coming.” A recent example: Edward went into a church and I decided to walk around the outside. Without my Wildebeest I actually walked into a Via Francigena signpost. A bystander asked if I needed help.

We walk on through the day reminding ourselves of the importance of the journey versus the destination. As the hours go by, our pace slows and our gait resembles drunk walking. I hope I am not destroying your fantasy that we are somehow traveling along on a magic carpet propelled by spiritual rapture. By the end of the day I feel like a chicken from Gary Larson’s boneless chicken farm cartoon but then a passing car slows and the driver shouts “Buon Cammino!” and everything is good.