I chose, probably judiciously to not take long trip to remote tropics,

running the risk to find them sad

like Lévi-Strauss did (not the one who wore jeans, it's simply a coincidence of names).

Just to avoid a dangerous temptation, I invent my temporary domestic tropics,

for the time of a cup of coffee.

It’s deliciously kitsch but cosy and the coffee tastes good.

Someone says that thinking too much can be dangerous, because if one goes too deeply inside thoughts, one ends by facing troubling questions.

My best way to survive the hostile summer is to get out from my shelter very early in the morning, and to enjoy the silent company of the world around me, which wakes up.

Thoughts take me company as well and they are not depressing at all.

But, as a poet said...the rest is silence.

Thoughts follow summer clouds in their lazy run over the sky.

Suddenly I remembered a quote of a fairy tale writer, Hans Christian Andersen, it was hidden somewhere in a corner of my memory and suddenly it popped up without any apparently logical reason.

“Just living is not enough... One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.”

Freedom, a word full of responsibilities, also in its definition.

Freedom doesn’t mean to do all what one wishes, it’s illusory and then it can condition others’ freedom and if we don’t respect others’ freedom and autonomy, indirectly we spoil also the essence of our own freedom.

I think freedom means having the possibility of choice.

Being free is to be responsible for one’s own choices and to have the faculty to examine alternatives and to accept what one chooses, including the possibility to change.

I have chosen to spend the summer my own way and I feel free and rewarded by this possibility.

Suddenly I perceived a discreet presence, I looked over my book and I found the serious glance of a furry visitor.

It was a very enjoyable little moment.

Cats are, in my opinion the most free among all domestic animals, for this reason I like and respect them so much.

Cats don’t belong to anyone and they are always in balance among their own choices.

I fell like paraphrasing the quote:

“Being on holiday is not enough... One must have moderate sunshine, freedom, many books and a cat visiting on soft silent paws”

(Just to satisfy a possible curiosity the cat doesn’t live with me, she is an independent cat who has decided that my parent’s in law’s neighbourhood is her territory and she comes always to ask for fish - not to beg, to ask – when my husband cleans it.

Usually he cleans the fish where I was sitting to read.

The cat thought I might supply her for fish as well and was very annoyed to see me with a book in my hands instead.

This is the reason of her interrogative and haughty look.

She graciously gave me the time to take a picture in a hurry, and then she left with dignity.)

Probably not all is strictly relative, but it’s rather sure that not all is absolute either.

Too strict relativism tends to fade, as a paradox, into a kind of absolutism of negative sign.

But I prefer a mild relativism, rather than a rigid and dogmatic absolutism, which decides that certain things must be necessarily in only one way, the same for everybody.

Since I’m losing myself in too involved questions, let’s come back to solid ground, not only metaphorically.

One of little daily pleasures which help me to survive summer, a hostile season for me, is the childish discovery of the potentialities of a small kitchen garden.

To be honest I don’t do anything useful there, the wizards of the garden are my mother-in-law and her talented son, who for reasons which I’ll never be tired to bless shares his life with me.

I roam about trying to guess what green leaves hide carrots and what will grow from a menacing thorny bush.

It’s another planet for me, used to think that zucchini and similar grew already packet into a plastic film on supermarket stalls.

But then I cook all enthusiastically and it’s my part of the work, I suppose.

In the garden I explore, trying to not disturb the expert.

And at this point we meet relativism again.

If I were a Lilliputian instead of a messy amateur photographer of standard human size, I’d be surely impressed by the respectable size and the remarkable look of this kind of local baobab, which is not a bonsai either, but a vegetable, the English name of which I quite ignore. Rib?

All is relative.... (Gentle grin in background)

I’m not a writer even thought I’d like to be.

I have a few ideas, I try to express them more or less correctly, and I have a respect that occasionally is similar to a kind of veneration for a good and elegant use of prose. I’m very sensitive to the vibrations of words, but I’m not a writer.

Nevertheless when it happens to me to read some best-sellers where all is based on the plot to capture the superficial readers’ attention, forcing them to wonder what is going to happen next, just to forget the banality of a prose without any nuance, before putting them asides without any intention to finish reading, I cannot help thinking that maybe, with a little concentration and some discipline I might write something not that worse than that.

But when I read and read again the pure and shining rich prose of some infinitely great authors I just feel like throwing my virtual pen away and to not write anymore, a simple postcard text either...

I have this deep feeling in a special way when I read Borges.

Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires and died in Geneva.

The second part of his long life had been a long, slow twilight, since he had lost his sight gradually until he became completely blind.

What can be crueler for a writer and a learned, passionate reader than blindness?

I deeply admire the vibrancy of his literary style in both prose and poetry, the sober depth; the incredibly smart and accurate use of adjectives, his liking for oxymora.

One of his sentences came to my mind.

"I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does."

After that the only think I might add is a thoughtful silence.

Once upon a time a solitary little girl decided that she would have never liked dolls, but she would have always loved her inner world of fantasy and imagination to play with.

She invented stories, which she told herself before sleeping.

She learnt to listen to the voice of things.

She liked the immaterial shape of water, which changed constantly, but remained always of the same nature.

She liked the sound of words and she tried to grasp their meaning, she was glad to discover that there were words which merely defined a concrete object and were not subjected to the risk of misunderstanding and didn’t need explanation.

She called them “The good little soldiers” because they were a category of necessary words, but they were simple, unpretentious in their role, nevertheless important for the common exchanges of information based on language.

Then she found out that there were other categories of words, which can be used to express immaterial things, sensations, feelings, abstract concepts and they had a little blurred borders and were harder to identify and to use properly, but when one could master them, at least a little, then they opened all a different larger field to explore.

The little girl called that category of words “The architects of thoughts”.

She collected new words, which she tried hard to posses completely, knowing that the only way to possess a word is to understand it in all its nuances.

She was a little puzzled about a word which had a nice sound “Innocence”.

She had understood quite easily that being innocent meant to not be guilty, that is to not have done a certain action, usually a bad action, even though one might be accused for that.

But she perceived another connotation for that word, since she had heard people using it mostly speaking of children, sometimes even of animals (that made her quite surprised and made her think over).

She came to the deduction that being innocent didn’t mean only to not be guilty of an action, but also to have not the concept of bad action either, in a way a lack of voluntary bad intention.

And she was really very intrigued, because as a child she knew that in general children were aware of the concept of evil and they were also aware of its effects.

She wondered why adults thought that the word “innocence” in one of its nuances were so suitable for children.

She thought over about of that, she liked to think over about concepts.

She thought that innocence could be perhaps an equivalent of ignorance.

She didn’t want to be ignorant, but she didn’t want to be guilty either.

She thought there must be a compromise.

That day she started growing up.