'Various senses enable spiders to communicate with one another in a wide variety of ways. In close contact, touch can be important and considerable stroking may be employed. Spiders also use chemical communication by the production and detection of pheromones; the latter may be airborne or laid down on silk draglines.' 'Spiders' Michael J. Roberts

The Vine

We were sure it was dead.

The vine.

It was black and brittle. In the fields around they were green and blooming already by the week after Easter. And this is the second week of June.

It was twisted and very old, planted some 350 years ago when the tower first went up.
But it was definitely dead. Valerio said so.

And Valerio is never wrong. Valerio says so.

Although that's never a guarantee, I might add.

Killed he said by five consecutive days of temperatures below freezing in February.
No sunshine on this spot when the sun is low in winter he says, as if I didn't know.
The wall faces East.

Now this is a very unusual thing in this part of Tuscany. Not that walls face East, but that vines are ever planted on East facing walls. What were they thinking I wonder?

The house, as far as we can work out from hearsay, was built from a flattened tower, an outlook tower for the rich, now extinct, family from the Villa below. Or maybe it was non-strategic, just a folly like so many others in this string of a hill along the southern rim between Siena and Colle.
It still has within the group of six buildings three bread ovens, which we nowadays use for pizza parties or huge dinner parties in the summer when we cook meat and potatoes for our guests.
This means that probably up to the Second World War five or six big families lived here.
In the summer they would have sat under this very vine next to the bread oven to prepare the food.

Add the hot Tuscan sun, the need for shade at this time of day, and Bingo! The reason for the vine. Valerio went off muttering when I expounded this hypothesis this morning. Didn't catch the exact text, something about the English being know-alls who know nothing.

Nico had sprayed the vine with copper solution every early spring for 25 years. But Nico died in February. And who did the spraying instead? Alfredo! Freshly arrived one chilly March morning all dressed up and looking for all the world like a candidate for the next Mars mission, complete with brand new spray and a sickly grin. What I could see of it that is.

Does he spray the vine? No! Instead he sprays all my vegetables, the geraniums and the left-hand side of my car. It was windy he said.

We weren't getting on too well at the time, Alfredo and I.

This is the third day of storms and heavy vertical downpours. Tropical I would call it, cold Atlantic air meeting that from the Sahara. And suddenly the dead vine is sprouting fresh leaves and catching up at a phenomenal rate. I find three caterpillars chomping away at these out of season treats; tiny creatures a thumbnail across, munching their way from leaf to leaf. I ground them then stamped on them. No mercy at all. It's either them or the vine.

Yes the new leaves are appearing but not from the badly pruned stems of last year's growth, instead from the thick deep iron black of the main trunk itself, so hard in fact you couldn't drive a nail through it and the greyness and the rain make the fresh green growth startlingly bright and these colours shake me out of my annoyance with Alfredo and the tiny caterpillars.

Valerio says he's never known a vine die and come back to life again. I say maybe it was just waiting for the right moment. That it had got used to Nico and his attention and was sort of mourning. He turns and goes off to look at his rabbits without replying.

It's 4.30 pm and it's mid summer and as dark it would be in winter at this time and the roof begins to leak as I hear rain pit pattering throughout the house and have to arrange the bowls and buckets to catch the streams of water dripping, pouring in.

And the storm which I thought was passing, pushed away by streaks of yellow sky from the West, instead turns about and circles back as it often does in these hills. It's as if they're reluctant to let rain pass without first squeezing out every last drop from the sky, which even now is going rapidly though the grey scale to black. And my computer flicks as lightning strikes and another wave of rain rattles across the metal roof above the chicken shed.

Next morning, after another night of howling dogs (I resorted to earplugs), the air is fresher from the North. In fact cool inside the house for the first time in weeks. The humidity has gone, as has the mist, which hung in patches between here and San Gimignano. There's a view again for Ed and Frances but instead they gaze at me as I pass by, from the brown window, which hangs above the vine.

Overnight the shoots have grown two inches and I notice new buds, tough and dark green pushing out everywhere from underneath the vine trunk as if to stay protected by the summer sun. The miracle of the vine Valerio is calling it and neighbours are invited to come and inspect and walk away nodding.

Turning my head away from the sun to peer underneath the leaves searching for enemy caterpillars my eye catches the glint of a strand, and then lots of them stretching and arching from leaf to pergola post, sweeping across to the London red letter box and back up to the small brown window.

In summer I keep this window slightly ajar to dry out the bathroom after the nightly shower.
And I wonder if my water spiders, because such they are I'd swear, had voyaged out during the storm.

That Ed and Frances might have something to do with the miracle of the vine.
I'm not going to tell Valerio of this.

He would walk away.

To look at his rabbits.

This morning I asked him: why the frequent rabbit inspecting?

He said because they're acting in an odd fashion.

He said they're sort of gazing.