The Road Less Traveled

After only seeing it once or twice, going to stay in the first house you’ve ever bought is a scary thing. It’s kind of like deciding to marry someone after one or two very cordial dates.

What will it be like sleeping together? What are they really like once you get to know them?

Will they smell in the morning?

Will you still love them once you start noticing the cracks in the wall…or was it all one huge, lonely mistake? 

I had planned to make the journey to Tuscany easier by arriving before dusk. Cut to me on the autostrada at 8 PM, winding the pitch-black curves in the pouring rain and fog. I chatted nervously to a friend as I drove through the mountains, both of us trying our very best to ignore our all but certain impending deaths, most likely at the outstretched hands of the Jesus decal on the truck in front of us which read, “Jesus, veglia su di me” (Jesus watch over me). Well, at least he’ll be alright, I thought to myself.

After navigating what I’m still convinced, based on their width, were one-way streets impersonating two senses of direction, we miraculously arrived at the house in total darkness. Using the flashlights from my phone, we investigated the closed-up musky space, finding our way down the winding staircase to the cantina, where the switching of a power box illuminated not only our field of vision but a small sliver of hope. The utilities had been switched into my name and actually worked! Huzzah! Along with our reignited fate, the silhouettes of a small army of spiders were brought into alarming clarity. “Charlotte’s Web…they eat the bugs…” I nursed my fearful elephant urge to smash them into tiny spider pieces.

I first saw this house six months ago, when the same girlfriend and I took a train from Milan and saw seven or eight houses in one day, Shepherded along by a local realtor, the first two had been down an old dirt road and most likely would have been put to better use as haunted houses rather than proposals for living situations.

“There’s a lot of…er…pot..ent..ial??” I strained while stepping over a moldy floorboard I had been specifically instructed to avoid. The third house had a sleeping elderly parent in a room where we were encouraged to, “take a peek!” Because nothing says I see myself living here, quite like the current owner’s bedridden parent.

By the time we saw the old stone house, my spirits were so low that when the agent opened the door and I saw through a sliver of light, the dusty, ancient interior and the bugs around the doorway scuttle off in a panic, my immediate thought was, “No, fucking, way.”