As a child I met an old fisherman in Positano whose favorite recommendation to passersby was: “ If you drop a small precious object in a big sink, don’t go fumbling after the small precious object. Head straight for the drain and plug it”.

People who have taken a class at Accidental Tourist know I have a mental condition that makes me see metaphors and analogies and signs EVERYWHERE.
So, I have always been charmed by the old man’s piece of advice, even beyond my actual understanding of it.
In the present predicament, I read the big sink as my beautiful life and all it contains.
The valuable little object must be – now – money: little but valuable, and definitely headed for the drain.

So today I have done myself two things that I usually pay to delegate:

– I searched and found a good tutorial for “cutting a male teenager’s thick straight hair”. (I account for about 7 of the total views).
A conservative serving of vodka softened the tightness in my jaw as I turned on the clipper.

It’s been 4 hours, and Giotto is still talking to me. I did ok. Perhaps a touch-up in a day or 2.

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– Painted the top of an old trunk with chalk paint . (More youtube tutorials, god bless them.)
The result is less than memorable, but one thing on that trunk is intended to be memorable: what I wrote on it.
“Repainted during COVID Lockdown 2020 by Marco and Majla Paoli”

Note: in Anglo-Saxon countries a woman takes her husband’s last name; in Spain, she adds it to her maiden name; in Italy, she keeps hers forever, regardless of marital status.
In this family, and only in this one, men who marry into the Paoli’s lose their family identity and gain ours.
We are dominant, like the dark-eye gene. When Marco books a restaurant, he goes “Paoli, party of 4”.
6 generations in the same home will do that to you.

I wrote on the trunk in English.
I did it to exorcise this feeling of immediate disaster.
I left it for posterity.
This trunk is really well made, it must be at least 100 years old.
Good chances it will last just as many.

So in 2120, someone will open the trunk and will call out “hey, look at this!” .(who knows what language it will be said in) and will show whomever that trunk was repainted during the past century plague.

I like to imagine the surroundings of that trunk, the faces of the people around it.
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I wonder what traces will be left by us human partners in lockdown.
Besides un-recyclable waste.