Lost in the House

I can't find bits of the plough. Not the heavenly body, the one that's dragged behind the tractor. It's impossible, you might think, to lose large, bright blue metal blades with curly edges (more than a dozen of them) but I've searched the limonaia (confidently, surprised not to find them), the cantina-cantina (nervously, the c-c is a kind of glory hole filled with everything that cannot be thrown away because either it is in a sealed box and the label has fallen off, or it's useful in a not-currently sort of way but were it to come back it would be irreplaceable, or it's a huge lump of wood of enormous value that's been there for centuries and one day will be cut into planks and turned into furniture without price but no-one has the time at the moment. The cantina-cantina is also home to many creatures that snuffle, rustle, stalk about, have googly eyes, live in webs that brush across my hair or legs, and has sacks of unknown contents. And huge, wooden wine vats resting on stone plinths with dark spaces under.) Am I the only woman frightened of bits of her own house?

I have searched the cantina-ingresso, a rather grand space with polished cotto and polished beams but where things tend to get dumped on wet nights 'to be put away later'. Huh. The cantina-ingresso is also haunted so that's a bit of a nervy place too. Mostly everyone comes in and out of the old main door which precipitates you straight up the stairs to the first right-angled defensive bend (or catches you as you precipitate down as happened to Mr HG last summer. Yes thank you, much better.)

The men say the bits are not in the tractor shed - still standing despite the best efforts of the envious to have it down, the Forestale are on my side - and if they say no then it's no, the tractor shed is a model of orderly work space and hung up tools, and vehicles and trailers.

There remains the little house, which is just that, leaning against the back of the main building where some of the braccianti, the landless labourers, used to be. I want to pull it down but as it is effectively planning permission for building in the historic centre, it has to stay. I'm not going in there, the place gives me the creeps. And if the plough bits are in there then whoever put them there had better remember and own up.

If any one of consanguinity, affinity, or spiritual relationship, or any other link with here whatsoever (to borrow a phrase) knows where the bits are, speak now.