Dispatches · Ongoing
Short observations from the field — kept on index cards, posted as we go.
Six weeks of notes taken from a folding chair beside a glass case. The attendant, Pani Maria, lets me sit. The visitors are mostly nobody. The case holds: a wooden butter mould, a fragment of a comb, a small iron key with no door.
It is the slate that keeps the village. Rain comes off it the same way it has for centuries. A new pavement of poured concrete already looks newer than it should.
On a tile in the corridor: 1894. A small chip; nobody has replaced it. To replace it would be a kind of erasure dressed as care.
I find a card in a drawer at the ethnographic museum that says, in pencil, see also: grief. It is filed under wooden spoons.
If you measure the lichen you can date the stone. The stone is older than the village, the village older than its name.