Jonathan being in law school is part of our routine now. Three mornings a week, he wakes up before dawn and rides his bike down to the train station in Pietrasanta for the half-hour train ride to Pisa and then peddles past the Leaning Tower as the sun rises on his way to his first class.

We went into Firenze last week and bought him a folding bike that is easier to get into the crowded morning train. Because it folds up to be the size of a carry-on bag, it has very tiny wheels and makes Jonathan look like an escapee from a travelling circus. He is now a local character and people make sure to tell him when they have seen him on it -- an interesting event in their day.

This is all well and good on the way down the hill, but at the end of the day when he comes home, he has to peddle up the mountain (a thousand-foot elevation gain over only about four kilometers of road) on his tiny wheels like a demented clown. The hard-core spandex cyclist crowd  -- many of whom are actually professionals who use the lovely Via Capriglia as a training ground for the Tour de France and the Giro d'Italia -- pass him easily, but often give him complements and friendly encouragement as they go by. One buff young man even circled back last Wednesday to say, "You are my hero of the day!" He didn't, Jonathan says, call Jonathan "Gramps," but he was clearly thinking it. So, a dubious complement, but we take whatever we can get from the whippersnappers.

When Jonathan goes past the pub, everyone on the terrace cheers wildly.

In the meantime, I am home making chestnut butter. We are in the height of chestnut season now and I can't seem to resist. If it weren't that peeling the nuts is such a tedious chore, we would probably be drowning in chestnut butter by now. So I guess the tedium is a blessing.

My drawing is now on the labels of the house wine at the pub, which is fun. The label says "Una comunita' e' una famiglia" -- "A community is a family."

And for purposes of historical record, below is a picture of everything I bought at the market last Thursday. It weighed 13 pounds all together and cost 14 euros -- about 15 dollars. Some day we will marvel at that.

Heavens -- that was fast! 

Friday night, Daniele asked me if I would try to design a label for the wine they are going to start selling at the pub. I did that on Saturday and Sunday and then yesterday (Wednesday) he sent me this picture of one of the bottles. 

 

Autumn is here now and I startled a beautiful deer in back of the house yesterday when I went out to hang up the laundry. It was a lovely dappled brown and black and it disappeared into the woods immediately.

The chestnuts have started to fall and so have the corbezzoli berries. The porcini mushrooms are still going. I am making plum jam later today, but chestnut butter is on the immediate horizon and corbezzoli jam after that. The air is cold in the mornings and very clear so that we can see the individual windows on the houses down on the coast. The sea looks smooth and burnished in the sun.

Daniele and Alice have decided to start a line of their own wine at the pub and Daniele asked me to design the label. (At first he hired an actual professional designer, but he didn't like anything the designer came up with and I happened to be sitting around drinking wine with the boys at the time, which is how most things happen to me. That has been true my entire life. Being underfoot has worked out well for me as a life strategy.) I did about four designs and they chose the one with the green door, which will be a good souvenir of the place. So I have, at long last, come into my true calling. Jonathan and I are anxiously waiting for the labelled bottles to appear. The naked bottles are already there and Daniele gave us one to take home to "inspire" my drawings.

I also made another book trailer. These are much easier to make than the actual books themselves are.

After a full week of trying my best, Goodreads still refuses to acknowledge that the author known as Kathy Giuffre is me and Facebook refuses to acknowledge that I am a human being at all. It's disheartening.

On the up side, the boys at the pub are teaching me to play scopa, the rosemary in our garden is flowering and I'm having fun making promo trailers for my book. Here is the one I made this morning:

Regal House Press has a very thorough and extensive (139 pages) Author's Guide that they sent me once I had signed the contract. It is supposed to help me work through the process of having my book published. It is basically a 139-page (single-spaced) To-Do List with headings like "Obtaining Copyright Permissions: Written Works" and "Obtaining Copyright Permissions: Song Lyrics." Take a tip from me: never quote song lyrics in a book you write. Trust me.

I started with the section called "First Steps" because I am a methodical kind of girl. Yesterday, I worked on First Step #3: "Do you have a fully developed author profile on Goodreads?" and First Step #11: "Have you joined the Regal Author Community on Facebook?"* I started with Goodreads, thinking that would be easy.

But no.

Goodreads informs me that although there is clearly an author named Kathy Giuffre, they don't believe that I am her.

It is unclear why they don't believe this. I can't imagine that there is a hot global market in Fake Kathy Giuffres with people paying big money to nefarious Russian cyber-criminals to pretend they are me. I can more easily imagine people paying to ensure that they are not accidentally mistaken for me. But here we are.

But while Goodreads was irritating, Facebook was existentially devastating. They say that they don't believe that I am human at all. That really hurts.

My numerous attempts to prove my humanity were so unsuccessful, in fact, that I inadvertently angered the Facebook gods and have now been told that I am prohibited from trying to prove that I am human ever again. That is, quite frankly, not how I thought things would end up when I started my day yesterday morning. No one expects that.

So I am making vegetable soup and hoping the internet eventually forgets that I exist.

It is very quiet in the house just now. The birds seem to have gone further south since autumn has come. The mosquitos, alas, have not followed the birds and, in fact, have taken full advantage of the recent rain to breed like rabbits and rampage around in giant clouds of ravening bloodsuckers. At night, we scratch ourselves and listen to the owls (the only birds left, it seems) riot in the woods.

Jonathan goes three days a week now to the University of Pisa where he is enrolled in law school. This was an unexpected summer development, sparked by a casual comment made by the official Italian translator while she was officially translating some of my citizenship documents into official Italian. And, since this is a civilized country that recognizes the benefit of having an educated populace, higher education is fantastically cheap (especially compared to the exorbitant cost in the US) and readily accessible. Jonathan just had to prove that he has an undergraduate degree -- which he does -- and then he started going to classes ten days ago.

The best things (besides the actual education and fascinating information gleaned, of course) are that 1.) he takes his bike on the train with hm and then bikes past the Leaning Tower of Pisa on his way to class every morning, and 2.) in one class there is only one other student and Jonathan is older than the student and the professor combined.

I am still riding the incredible high of having my novel under contract with a publisher, which really says something given that I spent the day yesterday changing all the n-dashes in my manuscript to m-dashes and reformatting my paragraph indentations. Today I begin my dance with the endlessly fascinating Chicago Manual of Style. It has hidden depths.

So many hidden depths.

But I also made a book trailer. It can never be used because I don't have rights to the music. But I went ahead and did it anyway just for the fun fun fun of it.

 

We will have no olive harvest this year. All up and down the coast, the crop has been devastated. There was the blazing summer heat with no water and then the rains so hard that they were almost floods. And then the flies arrived to lay eggs in the green olives so that now every single olive in our grove has a worm hole in it where the fly larvae have been.

Valerio says his whole crop is gone, but he thinks there may be a few groves somewhere around that, because the wild terrain makes so many micro-climates, might have been less hard hit. Gilda says her grove has some surviving olives -- not all are lost -- but everyone else sits silently on the terrace of the pub and looks at their shoes when the subject of the harvest comes up. Times are hard.

But Alice brings Celeste to work with her these days and she is a sweet baby who doesn't cry much, but sleeps in her stroller under a mosquito net in the shade or looks around her with dark curious eyes to see what everyone is doing.

"She is growing," Alice says and we are all happy to hear this.

My novel, Armadillo Massacre Number Three, has won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and will be coming out from the amazing Regal House Publishing, one of the best presses in the US, in Fall 2027. I can almost not believe it.

I got the email while we were sitting in the departure lounge at Dulles Airport waiting to fly back to Italy. At first, I kind of couldn't take in the email -- I was just sort of confused by what it seemed to be saying. Then the light dawned and I started to cry sitting right there in the middle of the crowded airport. (For the record, no one around me even batted at eye. Except, of course, for Jonathan.)

My friend Jessy says I should have gone and had myself paged: "Will Kathy Giuffre, award-winning author, please pick up a white courtesy telephone for a message..."

I have been away from lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea for a while, but I'm back now. After a long, hot August working almost every night in the pub and then sleeping as late as we could in the cool mornings with all the windows open and all the sheets pushed off the bed onto the floor, we left to go to the US and visit our new baby grandchild.

We have decided not to rate him with regard to beauty ("the most beautiful baby ever") because my own two tiny sons were, of course, breathtakingly gorgeous. But we have agreed that this child is definitely "top five." He is laughing now. Baby laughter is my favorite sound in the world.

But the US seems like a scary, angry place now -- a place where everyone is on the edge. With Putin's lapdog sitting in the White House, it is looking more and more likely that there will be a war here in Europe, but it is still not as frightening as daily, violent life in the US.

When we got back, I left again almost immediately to go to England to see Fiona, who had a health scare a couple of weeks ago during which I bought a plane ticket. But she had recovered by the time the visit actually happened. (Which is, after all, the best outcome.)

While I was gone, some of the ladies from the village came over to show Jonathan how to find the wild porcini mushrooms in our woods. They waited for him on the terrace while he was inside putting on his boots. When he came out, Gilda said to him, "So, we're here to teach you how to hunt porcini mushrooms?"

"Yes," Jonathan said.

"Well, we might start with this one," she said and pointed to a giant one growing straight out of the mossy wall of the terrace, smack in plain sight. "Shouldn't be too hard around here, apparently."

It's good to give your neighbors a source of amusement. Makes you more part of the community.

Nonno's birthday was at the end of July. We had a big lunch that lasted many hours at a long table behind the pub. There was seafood risotto and acciughe e gamberi fritti and lots of wine and singing. Late in the afternoon, I wandered inside and found Elena singing to Nonno.

But Daniele and Alice weren't there because they were at the hospital where Alice was in active labor. About five o'clock, the word came that the baby was born. Irene and Lucia Mora sprang into action putting up a giant pink bow and teddy bear on the front of the pub to announce the good news to all of Capriglia. Or, actually, they sprang into action directing Valerio -- "Up, higher, a little to the left, no, to the right, lower" -- who was perched up in the big sycamore tree actually hanging the bow and displaying superhuman levels of patience. 

"A pretty good birthday present for you," I said to Nonno.

"My birthday wish for the baby," he said, "is that she has a life as long and healthy and happy as mine has been."

Other updates:

Wheels: Now that Jonathan has a valid Italian driver's license, we have finally bought a car -- it is tiny and red and gently pre-owned. The people we bought it from also live here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea, renting a house from our friends Fabio and Luciana. We still don't actually have possession of the car yet, of course. That will come eventually. I hope it doesn't take two years to get, like the driver's license did. (There is a part of the movie of Under the Tuscan Sun where the heroine impulsively buys a house in Tuscany in only one day. Whenever I think about that, I laugh and laugh.)

Flora and Fauna: In the past week, overcome by the gorgeous abundance of the summer produce, I have made apricot jam, fig jam, cherry preserves, and zucchini relish. It's a sickness. And Milo went on a family trip to the mountains and brought us back some of the trout he caught. We cooked them with fresh ginger and garam masala and they were lovely.

 

The katydids started up their annual screaming this year precisely at dawn on July 1st. In the long lost innocence of my younger days, I was rather fond of katydids. I even used them in books I've written as a shorthand for sultry and romantic summer nights. Then I moved to Italy.

Three solid months of incessantly droning screams -- loud enough to drown out all the birdsong -- eventually wears on the nerves. And not just for me. I was sitting on the terrace of the pub one evening last summer when the katydids all simultaneously paused their cacophony for a moment. Everyone on the terrace spontaneously burst into cheers.

Then the katydids started up again.

But five days ago, I finally made my peace with them. After a particularly troublesome and difficult call with the "outside" world, I went onto the front porch of our house and was immediately enveloped in the overwhelming drone of the katydids. But now they seemed like some sort of giant sonic protective shield -- a big comfy blanket of sound. For some reason I can't explain, I felt safe -- like nothing bad could get to me as long as I was inside that sound.

The beach is the same way, with surf and the sound of children playing. And so is the pub, where we are now part of the secret society of workers. While the outside world descends further and further into the frightening chaos of fascism and we have to take breaks from reading the news for the sake of our mental well-being, in our protective sound bubble here, nothing can hurt us.

It has cooled down a bit (low 80s) and I am able to sleep now and, as a consequence, think consecutive thoughts again. 

I have changed the title of my finished novel to "Armadillo Massacre Number Three," for instance, and decided that if it ever gets published, I am going to immediately start lobbying for it to be made into a big Broadway musical along the lines of "Little Shop of Horrors." 

Since there are armadillos in it and since the narrator of it is dead and speaking to us from the afterlife, I think the musical version of it should have two choruses of background singers, like in Greek tragedies. 

One will be a group of singers dressed up as angels and the other will be dressed up as armadillos. I can just see the armadillos singing and dancing in step like the Temptations.

I hope I never forget the time a longhorn steer escaped from a parade in downtown Colorado Springs and went into the lobby of my bank. Good times.