My father died at home the day after New Year's Day five years ago. My brother and I were with him that final month and we had a semblance of one last Christmas together there in the house that we had grown up in. That is some consolation, I guess, but it wasn't my best Christmas ever. We miss him very much still and when one of us does something lovely that he would have done or enjoys something that he first introduced us to, we send the other one an email that says, "Thanks, Dad."

When my boys were still living at home, we would drive up higher into the mountains every December to cut our Christmas tree in the State Forest. You could buy a permit for $10 (later $20) and cut designated trees (less than six inches around the bottom of the trunk) in a designated area. The money from the permits went to support the parks and it was basically a way to cut back undergrowth as a wildfire mitigation method. But to us, it wasn't wildfire mitigation. To us, it was magical.

We always went early in the morning and hiked deep into the snowy forest and brought bacon and egg wraps and hot apple cider and Christmas cookies and hot chocolate and the sky was always delphinium blue and the wind in the trees was always the only sound. On the way up, I always made the children listen to a CD of John Denver's Greatest Hits and on the way down, with the tree tied precariously to the car roof or even stuffed inside, coming up between the seats and filling the car with evergreen aroma and a thousand persistent pine needles, we always listened to the original Broadway cast recording of Fiddler on the Roof as an acknowledgment of our multicultural family heritage.

I remember one year Aiden drove all night after his last final exam to get home from Los Angeles in time for the last day permitted for cutting. We always decorated the tree right away, all of us together.

So, although we are busy and happy here and the holiday season is filled with kindness and good cheer, I am a little bit blue, missing them. 

So two days ago, acting under the influence of the Recipe Section of The Guardian, we decided to make Christmas cookies again. Jonathan and I spent hours mixing and baking and frosting and decorating -- and eating. It was lovely, the two of us working away together and listening to the original Broadway cast recording of Fiddler on the Roof.

Later, I called my brother and told him about our baking and about how we used to take cookies and hot apple cider with us to go up into the snowy forests in the clear morning light and listen to John Denver on the way up and Zero Mostel on the way down. "Twenty years from now," he said, "when they hear one of those songs, one of them will send the other one an email that says, 'Thanks, Mom.'" And I burst into tears.

 

One of the nicest and most surprising things about living in our hidden little world in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea is how much music there is here -- not music to make the musicians famous or music to sell merch or music to impress a sea of social media followers. But music for the joy of making music, for the love of it -- music among friends to make the winter days and nights more lively and more beautiful. In the past two weeks, Jonathan and I have marched in a parade through Capezzano Monte (pop. 355) following the Filarmonica as they played to unveil a new mural in town, gone to listen to our neighbor Fabio play in his blues band at the little cafe near the Lucca Gate (first video below) and driven to Pruno (pop. 90) -- far back in the hills above Stazzema, deep along winding roads to an ancient stone town with cobbled streets -- to hear Avi and Adele, our friends from the pub, play a concert in the tiny 13th century church of San Nicolo on a rainy, windswept night (second video below).

But there is also the casual music of everyday happiness. Below is a snip of the usual lunchtime pandemonium at the pub as it existed last Friday during lunch, the regular exuberance (Avi playing again -- this time on the wildly out-of-tune piano, which sounds so weirdly beautiful that I hope it never gets tuned.) I would say that this sort of commotion is nothing special -- meaning nothing out of the ordinary -- but that would be wrong because, of course, it is special and I am very aware that this will someday come to an end.

Some other updates:

Property is bondage: We have begun the process of bringing boxes of our stuff from the storage unit in Lucca to our house and unpacking it. This is tricky because the house was already full and there is no space to further absorb our belongings.

And, although opening box after box of our books is like greeting very dear old friends after a long and lonely absence, I somehow wonder if maybe we were better off when we had nothing.

The Netherworld: We went to visit Jonathan's son in Holland, where he is in school, and to visit the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which -- to tell by the pungent aroma coming off many, many of the other visitors -- is a favorite haunt of stoned people. Possibly this is not specific to the museum, though. We also went to a big Asian market and stocked up with ramen to bring back to Italy. It's funny the things you miss. Let's not judge.

Remembering What is Truly Important (Food): I took my language test for Italian citizenship last Thursday and now we're waiting for the results. Could go either way. Among the dozen people taking the test, I was by far the newest arrival in Italy, having arrived only two years ago. The next newest has been here five years -- most of the others have been here between 10 and 15 years. One woman has been here 26 years. So I may have some grave doubts about how I did, but in another 24 years, I think I will have a decent shot. 

In any case, when we finally arrived back home after my extremely trying morning, we found that Mimmo had very sweetly managed to get a bunch of ripe persimmons down from our tall persimmon tree and left them for us on the porch.

Personality Defects: We have made tiny little bottles of our olive oil to give to friends, but (being hyper-aware of our own novice olive-oil-making status) we are too shy to actually give them to anyone.

Dead Geniuses: The Campanile down by the Duomo in Pietrasanta, which is always locked up tight, was unexpectedly open for viewing one day and we stumbled across it and were able to go in, although not up (which is probably just as well). Michelangelo designed it when he was living and working here and it is famous to us all -- the spiral staircase reproduced on postcards and paintings and refrigerator magnets -- although most of us had never seen it in person.

Episode IV -- A New Hope: Walking up the drive last week, I caught sight out of the corner of my eye of what I at first thought was the daytime moon. It turned out to be a wasp nest as big as a beachball high up in one of our trees. The bad news is the wasps. The good news is that it now gives Jonathan and I plenty of opportunities to look at each other and say "That's no moon" and "I have a bad feeling about this."

Lights: Everyone is now decorating for Christmas. It is all very magnificent down in Pietrasanta. But my heart belongs forever to the two and a half strings of lights over the road up here in Capriglia. What we lack in flash, we make up for in convivial drunkenness and good humor.

Our hearts are broken now because Renata is gone. She and Stefano drove away Monday morning leaving nothing but silence and too much emptiness in her place.

In the end, she allowed a going-away party at the regular Sunday night Giro di Pizza. It was very moving and she gave a little speech saying that we are a family. Alice organized a present for her and we all went in together -- a lovely necklace with a heart charm that is the key to unlock the necklace. She and Stefano seemed sweet together and loving and I thought about how hard it will be for him in Poland, where he doesn't know the language, etc. It is a situation I can empathize with. But it helps to be deeply in love with the person you are married to.

I cried a lot, of course. Ugo was very kind. "Ah," he said, "artists always feel things so deeply." In all my years of being a big crybaby, it is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.

Other people cried, too -- including Nonno. Renata hugged him at the end and spoke softly to him and then he left very quickly and Valerio, seeing it all, hurried out after Nonno to check on him and see that he would be okay.

There is some talk now about going to visit her -- all of us together on the train with a big hamper of Italian food for the journey. Maybe next summer.

 

Daniele has been baking pears with sweet red wine sauce. Last night there was a big pan of them keeping warm on top of the wood-burning stove that is right inside the front door of the pub. The aroma of warm red wine and pears and woodsmoke was perfect for a late autumn evening.

The air was so clear yesterday that we could see the French Maritime Alps and all the little red-roofed houses down on the plane seemed so close that we could almost see inside their windows. The horizon line is sharp and crisp and by mid-afternoon, there is a peach-colored glow that begins just above the edge of the sea.

The two and a half strings of Christmas lights that are hung above the street just outside the pub have now been installed to inaugurate the holiday season and we can look down on them from the bathroom window here at the house and feel festive.

 

Every day more chestnut leaves fall and our view of the sea becomes more clear. Today, the water is wild and gray with furious white breakers foaming far out past the edge of the pier at Marina di Pietrasanta. The offshore islands have all disappeared into the fog.

This morning, we brought two teensy bottles of our olive oil down to Barbara and Sara, who promised to try it and to let us know their honest opinion. (They won't -- they will tell us it is wonderful no matter what, because to tell someone that their olive oil is good is to tell them that you are friends.) 

This is just the latest in the big interlocking circles of generosity that go on around here -- we gave the painters corbezzoli jam and they gave us ancient grain flour. Fabio and Luciano give us figs and we give them marmalade. We are involved in exchanges of chestnuts and books and persimmons, lemons and limoncello and liqueurs and dried lavender, potted plants and pickled kumquats, Italian gelato and Swiss chocolate and Polish vodka, math tutoring and holiday wreaths and honey and tomato sauce and wildflowers.

So I feel sad for people who are stuck living in a dog-eat-dog world of unfettered capitalism and corporate greed and the profit motive and I-got-mine-Jack-so-fuck-you. They never know the wonderful surprise of finding flowers from a friend tied together with string and left on the garden wall.

We have spotted a mouse who has come into the living room to escape the incoming winter weather. In Colorado, we often got mice moving inside at this time of year and we mercilessly dispatched them by means of traps baited with peanut butter. It was always quick and wildly successful.

But peanut butter is not really a thing in Italy -- there are a couple of jars in the big supermarket outside town, but they are viewed with side-eyed suspicion and I suspect that they are only there at all in a half-hearted concession to the handful of American ex-pats who insist (in the face of all reason) that is is good to eat.

Instead, there are acres of chocolatey Nutella (big jars, medium jars, small jars, gigantic jars) and Nutella products (Nutella sandwich cookies, Nutella candies, Nutella cereal, etc.) lining the shelves. This is considered much more nutritionally sound than peanut butter on the theory that chocolate sandwiches give you energy. And, to be fair, a breakfast of Nutella sandwich cookies and espresso would probably make you feel quite jazzy.

"We should probably bait the traps with Nutella," I said to Jonathan. "After all, it is an Italian mouse."

But we are old hands at the mouse-trapping game and so we procured a rare and costly jar of peanut butter and some readily available traps (we are clearly not the only ones around here who are receiving seasonal rodent visitors.) We knew exactly where the mouse was hanging out (under the couch) because we had both seen it there on separate occasions.

So we put the peanut-butter-baited traps within easy striking distance of the couch and waited.

 And waited. 

And waited.

It has been a week now and we are still waiting. We have begun to think that possibly something else untoward has happened to the mouse. Or perhaps it has moved back outside to enjoy the changing colors of the chestnut leaves. Maybe it headed south, following the sun. In any case, our peanut butter lies untasted, spurned.

We discussed the issue with the boys down at the pub, where one topic of conversation is as good as another.

"What did you bait the traps with?" they asked.

"Peanut butter."

"Ah," Almo said, "there's your trouble -- you should have used Nutella."

I have made a new label for our olive oil.

 

The horrors of the US political scene continue to be sickening and we feel helpless to ward off the disaster.

So we work on strengthening our community and reaching out to our friends. We continue to do what work we can to have a positive impact on the culture. It's all we can do.

It seems worthwhile to live in our small way, closer to the land, closer to the traditional. sustainable ways, to listen again while the old men in the pub tell us their stories of how it used to be around here, in the days when everyone had a few olives trees and took the olives to the communal press in November and came away with their oil for the year and everyone had a few grapevines and made wine and cordials in the summer and stored the bottles in cool cellars and cantinas, and everyone had a few goats ("capre" is Italian for "goats" and so "Capriglia" is "place of the goats") that they used for wool to spin and meat and milk for cheese.

The goats are all gone now. Wolves were successfully re-introduced to the hills here after nearly going extinct and if there's one thing a re-introduced wolf loves, it's a nice goat sandwich. Or, I guess, a nice goat panino. Everyone eats well in Italy.

But the olives and the wine are still going strong. When Jonathan and I rented this place online sight-unseen from Colorado, we spent hours on Google Street View trying to find a picture of our house and get a look at it and the surrounding neighborhood. (This turned out to be impossible because there is an error on Google Maps and our particular part of the street doesn't appear -- doesn't even seem to exist. We are hidden from even Big Tech here.) We saw what we thought might be olive trees around in Capriglia, though, and Jonathan said, "Wouldn't it be great if we could make our own olive oil?" I remember how excited he was at the idea.

It turned out that there were indeed olive trees on our property -- a small grove of about two dozen trees. But we heard that the olive presses required a minimum of 200 kgs to take your olives for pressing and that is far beyond our scale. So we brine some ripe olives in jars on the living room shelves and buy our olive oil at the supermarket.

But now we are much more local than we were then and rules that applied to us two years ago don't apply to us now. Sitting in the pub last week, Claudio told us about a little family-run olive press (called a "frantoio") here in Capriglia, right on Via Capriglia, where they will take as little as 20 kgs of olives. It is a holdover from the days of the few family olive trees, the few grape vines, the few goats -- when horses plodding in a circle turned the massive stone wheels to crush the olives because there was no electricity up in these hills yet. Claudio remembers being put on the back of the horse to ride it around its circle when he was a little boy -- a living merry-go-round.

"Where exactly is this frantoio?" we asked.

"There's a sign on the road," Claudio said. "You'll see it."

In the US, this would have been a big sign saying "OLIVE PRESS HERE" and an arrow, possibly involving neon or blinking lights. But here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea, the sign turned out to be about 1-inch high (albeit in red letters) -- added free-hand to the regular house number plaque that we all have. We finally did see it, but only after we had already been to the press and knew where it was. Jonathan met Claudio when he was on his bicycle searching for the frantoio and Claudio took Jonathan in and introduced him around. Some of our friends from the pub were there hanging around.

So we spent the weekend picking 20 kgs of olives from our trees -- we couldn't have gotten many more -- and took them to the frantoio on Tuesday where the daughter of the Signora inspected them very carefully by running her hands through them, turning them over and over, and then carefully smelling her hands. We were quite nervous during this process, fearing that we had somehow done something wrong. Then she asked us when they were picked and about the terroir -- where exactly they were picked -- and was pleased when we told her they came from the top of Via Capriglia -- only a few hundred meters away. We don't want any faraway olives from God-only-knows-where mixing in with our oil up here. But we passed inspection and everyone was very kind and jovial and happy to see us and happy to let me take pictures. The whole place smelled sweet and green, like olive oil and sunshine and late summer fields.

We went this morning to pick up our oil -- 2.7 liters of dark green unfiltered extra-virgin cold-pressed organic oil. The lovely daughter even topped up our bottle with a little extra. Total cost: 4.5 euros (about 5 bucks.) It was all so beautiful -- the guys standing around talking about olives and other things, the aroma of the oil, the big stone grinding wheels, the sunshine, the feeling that we were part of something that has been going on for centuries and centuries, small and local and communal. It was so lovely that I didn't even miss the goats.

So Jonathan is baking bread and tonight for dinner we are going to have brushchette with homemade bread and our own olive oil and garlic and tomatoes and basil. We plan to gorge ourselves.

And we are also making salt-cured olives, which people swear is the best way to have them. It apparently takes at least a month. After our adventures with the salt-cured lemons, we are wary, but still game.

After the incessant rains of September and October, we discovered mold growing on the wall behind the bed in our bedroom and so we have had to move out of there and into the guest room while the painters are here getting rid of the mold and re-painting the wall. The guest room bed is smaller than our regular bed and, because of the loft directly above it, the ceiling over it is lower. But for a little while, I find that I am quite liking our new sleeping arrangement -- Jonathan and I snuggled up close together in a little hideaway. It seems like nothing bad from the outside can reach us here. I know that is an illusion, but curled against him in our cozy little corner, I feel safe -- for at least one more day.

Renata is leaving soon -- she has sold her car and gotten a new job in Poland near her father. But she won't tell anyone exactly when she is leaving or let us plan a going-away party because her heart is breaking. She and Nonno sit together in the evenings and tease each other. His heart is breaking, too.

We have made labels for our bottles of oil.

Today is a terrible day here because of the devastating results in the US presidential election. It is like a nightmare that we can't wait up from.

Jonathan got an email this morning from a friend saying, "Who's glad he moved to Italia now?" But people we love are still in the US and we are very well aware that not everyone has the ability to just pick up and move to another country. And, even here, there is no escape from the incredible harm of a fascist taking power in the US. We are all fucked.

But after 30 years of teaching about totalitarianism, I know that a key goal of oppressors is to atomize and isolate people living under their control. Totalitarianism is threatened by community, connection, and solidarity. Reaching out to our communities and strengthening our connections with each other is one of the most powerful ways to resist oppression. 

After waking to the terrible news, Jonathan and I sat and cried for a while and then decided that we had to do something to get out of the house and into the world. So we went down to town and stopped into our little bookstore here, Nina La Liberia, to chat with Andrea and Valentina, the owners, who were also on the edge of tears. But at least we are on the edge of tears together. 

Then we went together down the entire two-block length of Via Barsanti and took pictures every few feet of the buildings and the doors and the windows. It felt like maybe making some art -- any art of any kind -- is a tiny part of the resistance and maybe the only thing we are capable of doing in the midst of our shock and devastation today. So here are the pictures. I love you all.