Semina (whose real name is Francesco) likes to hunt and is good at it and usually very successful and known around here as the go-to person if you need any sort of wild game, but especially wild boar, which is his specialty.

A couple of days ago, a chef at a high-end traditional restaurant in town asked if Semina could get him some boars' heads for some sort of ancestral Tuscan delicacy he was planning. So Semina went out and was very lucky, actually getting three boars, very fat from having spent the holidays gorging themselves on the last of the fallen chestnuts.

The chef only wanted the heads, so Semina severed those and put them all together in a bag, but then had to figure out what to do with all the rest of the boar meat. He kept some for himself and some undoubtedly went to Daniele at the pub to be roasted with red wine and wild herbs.

But Semina also knows three Albanian brothers who are sharing a house up here in the hills and could use  little neighborly generosity, so he cut off a couple of nice fat pork haunches and put them in a bag for the brothers as a little New Year's gift and then headed out to make his meat deliveries.

He stopped at the house of the three Albanian brothers first and dropped off their bag of boar meat, for which they were quite grateful, and then continued on towards the restaurant in town. He was only halfway down the mountain when his cellphone rang and it was the eldest of the Albanian brothers.

"Semina," he said, sounding serious and a little scared. "Are you sending us a message? Is this a threat? We don't understand what we have done."

Semina opened the bag of meat still on the floorboard of his car and saw that it had the haunches in it. He had accidentally given the three Albanian brothers three severed boars' heads in a bag.

When he told us this story last night in the pub, Jonathan laughed and laughed and laughed. He is still laughing this morning.

As we were leaving, Semina said to us, "Now remember -- if you don't let me help you move, then we are no longer friends."

So sometime at the beginning of February, we will have a moving party and invite our friends from the pub to help us carry boxes of books to the new house and then eat lasagna and drink wine together all afternoon.

Two important updates:

1. The raffle for the giant bottle of wine was finally held at the pub. We did not win. But the person who did win (#53) bought their raffle ticket so long ago that they can no longer be located. The word has been put out that they can come and get their prize, but no one has shown up yet. So the bottle may be raffled off yet again some time in the future. Fingers crossed!

2. At the pub the other night, two people came rushing in all breathless to find Mario. "We were just walking by your house," they told him, "and we saw a wolf in your yard, inside the gate!" Mario left with them to go see what was up, but by the time he got there, the wolf was gone. This reminds me of the time in Colorado when my friend Norma got a message from UPS that they couldn't deliver her package and she would have to come pick it up at the distribution facility herself instead. The reason they gave in the message was "Bear in driveway."

 

When Tris started middle school, I got him his first cell phone so that he could reach me in case of emergency. He recorded his voicemail message with deep seriousness in his own voice that, in those long ago days, sounded like a baby bird chirping, "Hi! This is Tris..." Then when he went to high school, he got a new better phone (and new phone number -- and, indeed, a new deeper voice) and I took over his old phone.

That was more than a decade ago, but although I have upgraded phones, I have never erased that beautiful little birdsong greeting. It has, admittedly, flummoxed certain callers on occasion in the past. But it is nevertheless precious to me.

Now that I have had my birthday and the new year has begun, I am at last eligible for social security, which -- having paid into it all these years -- I am anxious to get at least something back out of before the republicans take it all away from us to give to the billionaires. 

Am I bitter? Maybe.

In any case, I went through the online application, affirmed that my spouse had not worked longer than five years for the railroad (for some reason), and entered all of my relevant personal information, including my American telephone number. (There were not enough spaces to enter my Italian number, which is longer.) After I submitted the form, I got an email saying that sometime in the next 30 days, they will call the phone number I entered -- again, as with the railroad employment question, for reasons that they decline to give.

But I don't leave my American phone turned on all the time because that would be ruinously expensive. So, when the Social Security Administration calls my phone number, they will inevitably get the voicemail message. Guess whose.

I hope it doesn't scupper my chances to start getting my monthly payments. But I still won't erase the message.

We went last weekend to meet with our new landlords and see our new house once again. Things are moving along at an elegant and serene pace. Unhurried. We did, after all, move to Italy precisely for this vita that is so, so dolce. But the painters are scheduled to start re-painting all the walls of the new house tomorrow, which probably means next Monday, and they estimate that it will take two weeks to finish the whole house, which probably means three. We are going ahead and scheduling the movers, anyway, to bring all of our furniture from the storage unit in Lucca up the bracing Via Capriglia and then carry dressers and beds and cabinets through the twisted passageways and up the winding stairs into our new house.

The celebration of La Befana (Twelfth Night) happened Monday evening. Jonathan was busy with meetings, so we didn't go to the little parade and festival here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea, but since the whole celebration kicked off right at the pub, we could hear it very clearly from our front porch.

 

The winter flowers are out on the hillside now -- pale green hellebore and white daffodils. The holiday festivities are almost over now, although we still have the Befana celebrations on Twelfth Night.

We went to New Year's Eve dinner here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea where a big celebration had been organized at the empty school house. This was the first time that this had happened and there was a story in the local paper about it saying that the "old people" in Capriglia were gathering together to do this. Jonathan and I had been part of the planning of the event from the very beginning and were unaware that we are explicitly among the number of "old people" up here until we read about it in the paper. It was literally news to us.  But, honestly, we fit right in and weren't even the youngest people there -- although not by much.

The cuisine of Italy has just this past month been recognized by UNESCO as an important part of world cultural heritage (the first country to have its cuisine named by UNESCO) and the local grandmas who cooked the meal were absolutely proving it. 

So we ate until midnight and then watched the fireworks twinkling down on the coast below us. From up here, it looked like fireflies in the summer woods.

Mimmo gave us a precious bottle of local olive oil -- the supply this year is very limited because of the bad harvest. This year's vintage is being called Palle Verdi -- "Green Balls" -- which is slightly obscene in English, but not in Italian, where the slang for testicles is "scatole" -- "boxes" -- not "balls." So there's a piece of important cultural knowledge that you can keep on hand for your next trip to Italy.

We are not in our new house yet, but -- much like the raffle drawing for the giant wine bottle at the pub or, for that matter, my Italian citizenship -- we have high hopes that it will happen very soon.

In the meantime, I am keeping myself busy by trying to come up with ideas to promote Armadillo Massacre Number Three. This week I made bookplate stickers that have my recipe for fried catfish on them. Fried catfish are an important part of the book -- an explicit ingredient of Heaven. I realized, when thinking about this, that it took me a whole 60,000-word book to say basically the same thing that Henry David Thoreau said in just one sentence: "Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads."

 

I've come down with the flu and so we have been holed up at home all week, missing the Christmas lunch at Pilar's house and the big Feast of San Stefano today at the pub. But our time has been enlivened by the wisteria seed pods that I picked a couple of weeks ago and brought inside so that we can take them with us when/if we move and plant wisteria at the new house if it doesn't already grow there. I did not know before this that wisteria seed pods are explosive and can burst open with a loud bang and such force that they shoot the seeds themselves across the room like bullets. One of them two days ago actually managed to shatter a ceramic cup. I had no idea about this. But after having to duck screaming behind the couch cushions in terror, I do now.

Here during the shortest days of the year, I mostly want to hide under the covers on our bed and watch Christmas-themed food videos on YouTube and then make the things and eat them. This has led to many trips to stores all over town searching for things like molasses -- which is impossible to find, despite very diligent nostalgia-and-hunger-induced effort.

So we go down to the pub and eat Daniele's pears roasted in red wine and then wander home while the wolves howl in an amazing chorus and I hurry to get safe inside our house and Jonathan lingers outside, hoping for a glimpse of one. So far, I am relieved to say, he has been unsuccessful. But the wolves are so numerous (and so convivial) that they woke me up before dawn yesterday with a rousing symphony of howling.

The winner of the raffle of the giant bottle of wine at the pub has not been determined yet. We bought our ticket (#17) last Easter, which was the first time the raffle was supposed to have been held, and have held onto it for these many months through many further announcements that the raffle was going to be happening any day now. But things do not rush forward and it may be many months still before the winner is known.

Still no word on my Italian citizenship, btw.

Likewise, we are supposed to be signing the lease and paying the rent and getting the keys to our new house in ten days' time, but there is no movement on that front and we are glad that we gave ourselves a whopping four months of overlap, while we still have this house, to actually make the move. We will doubtless need every bit of the time.

But I am in no particular rush, just savoring these last weeks living with Jonathan in this misty, hidden dreamworld where we can feel, especially on foggy days or in the mornings before the mist rises back into the sky, that we have somehow managed to travel back in time to the days before televisions and cell phones and traffic jams, when a person's whole world could be just one tiny village in the hills of Tuscany and the people and things found there would be enough for a full and complete life.

We went to hear our friends sing in the local choir concert last night. Because there are so few people up here, the choir makes up ten percent of the total population of the village. I like to think of them practicing together in the evenings, as they have done for decades now, from the time before there was anything else to do on a long winter night. I sent a clip last night to Jonathan's sons and Gabe replied, "No wonder it's easy for people to believe in the divine."

 

 Update: Jonathan just got home and he has passed his first exam for law school! I am so proud of him!

 

The wolves have been howling at night lately. It echoes around the forest and the ravine behind the house and, when we walk out at night, we are careful, peering into the darkness and intent, listening to every sound. The dark comes very early now. Somehow, it all makes Christmas seem so much more real.

The Christmas fairs seem sparkly in the dusky winter light. In Pietrasanta, there are stalls selling special cheeses wrapped in straw and special sausages. There are stalls with local wine and new olive oil and different types of honey -- chestnut and linden and acacia and "a thousand flowers." There are stalls with serving implements carved from swirly olive wood and ones with delicate lacy shawls and sweaters crocheted with wool from local sheep and one with handmade soap from local olive oil. There is a stall with fifty different types of herbal teas, including one called "butterfly." Everything seems to twinkle a little bit.

But despite all this, the holiday season doesn't seem actually commercial. Instead, everyone we know is busy exchanging homemade baked goods and homemade wreaths and homemade jams and jellies and pickles. Jonathan and I are bringing around jars of our lemon-ginger marmalade and loaves of Jonathan's fresh-baked bread.

The commune here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea has put up a creche in the little park that commemorates the fallen war dead. There are sheep that have been made by pinning cardboard sheep faces onto hay bales. They give off a very distinct "Little Prince -- please will you draw me a sheep?" vibe and every time we go by them, I feel warm in my heart.

 

One of the nice things about being a grandparent is that now I can do fun things for my grandson that I thought about doing for my sons, but never did because I was too busy actually, you know, parenting them.

So during these past couple of weeks, I wrote a very silly book for my grandson called "Muffin and the Circus of the Sun" that stars a little hedgehog named Muffin along with other characters like the Later Gator and the Gift Horse and some very nice Dingbats.

For $11, there is a company in the US that is printing my book and binding it nicely and shipping it to my grandchild who can't read yet, but maybe will one day.

So that is what I did with the first half of December and now it is one its way and I am free to fall into all of the holiday festivities -- markets and concerts and dinners and parties. Today's festivity is a General Strike all over Italy that means the trains aren't running and our paper recycling wasn't picked up this morning. So that is festive, but in a different way from the choir concert.

Now that the cold weather has come, the air out over the sea is crystal clear and we can see all of the individual houses and gardens down on the coast and even across the bay to the headlands at Porto Venere. The evening air often smells of woodsmoke and the only birds are owls and the sunset over the sea is the color of rubies. The leaves are falling every day and we can see down into the valley behind us now to the lights of Solaio. Late at night, wolves howl and the sound echoes around the valley forest.

We bought a two-foot-tall plastic Christmas tree at the big supermarket out on the highway and installed it in the living room. I thought that having at least a few of our old family ornaments hanging on it would make me feel more like it was Christmas. But now that it is up, I realize that I miss the smell of the fresh-cut fir trees that we used to have every year, hiking up into the high mountains and tramping through the silent snowy forest to find the one we wanted. We brought thermoses of hot chocolate and hot apple cider and scrambled eggs and bacon wrapped in tortillas and Christmas cookies. 

We always decorated the tree right away when we got home and the whole house smelled like the snowy winter forest. I will go out later and cut a pine branch or two from our woods and bring them into the house for the sake of their perfume. But I know that it will not be -- could not ever be -- the same.

Because there is a fried catfish motif running through Armadillo Massacre Number Three, I have made a new trailer based on that theme from an idea Tris came up with. The only problem was finding catfish and buttermilk, neither of which are readily available in Pietrasanta -- or even in Italy in general. For the catfish, I substituted the fish in the grocery store that looked to me most similar (it turned out to be plaice). 

And for the butter milk, I thought, "Well, we'll just make it ourselves." For my entire life, I have been under the impression that buttermilk was the milk left over after you churn cream into butter.

So we bought three half-liters of heavy cream and dutifully churned it into butter, carefully saving the leftover milk in a big bowl. When it was all done, I got set up to film and then while I was waiting for Jonathan to be ready, I gave the buttermilk a little taste -- just out of curiosity and to make sure it was right.

So do you know what is left when you churn butter out of cream? Not buttermilk, that's for sure.

It's skim milk. Just plain skim milk.

So at that point, I looked online to see how to make buttermilk. It turns out that buttermilk is a cultured product produced in a similar manner to yogurt, but using a different culture agent. All of the recipes for making it yourself begin with, "Take two tablespoons of buttermilk and add them..."

But if I already had access to buttermilk, why would I be making it myself? In the end, we stirred in a couple of spoons of plain yogurt to the milk and carried on. The end product was tasty nonetheless.

But now we are left with a giant ball of butter as big as a baby's head. We used some of it to make cookies and I also made a concoction of butter, honey, cinnamon, and cloves that we are eating on Jonathan's homemade bread. I've had worse things in my mouth. But we still have a lot of butter to go.

 

There was a Panettone Fair in the Piazza del Duomo in Pietrasanta yesterday. Jonathan and I went to it thinking that there would be some people selling panettone and also people with other delightful and scrumptious seasonal treats. I was especially hoping that the lovely people from the Festa di San Martino mercato a couple of weeks ago who make salted caramel rum would be there again and I could correct my extremely grievous error of only having bought one bottle of that wondrous elixir. So on the way down to town, we had many pleasant food and drink speculations. I mean, how much panettone do you really need?

A lot. It turns out that you need a lot. The fair was two dozen or so booths of people selling exclusively panettone -- big panettone, little panettone, plain panettone, chocolate panettone. One booth did shake it up a little by also selling pan d'oro. But other than that, it was pure panettone all the way. Who could ever eat so much panettone?

Us. We bought four.

I love Italy.

Last night, we got five and a half inches of rain between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. There was much lightning and thunder to rattle the windows, even some tiny hail. I have been outside to our garden, where things seem very damp, but otherwise undamaged, but not down to town or even into the village of Capriglia itself because Jonathan threw out his back last night making risotto and so couldn't even go to school today and is here now with a hot water bottle, drugged to the gills.

On the one hand, being taken down by merely stirring risotto is an unmistakable sign of our aging decrepitude. On the other hand, it was an excellent risotto.

Every day now, more of the chestnut leaves turn fluttering gold and then brown and then fall, leaving us with an ever more clear view of the sea. This is our secret. In the summertime, we are hidden away in our shady glen, invisible to all the world around us. 

But in winter, our view opens up and we sit exposed here on our promontory where we can see everything from Livorno down south to the headlands past La Spezia and even further to the north. It's like we are on the prow of an ancient sailing ship, far out at sea.

And now the finished product. 

I was a little shy about traipsing through the Piazza del Duomo dressed as a giant armadillo, but no one paid much attention to me and the two workmen carrying lumber up the side street who chatted with me seemed to find the whole thing rather charming. 

I was glad we finished filming before the big group of German tourists showed up, though. One does not want to be so colorful as to show up on strangers' vacation reels.