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.