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.

The third draft of my memoir is sitting quietly marinating for a while so that I can come back to it with some "objective distance." Fat chance.

But, in any case, I am using my free time since I am not working on it (and since the chestnut butter days are now behind us) to work on some promos for Armadillo Massacre Number Three. Last night, we shot some footage in the pub. Did I ever imagine my life would end up this way? Um, no.

 

Some updates:

Wildlife: The wild boar in our woods has been going, well, wild. Last night. for the first time, we heard him rustling around out in the garden up close to the house and this morning there were new trenches uprooted all in between the grape vines. We have not, thank god, had any face-to-face interaction with him.* But we were visited by the biggest grasshopper that I have ever seen in my life. I realize, of course, that this is not the same.

* (Jonathan says he is disappointed by this, but I didn't notice him rushing down into the dark and noisy woods last night.) 

Festive Season: This weekend is the Festa di San Martino. Jonathan and I went into town this morning to the special holiday mercato and celebrated by buying sweet baked goods and killer booze. I am on a diet (to try to make up for my rather debauched summer) where I am trying not to eat any sugar or to drink any alcohol at home. So that's going well.

Yesterday, we inaugurated the official winter season with a big Bollito at the pub. Daniele made a gorgeous tortellini al brodo and we all ate and ate and drank much wine and then finished off with Punch Livornese, which is hot rum with espresso floating on top of it. This is for when you want to feel absolutely shitfaced and simultaneously totally wired. Festive season, indeed.

Italian Language: Now that AI runs our lives -- whether we want it or not -- whenever my Italian teacher sends me homework to do between my lessons, Gmail offers to translate it for me. Very considerate, but not likely to improve my language skills.

Persimmons: Mimmo has figured out how to get the persimmons down from the tree out back and, knowing that I love them, has very sweetly made a project of getting as many as he can for me. On Thursday, he got 21. I have them all sitting around in the kitchen getting ripe, which they will do either one-by-one (best case scenario) or all at once (most likely scenario).

Law School: Jonathan has become the sweet grandpa of his year in law school. The other students, who are mostly younger than our youngest child, all use the informal pronouns with him and treat him with great affection. He is on the group chat with them, where they mostly seem to discuss the parties that they have every weekend night and not a small number of other nights as well. I think we should start going to the parties, showing up with a bit platter of deviled eggs and suggesting we all play charades.

 

It has been raining lately and up here on our mountainside sometimes we are inside the clouds and sometimes we are above them. 

The wild boar have found their way into our garden again and left long trails off dug-up trenches in between the grape vines and all across the olive terraces. Mimmo says they aren't really hurting the plants, so we just quietly co-exist with them here in the rain.

In the pub, everyone has moved inside now to sit around one table near the wood-stove. They have put up a sign on the door that says if someone neglects to close the door after themselves when they come in, the next round of drinks is on them.

We sit so close together that our knees are touching. There is the smell of wood smoke. Two different people brought bottles of wine with them Friday night and Daniele railed against them -- but gently -- from where he was playing scopa in the corner with Almo and Alvaro and Luca. Our national tennis hope, Jannik Sinner, won in two sets -- 6-4, 6-3 -- on the television over the door to the kitchen. 

Nonno bought us all punch al mardarino and we drank them as if it was deepest winter although it was only a cloudy evening after a long day of rain and the dark of true winter is still three months away. We ate spicy salami from Napoli and then gorgonzola bruschette and then octopus bruschette and there were, at the height of the evening, twelve people squeezed in around a table for six and when the actual diners started showing up at 8:30, we wandered away and Jonathan and I walked home the long way, holding hands in the wet streets with the moon coming in and out of the clouds and an owl, sounding lost, calling again and again in the woods.

Luciana sent a picture that she took from her bedroom window of our drive and our red maple tree. She can't see our actual house from hers -- no one can see our house because it is hidden away of the back side of a little hill. Jonathan didn't recognize the view and thought she was sending a photo from some fabulous vacation spot. "Wow! Where are you?" he texted back.

She is here, looking at our house.

 

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.