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 heard back from an agent in New York. This is what he said: "I want you to know how much I enjoyed the read -- it was funny and deep and evocative and filled with Atmosphere without being hokey. I'm so glad I had the chance to read it. More to come and thanks once again." That was three months ago and I've never heard from him again. 

The armadillo costume is pricey, but I think I will go ahead and buy it anyway -- to keep the dream alive.

Here is a bit of the book, just for the hell of it. This blog may be the only place that it ever appears in public.

PART I: BEFORE

Chapter One: Armadillo Massacre Number One

 

            It all started with the first armadillo. That was back when Clyde still lived in his trailer on the farm outside of Babbitt, Arkansas. Well, he called it a farm, but he didn’t grow anything on it except for weeds and, I guess, armadillos.

            We should have recognized that first armadillo for the evil omen that it was, but sometimes I’ll admit that we’ve been known to be the little tiniest bit slow on the uptake. If we had been a tad speedier, we might of caught on sooner. If we had been a tad speedier, I wouldn’t be dead.

            What happened was that Clyde was living out on the so-called farm, like I said. Give the man his due, he kept himself busy out there making improvements on the place. Like for example, he put a great big handicap access ramp onto the front of the trailer and nailed down a piece of paisley-patterned indoor-outdoor carpet on it so that the ramp wouldn’t ever be at all slick in rain or ice. Nailed it down good and tight all over. I myself would have thought that wet indoor-outdoor carpet would be slick as grease, but Clyde seemed to know what he was doing.

            And also, he sure kept that pasture out there mowed. I bet there was nothing he liked more in the world than getting out there and mowing on that pasture. He had a John Deere riding mower with matching cap, but also a regular just walking around mower for when he mowed up close to the trailer. That was where he said he was doing his precision work. Also, this one time he rode the big John Deere into a ditch that he didn’t see across his path and it was pure hell to get it out. It made him kind of cautious of using the big mower in tight places after that.

            He mowed and mowed those weeds, hoping it would somehow turn them into grass, I guess. It never did, but you can’t blame a man for trying. He had neighbors out there and I wondered if they were ever bothered by the noise, the pretty near constant whine of the lawn mower. But if they complained, I never heard about it.

            I guess you can tell that he was a house-proud man and so it was no surprise that he did not take kindly to a danged armadillo that showed up that spring and started coming around the place digging up roots and grubs and leaving holes all over the yard. Looked a sight, he said. Not to mention the personal safety hazard. Clyde had a good many years behind him and his night vision wasn’t all that it used to be. Day vision wasn’t so great either, if you come to it. Some people might even call him a blind old coot, in fact, but probably not to his face. So stepping in an armadillo hole and breaking his leg was not the distant danger for Clyde that it might have been for his more sprightly neighbors. We all remember the John-Deere-mower-crashed-in-a-hidden-ditch incident, after all. There had been some speculation at the time that the ditch was maybe not quite so hidden as Clyde made it out to be.

            When it came to issues of personal safety, Clyde was always a stalwart believer in the simple efficacy of a dependable shotgun to fix whatever ailed you. A magic cure-all for any problem, large or small. You could have tried to argue with him about it if you didn’t mind completely wasting your breath (and possibly getting shot). So, naturally, Clyde took as much defilement of his well-mowed weeds as a house-proud man could take, which wasn’t much, and then he got old Bessie locked and loaded and set himself to wait.

            Clyde staked out the yard three nights running, drinking coffee and slapping himself to stay awake, but armadillos are wilier varmints than you might think from looking at them. Maybe it’s just dumb instinct or maybe it’s sheer animal cunning, but they steer well clear of anything or anyone who smells like that much Aqua Velva. There are plenty of fully grown human women who would be a lot better off in their lives today if only they’d had the sense to do the same.

            The fourth night, Clyde figured that the armadillo must have moved on to greener pastures and went on to bed, although he kept Bessie loaded and leaned up against the wall right by the trailer door, ready just in case. Clyde was a man who liked to be prepared. And sure enough, that very night just as he was getting to the good part of the dream, Clyde was woken up by the noise of that durn armadillo out there, crashing around at the garbage cans, looking for grubs, bold as brass. Fortunately, Clyde had gone to bed in his underwear and mud boots just in case. He was up and out and on that critter like a duck on a June bug, blasting away in no time flat.

            Well, naturally, the armadillo was surprised. You would be surprised too if a blind old coot wearing nothing but tighty-whiteys and mud boots interrupted your dinner by shooting at you. Even in Babbitt, Arkansas, this is not the norm. No matter that on account of being pretty near blind out there, the coot was missing by a mile. With all the pellets flying, it was almost inevitable that something was going to end up shot. The armadillo could see that as well as anyone and I guess it kind of lost its head and started running around all over the yard while Clyde was firing on it as fast as he could reload.

            Here’s a thing you may or may not know about armadillos: their hides are hellaciously tough. So tough that a shotgun pellet can actually ricochet off them. This is a true fact. There was a story in the paper not too long ago about a man who accidentally shot his mother-in-law in the back with a small-caliber handgun while she was sitting in her chair inside and he was trying to shoot an armadillo outside. The bullet ricocheted off the armadillo, went in through the screen door of the house and then on through the back of her chair where she was sitting watching TV. It didn’t kill her, but I bet it shut her up. The armadillo may not have known that about itself – that its hide could deflect small arms fire – but Clyde probably did. It didn’t matter, though, because by that time Clyde had kind of lost his head, too.

            The armadillo probably figured that no one in the world would be stupid enough to fire at an armadillo sitting in front of a propane tank right up against the side of their own trailer, especially not a house-proud man like Clyde. But that armadillo had figured wrong, because in the heat of the moment Clyde had not any qualms left at all and, having invested the better part of a whole box of shotgun shells already, he went all in. He aimed by the moonlight gleaming off the metal tank and I’ll be damned if he didn’t miss the tank and hit the varmint. It was a one-in-a-hundred shot and just goes to show what can be done if you steadfastly pursue your dreams with grit and determination.

            The armadillo squealed and ran under the handicap access ramp and there, dug in as far back as it could squeeze, breathed its last breath on this earth and passed on to those grub-filled pastures in the sky.

            Clyde’s blood was all riled up now with his victory and, being a no-time-like-the-present type of person and also having smelled his fair share of rotting armadillo carcasses in a long life filled with wholesome country living, he decided to go ahead and get the thing out from under his trailer while the getting was good and it was still fresh. Lord, the armadillo hadn’t made it easy, though. It had crawled up under the ramp as far as it could get and then had even dug down some before it expired. There was no reaching it from any side, even with the long-handled barn rake.

            Clyde hated to do it, but right then that very night he went ahead and pulled up each and every one of those carpet nails, all the way around the whole length of that paisley-patterned indoor-outdoor carpet. He couldn’t risk tearing it because he had got it cheap from a friend of his from church who worked at Home Depot and there was no telling when he could ever get such a good deal again, especially since his friend had been let go under unfriendly circumstances not too long after all that carpet had luckily become available to him.

Then Clyde started prying up boards on the handicap access ramp. It was getting on towards sunrise when he finally got hold of the dead armadillo itself. He had to dig it out some with the shovel there at the end and then he grabbed onto its tail with a pair of pliers and dragged it out from under there. He pulled it on across the pasture and up into the edge of the woods. He left it there, just lying on the ground and went back to repair the damage to the handicap access ramp.

            By the time the sun was good and up, he had nailed all the boards back from where he had wrenched them free and was re-stretching the carpet so that it would lie down flat and tight again. You couldn’t hardly tell it had been taken up at all. He thought at one point that he might be going to run out of nails, he used so many. But it turned out okay and he saw the buzzards up in the early morning sky, circling and circling there at the edge of the woods where that dead armadillo’s body lay festering already. He figured there wouldn’t be a single trace of it left by afternoon.

            Now Clyde told this story to my mother and my mother told it to me and she didn’t have any answers to my main question about the whole episode, which was, “Where the hell were the neighbors while all this was going on?” I mean, a blind man in his drawers shooting enough buckshot to kill ten armadillos and then doing major outdoor carpentry in the middle of the night is bound to raise a commotion. There was the family up at the big house – a nice couple and their three kids, all in grade school. And across the road (technically, it was a state highway, but it only had one lane in each direction) was Denny Sims and his widowed mother who moved in with him after his daddy died. Everyone said Mrs. Sims didn’t sleep much at night anymore. And right smack next door was Travis, who was Clyde’s stepson from his third marriage, who was staying in Clyde’s old trailer until he could get his feet back under him after he lost his job at the chicken plant for being caught with unauthorized gizzards on his way out after his shift. You know he stays up late every night. But even with all the gunfire and the digging and the hammering going on in the middle of the night and even with those buzzards circling and circling up in the sky all day long, not a one of them so much as made a peep about it. That’s pretty telling, when you come to think about it. That’s the part that we should have noticed. That and the buzzards.

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.

The heat is still here, lower temperatures always predicted for "tomorrow." I bought three gauzy summer sundresses for fifteen euros each at the market in an attempt to fool myself into believing that the daytime temperature had dropped by ten degrees. That didn't work, but the dresses are pretty anyway.

Daniele has been cooking everything he can out on the grill behind the pub, where it is a tiny bit cooler than in the sweltering kitchen. Since he has the hot coals going anyway, he has also been making roasted cherries in red wine. We bought three jars and are considering stocking up on some more. They are a rare treat and we don't know how long it may be before they come around again.

When I went outside two days ago, I startled a young red deer that was standing under our grape arbor eating the baby strawberry grapes. It flitted off to the far end of the garden and stood very still under the apple tree watching me for a long time until I turned my head and it vanished into the woods.

 

Lately, Jonathan and I wander around completely dazed in a haze of heat. We don't trust ourselves with heavy machinery or tricky crossword puzzles. At night, I keep the bathtub full of cool water and go in every now and then to take a quick dip to cool off. But the forecast is for rain early next week, so we cling to hope.

We think we have now submitted the final forms for my Italian citizenship application. This is the third time we have thought that. But now that Jonathan has at long last achieved a valid Italian driver's license, we believe that anything is possible. Who knows? Next week it might actually even rain.

 

The first deadly heat wave of the summer is here and all of Liguria is under temporary work restrictions barring outdoor labor or other heavy work between the hours of 11 a.m. and 4 p.m.

There was, nevertheless, a marathon held yesterday evening right here in town. It began at 7:30 p.m. down on the coast and the course came up the mountainside to Capriglia and then over to Capezzano Monte and then back down again. Despite the evening start, this seemed insane to me.

And also, apparently, to the runners. Some of them stopped in at the pub to have some snacks and cold wine sitting under the trees on the terrace. Mind you, this was DURING the race. They were having a good, if not very strenuous time, and were happy to let me take their picture. 

Jonathan and I were handling the bills. We have told Daniele and Alice that we will always work Saturday nights until their baby is born and then we will work every night as long as they need us.

The pub was slammed with people last night who had come up into the hills looking for a little cooler air and a bit of a breeze. One man, while he was paying, said to Daniele, pointing at us, "Who are they?"

"They're Americans," Daniele said. "So you can pay in either euros or dollars -- whichever you like."

"But what are they doing here?" the man said.

"Look, pal," Daniele said to him. "Up here, we are a community. Everyone helps out here."

The ice cream store at the beach has permanently closed. It had been there for 90 years, but over the winter the family who ran it decided they were done and so it sits empty now. I had become addicted to the Apple-Cinnamon gelato and doubt that I will ever taste its like again. Fortunately, in an act of what now appears to be great prescience (but wasn't really), I gorged myself on it last summer. Everyone says that there are plenty of other gelaterie around, and that is true. But it is also true that there will never be another one like that.

Even though we are in mourning, Jonathan and I are helping out every weekend at the pub, doing the bills and waiting for Alice's baby to be born. When that happens, we will work every night for a while. We do this surrounded by our friends who could be sitting out on the cool terrace, but decided to come in to be with us so that we won't be lonely. It is sweltering inside, but they are kind and lovely friends. They speak to us in Italian while we are adding numbers in our heads in English, making it impossible for me to either speak or add correctly and demonstrating beyond any doubt, because he can do both simultaneously, that Jonathan is a goddamn genius.

At the house, both the olives and the grapes are coming along nicely despite the heat. The olives are the size of small peas now. The grapes are a little bigger. Jonathan and I live very sedately in front of the fans, drinking ice water and not doing much else. In the mornings, we often go to the beach. Little kids build sand castles with buckets or play with beach balls at the edge of the surf. 

 

Jonathan and I went in to Firenze Saturday evening to see Yo-Yo Ma play some Bach cello suites. It was one of the most profound artistic experiences of my life.

There was nothing on the stage -- just a chair. And he himself didn't do any talking -- just walked out carrying his cello and sat down and started to play.

And it was like being hit by a tidal wave of purest beauty -- an intensely physical sensation, sitting still there in my auditorium seat, of love. I felt it -- all in a rush -- in every part of my body, but most especially in my heart. Jonathan cried.

It's a strange thing to be allowed to watch a man sit on a stage in the light and commune directly with his gods. It seems like that should be an entirely private affair, such an intimate moment -- something that we should not look upon with unshielded eyes.

But I think the thing that great artists have is that they can touch their gods and they can also give you the feeling that you are, for the space of that moment, touching them, too. It was like he was giving each one of us, personally, the gift of transcendence. And now my heart is changed forever.

"I always thought you were a little bit crazy to cry in front of that Botticelli Madonna in the Uffizi," Jonathan said later on the way home. "But now I understand."

I have reached the stage of my life where divesting myself of everything I own has enormous appeal. There is just something about having to physically lift up all of your possessions yourself that makes your treasures seem so much less precious. In ten and a half months, we will leave our hidden paradise here in the woods for a different paradise in a different place -- right in heart of bustling downtown Capriglia-by-the-Sea (pop. 255 people, counting us). And we will once again have to lift up all our shit.

In preparation for this, I have been very slowly ridding myself of books that I paid $30K to transport all the way across eight time zones, but now -- who was I kidding? -- will never read again. There is a Little Free Library in the big grocery store just outside town and every time we go there I bring two books to donate. My books are in English, but there is a very international community here and the books almost always have been taken by someone by the next time we go in. It's a slow process, but an oddly satisfying one.

Yesterday when Jonathan was putting out the trash, he found a book that had been left for us in our mailbox. It was from our neighbor Fabio. He left a note saying that he had come across the book in the grocery store LFL and took it for me because it seemed like the sort of thing I would be interested in. Indeed, it was -- so much so that I bought it in 2002 when I lived in the South Pacific and carried it back to the US and kept it for over two decades and shipped it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to Italy ($30K...) before I put it in the grocery store LFL last week.

It is nice to have thoughtful and caring friends who think about me when they come across books I would like. Apparently, I am keeping this one.

We have had another meeting with the owners of the belfry house. And, although we don't yet have a rental contract, we have a verbal agreement that one of these days we will make a written agreement to eventually sign a contract to rent the house. We are very excited about this because it means we will be renting an empty house and will, therefore, have room for all our stuff -- our stuff that I am currently busy donating to the LFL at the grocery store.

The belfry house is lovely -- maybe even slightly larger than this one, but without all the outbuildings and grounds. So no more grape arbor or olive grove with poppies blooming in it or chestnut trees turning golden in the fall and dropping their spiky nut bombs for us to make vanilla-rum chestnut butter with. We are planning to go crazy this fall brining olives and making enough corbezzoli jam to last us for the duration.

But the new house has enough M.C. Escher stairways and topsy-turvy layout to make us feel that now familiar and, frankly, beloved sensation of complete disorientation. We have been inside the belfry house twice now and still can't figure out where all the rooms are. (Jonathan is better at it than I am, but he has a Ph.D. in non-Euclidian higher-dimensional geometry and I feel that gives him an advantage.)

 Before:

After:

Jonathan passed his driver's license test!

 Un Bar Aux Folies Bergère

 

The exceptionally cool and rainy May followed by the last few days of glorious summer warmth has led to two unexpected pieces of magic.

The first is that there were wild porcini mushrooms at the greengrocers this morning. These are not usually in season until the fall, but the seasons are all cattywampus and so the mushrooms have been coaxed into appearing months ahead of schedule. I just finished making some rosemary-infused olive oil (we have masses of rosemary in our garden) and we will sauté the porcini in it and eat them with some of Jonathan's homemade bread. 

And the second piece of magic brought about by the rainy May is that we have an exceptionally abundant number of fireflies this year so that when we are walking in the dark through our olive groves or even along the road from the pub to our house, the air sparkles and shimmers all around us. It is easy to believe that fairies live in the summertime woods.

(photo by Tsuneaki Hiramatsu)

 

Summer is here now. It arrived all of the sudden with great waves of poppies and mosquitos and wild blue skies. We sleep now with the windows wide open with the sounds of the owls hunting in the dark woods and the larks rioting in the cherry tree at dawn.

Today is the Festa della Republica and there is a community potluck picnic here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea. We are bringing brownies and deviled eggs, which are exotic foreign delicacies here. We hope.

Saturday night, we lent a hand for the first time at the pub, doing the bills, sitting at the end of a table and trying to keep our arithmetic straight while simultaneously eating and talking to Nonno and participating in the life of our little world with the chaos of Saturday night clamoring all around us.

I once watched a documentary about the MIT Blackjack Team, who won thousands and thousands of dollars counting cards in Las Vegas casinos. The trick was not learning to count cards -- the trick was managing to count cards in the midst of a Las Vegas casino with waitresses offering you drinks and shouting discount prices in your ear and dealers keeping up a constant patter and other players exclaiming over wins and losses and odds. To make the team, potential MIT players had to pass a final test of counting and playing while being distracted by screaming undergraduates.

I bring this up for a reason.

I will just say that the steaks at the pub are 25 euros per kilo and one of the ones ordered Saturday night weighed 1.7 kilos. You do the math.

Fortunately, Jonathan did the math. He does, after all, have a mathematics Ph.D. -- albeit in higher-dimensional geometry. But I think we were OK. We are going again Monday night. If we can be of any help to Daniele and Alice, we want to help. Pray for us.

Then Sunday morning, our beach club opened and we hit the sand. We are Umbrellone #9 this year -- at the back of last year's #10. Sometimes, when I'm having a bad day or a hard time with something, I think to myself, "I want to go home." Then I think, "But where is my home?" and I have some amount of confusion about that. But when I stand in the sea and look out at the far blue horizon, I feel that, wherever home is, I am there.

My new bathing suit arrived at last. It doesn't fit. The top is too small, which has never in my entire life before ever been a problem for me. By turning it upside down, though, with the neck clasp at my back and the back strap around my neck, I can get it to pretty much work -- enough, anyway, to be wearable. So I will be spending the better part of the summer wandering around the Italian coast with my clothes on upside down. It's like I've finally achieved my life's ambition to inhabit the reincarnated spirit of Little Edie Beale.

S-T-A-U-N-C-H.