The nets are out in the olive groves now, waiting for the harvest. They look like ghosts floating in the trees. We are all happy that there will be a good harvest this year after last year's disaster.

The autumn mists have moved in and, in between days of startling blue-skied beauty, we have wet red tile roofs (which are so much more vivid than the dusty red of summer) and mossy stones and storms sweeping across the sea.

The chestnuts are ripe now and I have made chestnut butter twice this week -- coffee, chocolate and cinnamon. And the corbezzoli berries are ripe -- much fatter than they were last year when we all gasped in the heat until late autumn and waited, anxiously, for rain. Our persimmon tree even has ripening persimmons in reach, just waiting for me.

So I have been playing at being a good farm wife -- brining olives and making chestnut butter and corbezzoli jam. And tonight we are having a fall vegetable lasagna -- a "lasagna bianca" with cream sauce instead of tomatoes. It has baked sweet potatoes and fresh sage mixed into the ricotta. And more sage with sausage and caramelized shallots. And, of course, porcini mushrooms sauteed in rosemary-infused olive oil. Then there are roasted carrots and butternut squash and mozzarella and well-aged parmesan. I wish I had a sprinkling of pine nuts to add, but I didn't think about that until just this minute.

Later, we will go down to the pub and have a glass of wine with the boys and then come home and eat lasagna together and then go to sleep curled against each other while it rains in the night.

 Been a bit damp lately.

 

While we were in the US, I took the opportunity to be finger-printed (again) and request my criminal record (again) from the FBI, who have not yet discovered any crimes I've committed. I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that my various misdeeds have all been so trifling as to be beneath the notice of any authorities, but it does come in handy now.

So with my clean record in hand and an Apostile for my long-form birth certificate, I now have a three month window to apply for Italian citizenship. After three months have passed, they figure I might have had enough time to begin a new life of major crimes and I would have to get new fingerprints and a new copy of my record. Having waited this long, though, I really can't see myself being bothered to begin any hard-core criminal activities now. At 62-years-old, it just strikes me as exhausting.

My one stumbling block is the language test, so I have signed up to take it on December 5th and am now kicking my studying into high gear by hanging around more with the boys down at the pub. Last night we discussed our various attempts at making alcohol at home.* Jonathan and I once failed miserably in our attempt to make honeysuckle-infused vodka, turning out some glaucous beige shit that smelled of dirty feet and rotting cabbage. But Nonno tells us that he has had great success making liqueurs with both plums and figs. It is good to have a diet rich in fruits and vegetables. When people tease him about being old, he says that he will outlive us all. I hope so.

We sit inside now that the weather has turned colder and talk about this and that while the card players play at the table in the corner and Renata gives us a platter of sliced meat and cheese and bread because Daniele and Alice have stayed home now that the tourist season is over, so there is no great pasta bowl of one of Daniele's fantastic dishes to appear out of the kitchen tonight. Jonathan and I walk home holding hands and we can see all the islands very clearly out in the sea and all the boats heading into the harbor at La Spezia. The air is very clear and cold. We are glad when we get home that the heat has come on inside.

*If the language test is food-and-booze-related, I'm a shoo-in. Otherwise, I'm toast.

 

It's rainy today, with clouds and mist huddled around the house blocking our view of anything other than the dripping chestnut trees and the moss-covered stones. There are no sounds.

Jonathan is baking bread. The first corbezzoli have started to fall, so soon we will make corbezzoli jam. And then it will be chestnut season again and we will make our famous (if only to us) butter-rum chestnut butter. I feel somehow that I should learn to knit.

Instead, I have made a caramel-apple pie and a batch of late plum jam. We have been gorging ourselves on wild porcini sauteed in rosemary-infused olive oil. We are cautiously hopeful about the upcoming olive harvest.

Last Friday night, we celebrated Oktoberfest at the pub, even though it was still September. In these precarious days, we feel we should not delay our fun.

And Avi's father passed away early Saturday morning. He was a musician, a violinist, and Avi was his only child. We went to the funeral and then home alone in the rain. It's hard to believe that only one month ago, we were so hot and so tired of the katydid song and so glad to go into the cool water at the beach.

 

Aiden and I moved to Colorado in 1996. He was one year old and I was 33 and for a long time it was just the two of us. Then Tris was born and it was the three of us. I went to work and knew people there and made friends. But that was all outside my real life in those early days. My real life was Aiden and Tris and me and the magical little world we inhabited alone together.

That first autumn, back in 1996, Aiden and I drove up into the mountains west of Colorado Springs and got lost on a dirt road on the back side of Pikes Peak. Bumping along the ruts, we came around a bend in the road and suddenly a ravine filled with aspens opened out beside us. It was a sunny day and breezy and the aspen leaves had begun to turn yellow and the whole glen was filled with luminous, fluttering gold. I remember that I gasped. It was like being stabbed through the heart with beauty.

Over the years, we went back to that place many times, all through the year, but especially in the autumn when the aspens were turning yellow. So last week, when Jonathan and I were in Colorado to supervise the loading of all our worldly goods into the shipping container, we went back one last time to our secret hideout off that rutted dirt road in the mountains on the back side of Pikes Peak. Purely by chance, it was aspen season and a sunny day and breezy and I gasped again when the glowing, trembling ravine opened out beside us. And I thought, "I will never see this again" and I said goodbye to it and goodbye to all those days when it was just me and my babies alone together. They were good days.

But Jonathan and I are happy to be back home.

Now, in September, the house is at its most magical and when I go up the drive to pick a bay leaf for the dinner I am cooking, turning and coming back to it, I have to stop, breathless for a moment, at its russet loveliness in the light from the setting sun among the dark green chestnut leaves, with its red tiles and pots of geraniums and ancient stone walls and serenity. This is our hideout now.

Coming through passport control in the Pisa airport, the separate line for Italian citizens that we got into (thinking that it would be the fastest) was, in fact, the slowest because of the large number of arguments that people in line chose to have with the border police. One man even got through and then came back to argue one further point. The Italian word for "to argue" is "litigare" and, truly, Italy must produce the greatest litigators in the world. 

"Ah," Jonathan said, as the line came to another standstill, "it's good to be home."

 

It took Phineas Fogg 80 days to go all the way around the world. It took Jonathan and I twenty-five hours to go from lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea to Anchorage, Alaska, ten times zones away, to see my all-grown-up-now baby. But we might just have well have gone all the way to Alpha Centauri for the difference in culture from our tranquil little world in the olive groves.

An example: We took Tris to a store to buy some new clothes and there were many, many large taxidermed animals strewn about the place. But even weirder (to our no-longer-inured-to-America ears) was our conversation with the chatty and jovial cashier. Here is a transcript of our conversation, as exact as I can remember it:

Her (referring to the previous little boy in line): He just passed his driver's test.

Me: Wow -- he looks so young.

Her (laughing): Well, up here, they can get them at 14. You can start working at 14, too. That's when I started working. At one of those places with the trays (looking at Tris and laughing more.) You wouldn't remember them.

Me: A cafeteria. We used to go to Furr's Cafeteria every Friday to eat with my grandparents.

Her (still laughing): That's it -- Furr's cafeteria. That was one of the big chains (really laughing up a storm now.) That was were the first mass shooting ever was -- in a Furr's Cafeteria in Texas. A guy went in with a gun and just mowed everybody down. When my mother heard about it, she said, 'Well, he went to high school with me!' (Uproarious laughter)"

Me (backing away slowly): Have a nice day.

We are not in Capriglia any more, Toto.

The Trofeo del Leone is happening this week and we went Tuesday evening to watch a couple of the games and eat grilled sausage sandwiches and hang out in the cool night air with our friends. There was a horse and a pony for pony rides and much excitement because the soccer field here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea is less than half-sized (the steepness of the mountain slope making big flat places nonexistent up here) and so the players kept inadvertently kicking the ball into the spectators or even into the people who were not really watching the game, but were instead standing chatting to their friends or quietly guzzling inexpensive prosecco out of plastic cups until they were blind-sided by an incoming soccer ball to the head.

The teams themselves were made up of players of varying ages and abilities and although Daniele was the coach of one of the teams and although the teams had names like "The Drinking Monkeys," I didn't know any of the good players. It is possible that there is a connection between being able to run around with agility on a soccer field and not spending all day drinking in the pub. That might explain why the good players were unknown to me. Just a thought.

There were children and lemonade and laughter and bright stars slowly making their way across the summer night sky. But there was also the moment of silence at the beginning of each game when we bowed our heads and remembered Leonardo. And at one point, I noticed Geppolino, Leonardo's increasingly frail father, standing by himself looking lost, all alone in the crowd.

Today it is raining and the forecast is for rain most days all next week. Jonathan and I went down for one last ice cream at the beach yesterday afternoon. I have put the comforters back onto our bed. Summer seems to be over.

 This morning at the Frutta D'Oro, there were these little round peppers. 

"What do we do with them?" we asked Barbara.

"Well, you cook them in boiling water and vinegar for a few minutes and then you stuff them with things," she said.

"And what are they called?" we asked. "What is their name?"

"They are called 'those little round peppers that you stuff with things'," she said. 

Presumably, it sounds better in the original Latin.

The summer tourists all had to leave their rental houses yesterday. So today, even though it is still as hot as ever and sunny, the beach has an atmosphere of winter coming on. Only a few of us are left. We have been nodding at each other all summer and now we recognize each other -- not only as faces, but as members of the fraternity of permanence.

The sea is strangely flat and still and clear today. The cold water feels lovely after a sleepless, sticky night. I saw four dead meduse washed up on the sand. Their season is coming to an end, too.

You may ask yourself what Black Forest-flavored toothpaste tastes like. I asked myself that and now I'm stuck brushing my teeth with it. Live and learn.
 

We are in the last days of summer now. It is meltingly hot and the meagre charm of the katydid chirping has long ago worn thin.

Forty years ago, I ate a pistachio gelato at a little gelateria by the beach here and it was so perfect, so intensely creamy and flavorful and rich, that I have never really recovered from it, but remembered it -- through all the years and all the other ice creams -- as the pinnacle, the Platonic Ideal of gelato in comparison to which all merely earthly gelatos would, inevitably, fall short. It was no fault of their own -- such ice cream as I ate on that summer day in 1984 cannot exist in great quantities in our limited universe and to ask that there be two such pistachio gelati would be greedy. The gods have their limits, too.

But the same shop is still there. I recognized it immediately. So after months of going past without going in (out of fear of finding the old idols fallen in the dust and also laziness), on Tuesday -- here at the end of the summer season just when everything will soon close down -- we had an ice cream.

My god.

It was so good that I became an instant addict and spend all my mental energy now trying to figure out when I can have more, how I can have more, how much more I can have... Like any addict, I plot ways to justify needing (not just wanting, but actually needing) more of it and of tricking Jonathan into going for just one more hit.

I had Cinnamon Apple and Salted Caramel. Jonathan had Lemon Zest and Campari Grapefruit. I dream about the Cinnamon Apple at night.

In the meantime, between ice creams, I have been working on my series of paintings, "21 Views of my Groceries." 

We are in fig season now and stringhe season and apricot season, waiting for the first porcini mushrooms to arrive. Barbara and Sara gave us some very lovely gourds to photograph and more honey from their hives. The bees have been getting nectar from the lemon tree blossoms and you can taste it in the honey.

Our olives are looking good, but we don't know yet if the flies will come again this year and lay their eggs in them so that every olive is ruined by larvae. Mimmo is pessimistic, but sometimes that is just our way of placating the gods. They delight in overthrowing our expectations, so it is prudent to expect the worst. 

We are leaving for a short trip to the US week after next -- seeing the boys and supervising getting all of our old belongings into the container to be shipped to Italy. Tragically, we will be missing the soccer tournament that will be held at the pub in Leonardo's memory. The soccer itself is not all that exciting for me, but the announcement poster says that there will also be "jugglers, fire eaters, and singing animals."* I am very sorry to miss that, but Alice says that she will send me a video.

*It really says "singing and animals," but we have all agreed that singing animals would be even better.

 

When we first moved here, I bought a little clock at the Ikea in Pisa for our bedroom. It has a clock, a timer, an alarm, and a thermometer. This is a picture of the thermometer at 4:00 a.m. this morning in our bedroom.

What I am saying here is that it is hot. Fucking hot.

We went down to the big Esselunga supermarket in Lido di Camaiore yesterday just to hang out for a while in the cold foods aisle. I'm thinking of bringing a folding chair with me next time and just setting up camp in front of the gelato.

Instead, for now, I have filled our bathtub with cold water and take a dip in it three, four, five, six times a day. Inside my head, I think of it as "the swimmin' hole."

The beach is lovely, of course, although the sand is burning hot by 10 a.m. and the jellyfish are a regular feature now. They are, apparently, a species called "barrel jellyfish" and all advices are that we should not worry about them -- their sting is hardly ever fatal. This information is not as comforting as I am sure it is intended to be.

The olives and the grapes are looking good, though. And we went to a concert that the Coro di Versilia held in an abandoned Roman-era marble quarry over in Capezzano Monte. In a tribute to our life at the pub here, they sang a song with the phrase: 

L'Aqua mi fa male, il vino mi fa cantare.

Water makes me sick, but wine makes me sing.

We consider it our theme and live by its message.

I was a guest on a podcast this week talking about the pub. I have not listened to it because the sound of my own voice horrifies me. It's hard for me to believe that I spent so many years talking for a living. Fortunately for me, during all of those years, I never listened to a word I was saying.

https://karenchristensen.substack.com/p/i-dont-need-therapy-i-just-need-to?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email