The movers came a week ago and delivered all of our furniture from the storage unit to the belfry house. Since then, Jonathan and I have been carrying box after box of heavy books every day from the rustic farmhouse to the belfry house. I am too old for this.

How did I end up with so much stuff? We got rid of so many possessions when we left Colorado -- so many trips to the ARC, so many donations to the library, so much furniture put out on the curb marked "free." So much left behind -- we came here with only two suitcases and two carry-on bags. And yet I've spent all week carrying boxes of books around. I don't understand how my stuff has once again metastasized in this unholy way. It's a complete mystery and I said as much to Andrea in the bookstore when I was shopping in there yesterday.

 Just exactly how close is the Belfry House to the belfry, you ask?

This close:

I took this picture earlier today from the window of the room that will be my studio. The little bell that you can see is just one of many that are in there. They ring every day at 8:30 a.m., noon, and 5:45 p.m. People say we will get used to them and pretty soon we won't even hear them anymore.

I hope not. I hope I never stop hearing the bells.

 

At long last, on Saturday we finally signed the lease for the belfry house and paid our rent and got the keys. The movers are scheduled to come on Friday to deliver all of our old furniture and the last of the ghosts from our house in Colorado.

In the meantime, we went on Sunday to see the house for the first time on our own. The owners had warned us on Saturday that the latch to the gate to get in was somewhat broken and quite tricky to open. 

They did not lie. It was so tricky, in fact, that in the end Jonathan had to scale the two-meter-high security fence -- no mean feat -- and drop down on the inside of the yard to let me in from there.

The neighbors presumably watched all this in amazement from behind their curtains while shaking their heads at the inexplicable ways of Americans. We will doubtless provide them with hours and hours of amusement for the next few years.

In the meantime, we are celebrating the "Giorni dei Merli" -- "Days of the Blackbirds" -- here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea. These are called the Days of the Blackbirds because they are supposed to be the coldest days of the winter and Nonno tells us that when it is so cold, the blackbirds fly down into the chimneys to get warm and the soot from the smoke there gets onto their feathers and that is why the birds are colored black.

There have been special celebratory feasts every day at the pub and the big bottle of lottery wine, which was never in the end claimed by its winner, was drunk by all of us.

But the signs of spring are all around. I saw some yellow daffodils blooming on a sunny slope in the olive groves yesterday and the mimosa trees are glowing. The wolves are also flourishing and on the most recent night of the full moon, one sat right outside our dining room windows and howled at it. He was answered by friends on the next hillside. There is nothing like wolves howling literally right outside the door to make a house feel cozy on a winter night.

 

The Italian word for "ticket" is "biglietto" and there are various kinds of biglietti for all sorts of purposes. 

When you buy bread at the bakery counter in the supermarket outside town, first you get a biglietto from the little machine and then when your biglietto number is called, you go to the counter and get your bread. When you go to the post office, you get a biglietto from a little machine and then when your biglietto number is called, you go to the counter and get told to fuck off because you can neither send nor receive the mail you want. It is very orderly.

When you get a coffee, sometimes you pay first and get a biglietto from the cashier that you then present to the barista, who makes you a coffee. Sometimes, however, you get the coffee first from the barista and pay later. There is no way to tell which method any particular place uses, but if you are desperate and deprived enough, you can figure it out eventually.

When you take the train from Pietrasanta, there are no actual humans who work in our miniscule and unimportant train station, so you buy your biglietto from a machine at the station. Then you are supposed to go to another machine out by the tracks and stick the end of your ticket in it to be "validated." On the train itself, sometimes a conductor comes through and checks everyone's ticket and sometimes they don't. When I went with Jonathan to Pisa two weeks ago to watch him give his presentation in his mock trail for International Law, I forgot to validate my ticket and the conductor did come through checking, but she didn't care about my lack of validation. "They never care about the validation," Jonathan said and it is true.

When you park your car on the street, there is usually a machine somewhere around fairly nearby where you buy a biglietto for a certain amount of time to leave on your dashboard. You have to estimate how long you are going to be parked and, given our leisurely pace of life, it is prudent to overestimate that. By a lot.

All the parking biglietto machines work a bit differently so that when you park someplace new, it is always a bit touch-and-go trying to figure out the new machine and get back to your car with your biglietto before the parking patrol comes by and gives you the other kind of parking ticket.

When you park at a big parking garage or an airport parking lot, you get a biglietto when you go in and then you have to remember to pay at a machine somewhere else before you try to leave in your car at the exit gate, where there are no human attendants, but only a little machine that takes your already paid biglietto and then, for some reason, gives it back to you -- a little souvenir of your stay. I wander around with all sorts of used biglietti in my coat pockets and the cup holder of the car, like confetti. I'm pretty much always ready for a parade.

Jonathan came back from his trip to the US on Friday. His plane was an hour late leaving Newark and we were worried that he would miss his connecting flight in Zuruch for Firenze.

"If I miss my connection to Firenze," he texted me, "I'm going to see if they will send me to Pisa instead." Pisa is much closer to home than Firenze is. He had tried to buy tickets to leave and return from Pisa when planning this trip, but there were no workable flights from there that fit his schedule.

But he made his connecting flight in the nick of time and I jumped immediately into the car to drive the hour and a half to Firenze to get him. I got there just as the flight from Zurich was supposed to be touching down. But the info board said the flight was going to be 20 minutes late. Then it changed to 40 minutes late. Then 60, which is quite a lot for a 90 minute flight that is already in the air, so I settled in to wait.

At last, Jonathan texted that they were on the ground, but not in Firenze. They were in Pisa.

They had been diverted because of fog. So since he was already in Pisa, we decided that he would take the train to Pietrasanta and I would drive back there as quickly as I could and pick him up at the train station there.

Only when I tried to pay my parking biglietto at the little machine, the machine didn't seem to want my money. I tried everything -- turning the biglietto upside down, putting it in backwards, entering my license plate number into the keypad, inserting my credit card anyway. Nothing worked. So I got in the car and tried exiting the parking lot with the unpaid biglietto, but the exit gate was unmoved.

So I had to do the Exit Gate Backup Of Shame and then I re-parked the car and wandered forlornly around the airport until I found a man working in some sort of office.

"Excuse me," I said, "but this ticket is not functioning." ("Mi scusi, ma questo biglietto non funziona.")

He took the ticket and looked at it for a minute.

"Signora," he said very solemnly, "this is a biglietto for the train to Pisa."

"Ah," I said. "Well, that would explain it then."

In my defense, I need a lot of biglietti and, although they are all different, they are not that different.

But Jonathan is at last back home now. He brought a suitcase full of New York bagels and his old viola from high school. We stopped at the supermarket and bought smoked salmon before heading back up the hill to lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea.

Saturday, we went to lunch at the pub. Alice was there with Celeste. At one point, singing broke out. Jonathan is very happy to be back home.

 

Jonathan has been gone all week visiting his parents in New Jersey. I have been here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea living in the winter wind and the air that is washed clear and the sea that glows like a pale blue pearl.

I am supposedly working on some of the pre-publication tasks for Armadillo Massacre Number Three. People are surprised that it takes so long to bring a book out, but I feel like I have so much to do and so little time to do it. There was a big zoom meeting last Friday night of all of the authors in our "season" -- Fall 2027 -- with the publisher. 

Now we are busy grouping up to make book tours together -- arranging readings, signings, panel discussions. I am in both the North Carolina group and the Colorado group. There are lots of dates to coordinate and bookstores. etc. to contact. And, of course, we are reading each other's manuscripts, so I have like 10 books to read in the next few weeks.

But there is also paperwork -- my very favorite thing. Multiple questionnaires to fil out with questions that require actual thought: "Who is your ideal reader?" "What is the number one reason booksellers should stock your book?"

I have no idea. With the world both literally and figuratively on fire, I don't know why anyone would do anything rational and calm.

I got an email this morning from a friend in the US who wrote: "Things are heavy. I'm weary of marching, signing petitions and screaming into the void. Yet we must carry on. ... I'm not sure my nervous system was meant for this."

We also feel that way, even here. During my Italian lesson yesterday, we spent half of our time discussing whether the demented orange madman will start World War III over Greenland. It's all so unbelievably insane. And yet, I fill out my little forms and send my little emails. I take showers and brush my teeth and still make the bed every morning and continue to eat kale -- just as if I think the world will wake up from this nightmare one fine morning. Maybe it will.

 

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 a 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 useful and 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.