We are in a generosity spiral with Barbara and Sara at the Frutta D'Oro. After they were so kind to me about being on my own while Jonathan was away in the US and also gifted me a giant bunch of yellow mimosas, Jonathan brought them back some Vermont maple syrup from his trip. They reciprocated with a large jar of honey from their own hives and then an 11-pound bag of lemons from the tree in Sara's yard -- "So sweet that you can just eat them," Sara said.
The Career of Flowers
The career of flowers differs from ours only in inaudibleness. -- Emily Dickinson
21 March 2024
14 March 2024
08 March 2024
The loudest sound here these days is birdsong. Sometimes there are church bells mixed in and behind that, almost imperceptible, is the shushing sound of the sea. The spring flowers are starting to bloom. I saw the first poppy of the year on the roadside down near town.
We have been going to town to buy groceries every day this week since the refrigerator died. We went on Tuesday to the UniEuro in Massa and bought the smallest fridge they sell to hold us over until a new big fridge arrives. The nice man at the UniEuro loading dock didn't bat an eye when we rolled up with our clown car expecting to drive a refrigerator home in it.
"Oh, no problem," he said, cheerfully. And sure enough, by putting down the back seat and sliding the front seats up so far that Jonathan was driving with his knees up under his chin, we were able to close the hatchback with zero millimeters to spare.05 March 2024
Jonathan blew back home on the Mistral winds Saturday and we had one lovely evening before we woke up Sunday morning to a suspicious (and tragically familiar) chill in the air. We spent Sunday going back and forth to the furnace controls in the basement laundry room and then running around feeling all the radiators and saying, "Nope -- still nothing."
The wind was blowing so hard that we lost a bit of the roof over the place where we park the car and we actually had to tie one of our windows shut with string. On Monday, the furnace repairman showed up about 5 p.m. and replaced the thermostat which (fingers crossed!) was the ultimate culprit.
The heat did come on and is now working away trying to once again warm up an old stone house that had gotten very deep down chilly.
"Gosh," I said to Jonathan at one point, "it's actually warmer inside the refrigerator now than it is outside in the kitchen."
Then later I said, "Like really warmer."
Then later, "OK, so I just opened the refrigerator door and an actual blast of hot air came out."
So now we have everything from the refrigerator sitting out on the kitchen table while we try to figure out what the fuck is going on. The panel at the back of the inside compartment that usually feels cold is now hot to the touch. There are some instructions with no words, but only pictures and numbers, on the inside of the freezer door. These do not help at all.
But the good news is that there are violets and tiny white daisies and purple crocuses blooming all over the yard. Barbara and Sara, who run our veg store, gave me a giant bunch of mimosa flowers before Jonathan left and also gave me their telephone number and told me not to hesitate to call them if I needed anything at all. Jonathan brought them back a bottle of fancy Vermont maple syrup and now they are giving us some honey from their own hives.Me to doctor: Dottor Rivetti, e' un piacere conoscerla.
Doctor to me: Prendo i pantaloni, la camicia, e gli occhiali da sole.
01 March 2024
Jonathan has been gone for a week -- first to Switzerland to see his kids and then to New Jersey to see his parents. I stayed here because my permesso di soggiorno still has not arrived, shockingly enough. (Neither has Jonathan's driver's license, for those of you innocent enough to have believed that something promised for November would be ready no later than February.) And so I can't leave the country. Or at least I can't come back in if I do.
The first day that I woke up without Jonathan, the house felt lonely and empty and a little cold to me. "Ah," I thought to myself. "Everything is so bleak in the absence of my darling Jonathan that I actually feel cold from it. It is not the house that is cold -- it is my heart!"
It was the house.
It turns out that the furnace was malfunctioning and for those three days while the naughty gods waited waited for the truth of the situation to dawn on me, it got colder and colder in the house. Rain poured down outside and the Mistral blew through, searingly cold. Eventually I did come to the realization that this was more than emotional cold and figured it all out and everything is fixed now. But for the space of those days, it seemed like the house and the world outside it were all just a reflection of how much I missed him.
Also, this is a photo of what it looks like around here when we do laundry while it rains. Glamorous. They don't show you this side of things in all those romantic movies set in Italy.
17 February 2024
Nonno has spent the last week in the hospital, although they say he can come home today. When we asked what was wrong, we got answers with vague medical terms that don't really translate. Valerio looked downhearted and just said, "Well, he is ninety years old, you know." Mirio, who is himself just out of the hospital, seems to have suddenly aged many years. We doubt they have told him the truth about either his own or his brother's condition, but I think he knows anyway. He tries to keep our spirits up, though. "The wine in the hospital was terrible," he said to us, twinkling. "It tasted just like water."
This is a picture of Nonno and Hugo, when they fell asleep in their chairs one afternoon last autumn while watching TV. When the old men are no more at the pub, it will be a very different place. Bar Igea, the bar down in town that I used to go to forty years ago, the place where the sculptors and marble workers used to go in their dusty clothes and battered shoes to have a glass of wine with their friends and where the old men sat all day in the shade of an ancient spreading tree and played checkers, is now a chic cocktail bar called The Black Cat that is only open at night. The big old tree was cut down to make more room for parking in the piazza. I have never been in there in its new incarnation.
There are half a dozen For Sale signs on houses on the lovely Via Capriglia now. Some of the houses have olive groves, all have majestic views of the sea. They are beautiful stone houses going cheap because people don't want to live like this anymore.
13 February 2024
I love my brother. He is one of the smartest and most fun people I know. And having been raised in the same surreal shitshow as me, he always gets it. Not everyone does. (One of the reviewers of my new manuscript used the phrase "situational absurdity" in reference to my fictionalized description of actual events in my actual family -- events that I had even toned down to make them more believable.) One of the best things about my brother is that he is always willing to play ball, conversationally speaking.
It must be very hard for people to go through life without a brother like mine.
01 February 2024
Of the regulars at the pub, Almo is by far the baby. He is 54. That may seem irrelevant, but what I am getting at here is that we -- Jonathan and I -- now live very much in a world of quite elderly men. It is not a world for the faint of heart.
29 January 2024
I have a very strict rule about travelling light, developed from hard experience when the children were young and it seemed that we were always going somewhere: I must always be able to pick up all of our luggage and both of the boys all at the same time and still be able to run.
It is harder now because the boys' combined weight is well over 300 pounds and also because they vocally object to me trying to carry them around. But the rule served us in good stead on more than one occasion -- most memorably one time in a train station in Cairo when Tris was about five that I still don't like to think about.
So we went off the live for a year on Rarotonga with just one shared carry-on bag and a sock monkey named Jonesy for all three of us. We had basically no possessions at all (Jonesy being not so much a possession as a member of the family) for an entire year and I think we were mostly very happy. We had the sea and the beach and the coconut trees and library cards and a black-and-white cat named Pussy and each other. It was more than enough.
So I am a true believer in the Church of Travelling Light. You can imagine, then, my incredible conflicted guilt when I went on a three day buying spree last week. I don't know what came over me --maybe I was possessed by visions. Or maybe I have just somehow finally started to come to the realization that I am not travelling any more now.On Thursday, I bought some lovely old bone china tea cups with matching saucers and dessert plates at the bookstore on the Via Mazzini. On Friday, I bought a lemon tree in a pot at the Coop. And on Saturday, I bought a giant green glass bottle for 10 euros at the weekly market in Viareggio. Jonathan schlepped it all the way back to the car, many blocks away, in his arms -- refusing to carry it on his head, as I repeatedly advised him.
Cristina, our Italian teacher, tells us that it is for wine and that these used to be quite common. I doubt our livers would stand for that, but the bottle is a lovely piece of this place and this time.
Jonesy, incidentally, lives with Tris in Alaska now and mostly just hangs out on the couch all day.
24 January 2024
"Yes," Mimmo said. "There is someone sitting in an office in Lucca with a giant pile of driver's license applications on his desk. When yours gets to the top, he takes it off the top and puts it back down at the bottom."
I was inside the house, but even so I could still hear Jonathan laughing. But, you know, ruefully.
I am making a deck of Tarot Cards with Tuscan images on them. This is the Ten of Staffs. It makes more sense when you see the whole deck.
And I am in the process sending my new manuscript out into the world, poor little thing. I hope that people are kind to it. While it is busy touting itself on the streetcorners, I have begun working on a new book -- set, this time, in Boston, where I spent many years and learned, eventually, to speak the language of the natives, which is many things -- colorful, jocular, r-less -- but is not English. Here is a bit of the book:
The quickest way
from Tower Street to I-95 is to go to the end of the block (the opposite one
from the cemetery), turn right on Washington, and then take the first left onto
the Arborway. The Arborway is a wide street that runs right next to the green
and extensive Arboretum, filled with all sorts of exotic and educational trees
that would probably have been lovely to drive past if I wasn’t so busy trying
not to die. The fear of being slammed into by a crazed Bostonian driver took
the edge off my aesthetic appreciation of the trees, one of which would almost
certainly be the very last thing I saw in this life as I hurtled into it,
rammed from behind by the tightly-wound descendent of some hasty-pudding-eating
Puritan.
What I am saying
here is that Boston drivers are crazy. I was surprised to find this out, having
somehow associated Boston with decorum and grave deliberation. Ha! People who
will burn their neighbors to death as witches on the say-so of a bunch of
hormonal tweens will flatten your sorry ass without a second thought if you even
so much as pause at a stop sign. They will run you down and will flip
you off as they do it.
The key to understanding this behavior is that all Boston drivers want to be first. They want to be the car that is first – the car that is in front of all the other cars ever. You could try explaining to them that there really is no such thing as “first” in general city driving, but they wouldn’t hear you because they would be too busy honking at you to drive faster and then flipping you off. It’s the “can do” spirit that is to blame for so much of American history.
20 January 2024
19 January 2024
16 January 2024
Later today we will go down to town to buy some vegetables at the Frutta D'Oro, which is my favorite store in Pietrasanta -- more so than the art galleries or the upscale bespoke clothing shops with fantastic dresses made of velvet and heavily embroidered silk. More so even than the shops that sell old china and ceramic tiles and strange objects made of metal and blown glass. Quite often at the Frutta D'Oro, there are unusual vegetables that we have never seen before, things that look like Dr. Seuss made them up. Jonathan knows not to immediately eat anything when we get home before I photograph it.
We normally do our vegetable shopping first thing in the morning, but today we are holding off on the chance that Jonathan's new glasses will also be ready to be picked up. They were promised for last week, but we only halfway believed that. Today is the next day held out for possible delivery and we halfway believe that, too. Eternal optimism is one of our best shared traits.
Still no driver's license or visa, btw.
I sent off the first draft of my new novel manuscript to two different professional editors to get feedback. It went about as well as I should have expected -- their advice is completely at odds with each other, almost comically so. A passage, for example, that the first one specifically mentioned as one of his favorites in the whole book, the second one advised me to delete entirely. The ending that the first one said was "awesome," the second one likened to torture. He actually used the word "torture."
So I have begun re-writes. It is a gloomy process and I will be very glad to take a break later on today and go look at outlandish vegetables in town.