An Important Update Regarding My Growing Mastery of the Italian Language: Words that seem like they would be cognates in different languages, but actually are not, are called "false friends." For example, the Italian word "chiesa" ("church") when said aloud sounds very similar to the Spanish word "queso" ("cheese") -- especially to someone who has spent the last 26 years living in the American West, where Spanish words fill the air like oxygen. But the two words are not, in fact, related at all. This caused a fair amount of confusion earlier this week when I was trying to buy a piece gorgonzola in the deli.

I am especially aware of my American-ness today -- because today we have finally acquired our car and this gives me more joy than it is seemly to admit.

True, it is a tiny Fiat500 and I feel that there should be circus music playing in the background whenever we drive it. But it is wheels. And as much as I would like to gently turn up my nose at American car culture, the truth is that I love it.

My favorite place to drive is the Texas panhandle, leaving Amarillo and angling up through all that emptiness towards New Mexico and the Sangre de Cristos towards home. And my favorite time to drive is night when the highway is empty and the little radio stations fade out until another one takes its place so that you never know what you are going to get and you can hit a hundred miles an hour on the straightaways easy and the stars revolve across the sky and up ahead you see the faint glow of an all-night last-chance gas station when you are running on fumes just thinking that you weren't going to make it. I love the way the headlights hit the roadside signs and they light up like jewels. I love gas station candy bars. I love hanging my hand out the window to feel the wind pressing against it. I love driving when someone I love is asleep riding shotgun beside me. It is desolate out there with only the dashboard lights and the ache in your bones from sitting so long to keep you awake. But it is also beautiful.

And so, of all the ways in which I am so very much aware of my own American-ness these days, it is my fervent and abiding love of cars that is the most telling.

We are, in spite of our American-ness, becoming accepted more as regulars at the pub. It is called, officially, the Society for Mutual Aid and when we sauntered down there last night for a glass of wine at 6:30, the staff were still sitting on the terrace finishing their lunch. They shared their cake with us. It was very delicious cake. But what was even more lovely was the sign that we are, at least in the opinion of the waitstaff, OK.

It's a rainy day here -- the first of what is forecast to be a whole week of them. The sea is the same gray color as the sky and the chestnut leaves are hanging down dripping.

We have still not figured out how to turn on the heat in the house, although we did manage -- after two long examinations of the Senora's detailed, hand-written-in-cursive directions -- to find the thermostat. We are bewildered by it. Naturally.

Partly, this is because we live in a constant state of bewilderment these days. Partly this is because it is a fancier thermostat than either of us has ever seen before in our lives. There are buttons. There are screens. There are dials and sliding levers. I suspect that it is programmable. It has that look about it.

Programmable things baffle me even in English and I usually give them a wide berth (having seen enough sci-fi in my life to know where this is heading.) I would not, though, have thought that the heating system in a rustic farmhouse on a remote hillside in Tuscany -- a farmhouse where I have to light the stove with a match in order to make myself a cup of tea -- would be technologically so complex.

And so we have left the thermostat to its own devices for the time being and built our first fire in the fireplace.

It is a lovely day.

 

A snake more than a meter long has shed its skin out front, raising the possibility that this place is the Garden of Eden that I have somehow inadvertently stumbled into. I don't think it is, but the idea cannot be entirely discounted. Excited to see what happens when we begin eating the fruit off the persimmon trees!

After the blazing heat of our first two weeks here when everyone sensible (not us) was at the beach doing nothing and we were hauling large bags of groceries and household items up the side of a mountain, the weather has turned a bit cooler. I saw a red deer run fleetingly past our window last week.

The olives are ripening on the trees on the south side of the house. We have picked about a gallon of them and, having watched three YouTube videos on the subject, have begun brining them for mid-winter consumption.

Our trusted gardener, Mimmo, who works the olive harvest and makes olive oil when he is not gardening at our house, has encouraged us in this endeavor and tells us that these olives will be not only delicious but also organic, never having been sprayed by any chemicals. (He should know seeing as how he would have been the one to spray them.)

This was a relief to hear, seeing as how we were going to do it anyway. (Mimmo is a very kind man and has given us a bottle of his own homemade oil.)

Having had our fill of the terrors of the descent to town by way of both the path (snakes) and the bus (bus drivers), we have broken down and rented a car for the next several months.

It took Jonathan two full days of emailing and phone calls to manage this and, at one point, I despaired. But my hero came through for us. 

The soonest we can get it is next month and the closest place to get it is Milan. Fortunately, I can keep myself busy in the meantime brining olives and trying no to die in the bus.

In an effort to make friends, we have begun to frequent the only business establishment operating in the entire village of Capriglia. Luckily it is a bar/restaurant. (Suppose it had been, say, an abattoir? Imagine the things I would have learned!)

We have made exactly one contact there -- shockingly enough, it is with the barista, Nico. Sometimes, we can hear the sounds of jovial conviviality wafting up to our house from there. Last Saturday afternoon, it was so raucous, we thought it must be a very important football match, that being the only thing we could imagine as the cause of such an uproar. We could hear both cheering and singing. We walked down and the terrace was overflowing with men and empty glasses, but we felt too shy to go in.

But Nico tells us that, in fact, one of the regulars had come back from a trip to another village with quite a lot of really excellent grappa as well as a very large prosciutto and shared them both all around. "They were all so drunk!" he said happily, waving his hand in front of his face. "Everyone here knows everyone else." Not us. Not yet.

But most evenings it is more serene and we stop by for a glass of wine (served with potato chips) before we saunter through the village and then back home for dinner. The view of the sea is very beautiful from the low stone wall at the edge of the village and two nights ago the air was so clear that we could see Corsica and possibly, very faintly in the distance, the coast of France.

The weather forecast today predicts three straight days of hard rain, beginning this afternoon. Jonathan has gone down the hill to Pietrasanta to stock up on bread and wine and coffee before the deluge. It is the first time that we have been separated from each other in many weeks and I feel a bit lost without him nearby. I find that, despite being busy with other things, I am nevertheless also waiting for him to come back home even though he left less than an hour ago.

The "other things" I am busy with are copy edits. In the midst of this big move, this enormous life transition, the unspoken activity is a book. I am finishing a book and have spent more hours working on it these past few months than on any other single activity. But it is not very exciting to write about -- the days I have spent checking references, the long hours logging quotes, the tedium of requesting permissions. Three minutes with a lizard are much more entertaining than an hour figuring out the exact titles of long-defunct British literary journals from the 19th century (Is it the Leader or The Leader, etc., ad naus.?)

And so Jonathan is in town without me, Mimmo is working in the bosco just behind the house, and I am supposedly working on copy edits. Not very hard, admittedly.

George Clooney seems to have cleared out now that the rains are coming. Or at least we haven't spotted the helicopter recently. He did not say goodbye to us.

The persimmon tree out back dropped a couple of persimmons, even though they aren't ripe yet. The tree is full of green ones, but we have no idea how we will ever manage to get to them when they are ready. To climb a tree here is to risk death if you fall out on the wrong side and plunge a hundred meters down the mountainside. I think there is a life lesson here. Unfortunately.

We are befuddled.

We find that we do not know how anything works. It has been 40 years since I lived in Italy and I have forgotten many things. Many things have changed. It has been 20 years since Jonathan spent any significant time here and back then he was always a guest of his first wife's family and, therefore, did not need to know how (for example) the trash bags worked.

We do not know how the trash bags work. There are five different kinds: for paper, for "organico," for plastic bottles, for glass, and for "indifferenziata." These things are all picked up on different days of the week, having been put (and this is the part that got us) into different types of bags. We did not at first realize the part about the different types of bags. We don't know how any of this works.

We did, after two tries, manage to buy the correct type of bags for the "indifferenziata," but then when we got them home and took one off the roll, it devolved into a plastic sheet with a plastic string attached to it. Is it supposed to do that? Have we gotten a defective batch of bags or are we ourselves the defective ones? We don't know. We don't know how any of this works.

At the Fruit and Vegetable store, there are plastic shopping baskets inside the front door. Our first time in, the lady who works there pointed out the paper bags also by the door and so we put our three plums into one. So far, so good. But the next time we went in, as we were putting our plums into the paper bag, we were sternly spoken to by the other lady who works there. The only word of this dressing down that I understood was the word for "bag." Am I not supposed to put the plums into the bags, after all? Am I supposed to put them into the bags differently? Use more bags? Fewer? A different type of bag? Bring my own bag? We don't know. We don't know how any of this works.

The bags are just one example of the things that we don't know how to work. I still haven't figured out which lights switches turn on which lights or how to light the burner on the stove to make my morning coffee without using at least three matches -- sometimes four. I broke the bathtub drain trying to get it to open our first night here.

The local newspaper headlines on display in town announce that George Clooney is vacationing here. And, indeed, a helicopter has been ferrying someone glamorous from the roof of a house below ours down to the beach and back every day. George, of course, is a notorious prankster and this would explain the lizard in our bed last week. George thinks that kind of shit is funny. I bet George is not down there right now being befuddled by bags. He probably pays someone to figure out his bags for him. He probably has someone on staff to do nothing else.

My friend Benjamin came for the weekend -- our first visitor. And even though he is a lovely person, he knows jack shit about Italian bags. So we were all befuddled together. But on the walk down the path to town on Sunday (only our third time and our first time ever without getting lost even once!), we came across a fig tree with late season figs still on the branches. We got two -- perfectly ripe and warm from the sun -- and shared them standing there on the hillside with its view of the sea and the smell of rosemary and the tiny purple and yellow and white flowers in the grass and the cricket song and the quiet. The fig tree is in the middle of nowhere -- we had been walking 30 minutes before we came to it. All of the other figs are already over with for the season.

These are the things that George is denied in his luxurious helicopter descent. These are the things that make our befuddlement worth it.

Jonathan says that the chestnut trees look like Dr. Seuss creations.

 Update II -- Extremely Important Point of Information: The little lizards are much less charming and picturesque when you find them in your bed.

 Update -- Extremely Important Point of Information: The "strawberry grapes" do indeed taste faintly of strawberries. That is all. 

Yesterday we went down the "path" from our village into town. It is a thousand-foot elevation drop through terraced olive groves and other people's chicken runs and it took us almost an hour, although we were almost certainly lost for part of that time. I don't remember the chicken runs from when I lived here and regularly walked down the path 40 years ago. But, then again, there is so much that I don't remember from 40 years ago. (You would think, though, that illegally crashing through someone else's chicken run would stick in the mind. It will now!)

The olive harvest will start soon and there are nets, still bundled up, strung in among the olive trees. When it is time to harvest them, the nets will be spread out a couple of feet off the ground and then the tree branches will be raked with long wide-toothed wooden rakes to bring the olives down onto the nets without damaging the trees.

The trusted gardener, Mimmo, is here now -- a kindly, white-haired man who will be around once or twice a week, depending on his other work. The olive harvest will take a lot of his time soon.

I cut a giant bunch of rosemary from the yard this morning and have it steeping now for rosemary-infused olive oil.

We are in our house now, perched all topsy-turvy on the vertiginous side of the mountain with the ground dropping away hundreds of feet below us into the blue Ligurian Sea where Percy Shelley met his death.

The chestnuts and green persimmons clustered in the trees all around us are simultaneously very close and very far away. I could almost reach out and touch them from where I sit on the porch, but could never climb so high up into the tree. There are old stone steps everywhere with geraniums in pots and lizards sunning themselves and outbuildings scattered haphazardly at different levels and rosemary in profusion and olive trees and grapes called "strawberry grapes" and the sound of church bells in the distance throughout the day. The stairways seem to have been designed by M.C. Escher to maximize the feeling of being in a dream.

On Monday we arrived here with all of our luggage to be greeted by the Signora and her daughter and the rental agent, all of whom showed us everything around the place and explained how everything works and with whom we signed many forms. They spoke very quickly and very simultaneously and although Jonathan says that he got almost all of it, I only really understood that if we leave the gas on and blow up the house, we will be in trouble. Which seems fair.

The Signora's daughter asked Jonathan about our house in Colorado and he told her it was built in 1895. "Yes," she said. "I had heard that all the buildings there are very new." (This is not the usual response that we get. Perspectives shift.) She had seen a documentary about tornados in the US and wondered if that might explain why there is nothing really old in the States. Could be.

Then we went down to the town to open up a local bank account. Again, it was a long process involving much rapid speech with technical banking terms of which I understood only that I should not use my birthday as my PIN and that at some point I would be asked three security questions. I have not been asked them yet, although that was now three days ago. Or if I have, it happened in such rapid Italian that I did not notice. As the afternoons wear on, I have a tendency to simply start saying "si, si, si" to everything and smiling a lot. So far, so good.

Then we went to do a big shopping at the HyperMarket out on the road to the beach while we still had the rental car to carry things home. It turns out that the organizational grouping of groceries is highly culturally specific so that whereas, say, flour and salt and sugar all all grouped together in American grocery stores, they are not in Italian ones. Also, it turns out to be harder to tell the difference between dishwasher detergent, laundry detergent, shower gel, dish soap, toilet cleaner, and shampoo just by reading the labels than you would think. There are possibilities here for making mistakes that you really do not want to make. We were so confused that we ended up with pre-packaged octopus salad and screw-top 3-Euro wine and called it a day. We will live on love. And, I guess, octopus.

Tuesday, we drove to the airport at Pisa to return the rental car and took the train back to Pietrasanta. Then we took a taxi 95 percent of the way back up the mountain and walked the rest because the taxi driver was worried that if she took us all the way to our house, she would never be able to get back. So we are marooned here in paradise now as if we have fallen off the edge of the world.

Emily Dickinson wrote, "what indeed is Earth but a Nest from whose rim we are all falling?"

The important thing is not to panic.

We have arrived, at long last, in Pietrasanta. Our last days at "home" are a blur -- the final packing, the final garbage run (goodbye, futon!) , the final cleaning -- all made more challenging by the roofers showing up unexpectedly on Monday morning to begin removing all the layers of old roof that had piled up over the decades -- layers which delighted the local fauna, no doubt, but displeased the house inspector. So our last days of leave-taking had a soundtrack of splintering wood and crowbars. Metaphorically appropriate, but hard on the nerves.

Our last night was spent sleeping on the floor. Never before in all my years at the house has the floor ever seemed so unyieldingly solid. No structural problems there!

I sobbed as we left, of course -- partly for the place itself, which I loved, but mostly for the time in my life that it represented, a time when I was a mother with my beloved little boys at home and a professor who spent long hours talking about Ideas with generations of students who cared about them. When I was turning in the rental car at the Colorado Springs airport, the booth attendant asked me, "Heading home?" -- which seems like a simple "yes/no" question. I told him some lie because the real answer would have been too emotionally difficult to explain: "I don't know."

And so it began -- lines, cramped seats, cramped legs, execrable airplane food, the peculiar stink of airplane bathrooms, and our second mostly sleepless night in a row while the tiny icon of an airplane on the seatback screens inched its way across a map of the ocean.

And then, in the early afternoon, we finally touched down in Milan.

I had worried a bit about Customs (so much luggage!) and about Immigration Control (no extended-stay visa!), which just shows how long it's been since I was in Italy. Not a word was said to either of us -- just another middle-aged tourist couple off a plane-ful of them. We were blithely released into the afternoon sun, where our rental car waited.

We only got lost twice on the drive to Pietrasanta, which is pretty good -- especially since it was Thursday and we hadn't really slept since Monday night. Jonathan drove and I promised things to God. This is our customary division of labor.

Pietrasanta has changed, of course, in the last forty years. It is still lovely, but now it is filled with art galleries and restaurants in the places where the marble workshops and bronze foundries and stores selling chisels and power grinders used to be. We went to the place that used to be my regular bar, the Bar Igea -- always filled in those days with artists, sometimes still wearing their blue overalls sprinkled with marble dust or gesso or blood -- but it is now an upscale "Cocktail Lounge" open only at night. The important thing, in moments like this, is not to panic.

Our new best friend Lorenzo, an old punk who runs the hotel where we are staying until our house is ready for us on Monday, tells us that there are still many working artists here, just that they have been pushed out of the very center of town. And, indeed, I saw two men at lunch on Friday with the telltale pencils and ruined shoes of people who have spent the morning working in the studio.

Later, we drove up the mountainside for a peek at our village, even though we couldn't go to our house. And by "mountainside," I mean "sheer cliff with dozens of narrow switchbacks pretending to be a road." I had not remembered it as being quite so death-defying, which only confirms that I was 20-years-old and therefore clearly thought I was immortal when I lived here before. Jonathan drove our little standard-transmission car all the way up in first gear and did not tell me (while I was saying "Ooo! Look at the sea! Jonathan, look at the sea!") how close we came to stalling out a couple of times on practically vertical switchback turns. This would have been disastrous as the car has no real emergency brake, thus raising the possibility of us spending that always tense moment between "stopped" and "first gear" rolling precipitously backwards down a very steep roadway before plunging to our deaths over the side of the cliff. Of all the times not to panic, this is probably the most important.

But the village seemed magical, as things do when one has risked death to see them, and the sea was very blue (with what may or may not have been Corsica just visible in the distance) and the fig trees were heavy with green figs. It was so quiet that we found ourselves whispering.

Our first night, we had pizza and wine at a table in the street. Jonathan is speaking Italian like a pro. I am speaking Italian like someone who speaks only Spanish -- and only a little of that and only badly. We are, so far, very dazed and very happy.