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.