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.