Aha! Aha! Ahahahaha! Ahhhhhhhhhh-HA!!!

They have shown their hand and I have them now!

"Who?" you ask.

Who else -- those fuckers down at the POST OFFICE!

Kids, take a word of advice from an old pro: If you are going to gaslight someone, you have to go all IN! You cannot swerve, you cannot break, you cannot relax your total control of the matrix for even a heartbeat! You cannot BLINK!

The fuckers blinked.

A letter arrived. A letter addressed to me -- to the Post Ferma address. And there it sat, on the little shelf behind the tellers where I fucking knew the Post Ferma was held, but where the Mean Old Man refused to even look, insisting that we had to go downstairs behind, where they in turn insisted that we were nuts.

But the Mean Old Man was not there yesterday and the Generally Pretty Well-Meaning But Absolutely Not In Any Sort Of Hurry Whatsoever Lady, torn between her standing orders to tell us to go ask downstairs behind and her desire to reprimand us for waiting so long to pick up our mail, let the urge to reprimand get the better of her. (Admittedly, this did have an additional tasty layer of irony-laced icing on top.) And so she reached behind herself to the little shelf and forked over a letter from my friend Esther. 

Ha! And so I have them now!

The Posta Ferma mail does come. It does come to the address we gave everyone. It comes to the Post Office upstairs and not downstairs behind. It does sit on the little shelf. 

I know that there is absolutely nothing to be done with this newly won knowledge, but one must not be greedy. I have the truth now and, god help me, it will sustain me through the cold dark months ahead as we are again inevitably, repeatedly sent to check downstairs behind.

The Truth will warm us in the winter of our hearts.

(p.s. A sign up in the Post Office alerts us to the fact that they are on strike from December 15th through January 15th. It is interesting to note that this work stoppage makes absolutely no difference whatsoever because they are in a very real way kind of always on strike.)

 It seems like every town of any size at all in Italy (so not lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea) has a shopping street -- or a whole area of streets -- lined with high-end international luxury goods stores. Firenze does, Siena does, even Pietrasanta does. There are always the same things -- couture ladies fashions, luxury handbags, pricey eyeglasses and even pricier shoes, and jewelry, lots and lots of jewelry.

In Siena, Jonathan and I strolled this street, holding hands and not even pausing to window shop. We are unmoved by luxury goods, it seems. Probably because of our great moral purity.

But we went nuts when we ran across the shop for the Consorzio Agrario di Siena -- basically, the local farmers' co-op. Local cheeses! Local pastries! Local wines and liqueurs and freshly made bread and pasta! Herb-infused olive oils and spice blends and fruit (fresh and dried) and veggies (fresh and dried) and salami and sausage and prosciutto in profusion. 

We went back twice and spent money like very drunken, very hungry sailors. 

We laughed about it. It turns out that (shockingly) we have no moral purity at all, but only very great appetites. "Well," we said to each other, "we guess we know who we are."

But it was good to be back home again, even though we either don't have or haven't yet found such a wondrous store here in Pietrasanta among the handbags and the jewelry. I intensely love the view at night from our windows of the two-and-a-half strings of Christmas lights stretched above the road outside the pub just below us and then, further down on the plain, all the coastal lights twinkling and glowing and then beyond that the velvet darkness of the sea.

"It's funny," I said to Jonathan. "I find the lights so incredibly beautiful, but the only way I can describe them is to say that they look like jewels. But I don't actually care about jewelry at all."

"No," he said. "The only jewels you care about are metaphorical ones." (Things like this are the reason I love Jonathan.)

Mimmo came by and brought us two bottles of the very precious new olive oil made from the local olive trees. I feel like I have been given gold, only better.

As a birthday present, Jonathan gave me a lovely trip to Siena. We stayed in a beautiful hotel near the Campo and had one of the best dinners of my life in a tiny, elegant restaurant tucked away on a side street. The best thing, though, was a surprise to us both -- they are restoring the Lorenzetti frescoes from 1338-9 of the "Allegory of Good and Bad Government" in the Palazzo Publico and we were allowed to go up on the scaffold where they are working and see it up close.

Now, you may think that seeing a 700-year-old fresco about the allegorical effects of good and bad government would be a rather dry, cerebral, academic experience. I certainly would have thought that before I was up there.

Before we were allowed up, the guide -- and, in fact, everyone we talked to -- warned up repeatedly to be careful (which was understandable) because we might step backwards and fall because of the extreme emotion we would feel (which was not).

"Well," I thought to myself, "Italians are probably brought up on 700-year-old government allegory frescoes and will naturally react with an intensity of feeling that will elude an American heathen such as myself."

I cried.

I was so overwhelmed that the only thing that kept me from stepping backwards and falling to, if not my death, then at least a very serious injury indeed, was my overwhelming urge to get even closer to these magical paintings.

And we were already pretty damn close -- maybe four feet away. Certainly closer than Lorenzetti ever would have imagined that anyone other than himself would ever be again. The things that he painted there were made knowing full well that they would be invisible from the ground so very many feet down below.

But he had -- for no other reason than love -- made this tender, breathing little world up there. A tiny bird the size of my thumb in a birdcage in a window. The frills and laces on the shoes in a shoe shop. A dragon fly pattern woven into a lady's dress. The expressions on the face of two men -- not to mention the one on their horse's -- so vivid, so full of life, painted for no one's pleasure but his own.

Jonathan used to work with a woman at CSU-P who was constantly telling the students to "fake it 'til you make it." It drove Jonathan nuts. What about living authentically, instead of being a fake? What about being who you really are and owning that and taking pride in it? What about doing your best rather than merely pretending to? What about putting real effort into your endeavors, not to make a big show but because the striving itself is valuable to you? Because the striving itself is ... noble? Even if no one ever sees it.

And so Lorenzetti's bird in its birdcage was the very opposite of "fake it 'til you make it" -- made not for show, but in secret, a hidden treasure that only he would ever know about. And, because of that, its power is such that people are overcome to the point of stepping backwards off of scaffolds. Fake art doesn't do that, I don't think.

 

Forty years ago, I spoke Italian better than I do now. (Forty years ago, I did a lot of things better than I do now -- but I'm a lot happier now, so there's that.)

Oddly enough, although I have forgotten almost all the Italian that I once spoke with subtlety and verve, the one thing I never lost were the curses:

"Dio cane!" ("God dog!")

"Porca miseria!" ("Miserable slut!")

"Stronzo." ("Piece of shit.")

"Va fa un cuolo!" ("Fuck off!")

"Che cazzo!" ("What a dick!")

You may ask, "Um, you don't seem to be your usual sunny self today, Kath -- is anything up?"

I answer: "The Post Office."

The box of books we mailed ourselves (cost: 81 actual US American Dollars) from Colorado Springs last August has finally arrived. 

Unfortunately, it arrived not at the rustic Tuscan farmhouse, but at my brother's elegant Capitol Hill townhouse in Washington, DC, USA, having been -- and here's the kicker -- returned from the Post Office in Pietrasanta. TWICE.

While Jonathan and I were going in constantly to inquire after it or any mail at all, they were busy stamping the box with all their little stamps and returning it to the US as "unclaimed."

I suppose we should count ourselves lucky -- I was in there about a month ago when one of the tellers (true story) actually made a woman cry. But, really. Our box has made more trips across the Atlantic than most college students. It has frequent flier miles now and the cabin attendants all know its name. The only beings in the universe who have spent more time hanging around in the Pietrasanta Post Office than it has are Jonathan and I looking for it.

Dio cane!

 

Well, we didn't win any prizes in the Christmas raffle down at the pub. Not even the squash.

In fact, we somehow managed to miss the raffle drawing entirely. We don't know how. Not only did Alice tell us that it would be held December 24th at lunch, there is also a sign near the door saying the same thing. But when we arrived for lunch (having even made a reservation!), there was no joyous crowd of festive revelers on hand and the prizes had all been taken away. Even the old men who seem to live there had apparently gone to their actual houses to be, presumably, with their family members who do not spend all day every day at the pub. I hope they were all able to recognize each other. It was sort of eerie -- I don't think I have ever been in the pub without the old men there before.

So we ate our subdued little lunch and bought a jar of Daniele's artichokes and came home and built a fire. We ate some panforte and I "watched" the Lauren Bacall version of Murder on the Orient Express while sleeping on the couch.

My friend Taylor had asked me take a picture in the pub and send it to him, so I sent the one above. "There's no people in this picture," he said. "Yeah," I said, "there were no people at the bar."

Just the other day, Jonathan and I had been congratulating ourselves on how many things we have figured out in the past four months. But really, I guess, the truth is that we still don't know how this works. We don't know how any of this works.

We have made reservations for what is supposedly going to be a big New Year's Eve dinner. There was a sign up about it near the door. Fingers crossed!

 

It takes us a bit less than two hours to drive to Firenze, depending on traffic. While Venice seems to be all soft light and water, Firenze is red tile and stone. I prefer it, if only because it is "our" city. We have our regular parking garage with our regular bakery near it. We have "our" museum -- the Uffizi. We know some restaurants we like and where the English-language bookstore is. (Well, Jonathan knows -- I have no sense of direction at all and have been relying on the boys to navigate in the car ever since they were still strapped in child seats in the back. Even now, we sometimes talk about the time, about five years ago, when we were lost and I suddenly knew where I was. It was glorious! But mostly Jonathan knows where to go and I hold his hand.)

But my favorite place in Firenze is Zecchi, the art supply store.

It is small (smaller than this wide-angle picture makes it look) and crowded with pencils and paints and jars holding brushes of all kinds jammed in together in an only vaguely ordered confusion. There is very little room to move around because beautiful things in tubes and boxes and piles fill all the space.

Behind the tumbled chaos on the counter in the back is a whole wall of jars of powdered pigments -- every color, but heavy on all the gradations of burnt red that are the colors of Tuscany. They seem like the ingredients for magical elixirs and I suppose that in a way they are. 

We went there on Wednesday and I bought more pencils for my drawing class and then we went to the Museo degli Innocenti to see the Escher exhibit, "Italy as Inspiration for the work of M.C. Escher."

We've been saying ever since we moved into the rustic farmhouse that it is like living in an Escher drawing. It turns out that we were more correct than we knew. Escher lived in Italy for 13 years -- he got married in Viareggio, which is so close to us that we go there to get our favorite bread.

His early drawings of landscapes around here are absolutely realistic renderings of the places and look like, well, Escher drawings, with nonsensical stairways and strange contorted perspectives because that is how this place actually is -- defying logic and even gravity. There were photographs paired with the scenes he drew and they are exact matches.

So my big reaction to the show was, "Aha! I knew it!" Like I have somehow caught Italy red-handed in the act.

 

More compelling evidence has emerged that our rustic farmhouse here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea (population 255 people, I have recently discovered) is definitely enchanted.

This is the story: Our floors here are red tile bricks -- beautiful, but rustic and surprisingly tough on socks, slowly wearing them away if you walk around in sock feet all day, as I do. As a consequence, several pairs of my socks now have holes in their soles. I thought to myself yesterday morning, "I really do need to get some new socks."

It has gotten colder here lately and I have begun wearing my coat. I've probably worn it eight or ten times recently, but yesterday afternoon as I was putting it on to go to the Capezzano Monte Philharmonic Annual Christmas Concert (a very charming and slightly surreal experience), I noticed that the side pocket of my coat was buttoned closed and was also lumpy. This is not usual. "Hmmm -- what could it be?"

Socks.

It was a pair of socks.

New socks -- black with purple toes -- that I have never seen before in my life. Besides which, who puts socks in their winter coat pocket? Not me.

So the evidence continues to roll in -- the rustic farmhouse is enchanted. It gave me a convenient bench from which to view the sea when I wanted it and it gave me a covered shed filled with firewood when I wanted it and now it has given me socks, the thing that I really most desired.

Thank god I've never been one of those people who wished they had a dragon.

The storms have come in waves this weekend, alternating lightning and window-rattling thunder with blue skies and air washed clear enough to see the coast of France from our living room windows.

And Jonathan and I have been out in waves between the storms, alternating cuddling up together at home with trips down to the pub -- Friday night for a convivial late afternoon glass of wine with the regulars. The World Cup was happening on the TV in the corner and no one knew whether to root for Croatia or Brazil, didn't really care that much, lackadaisically settled on Croatia at some point rather late in the game, and then celebrated wildly when Croatia won. Daniele popped open a bottle of prosecco and we all raised a glass, cheering uproariously.

We also entered a raffle (choosing, because I am apparently still in junior high school, number 69.) The winner will be drawn at lunchtime on Christmas Eve. The first prize is a big basket of all the homemade goodies -- sauces and pickled vegetables and olive oil -- that Daniele and Alice produce. Second prize is a giant (two liter? three liter?) bottle of the locally produced red wine that we have been eyeing for months now and wondering about. Third prize is an enormous winter squash. We have our fingers crossed for the squash.

We also went down for dinner Saturday night because the local Capriglia choir was there eating and singing between courses. They were downstairs (filling the downstairs) and we were upstairs. It was lovely, even though no one upstairs stopped talking during the songs, but instead only talked more loudly so that they could hear themselves over the music. But everyone clapped appreciatively at the end of each number. Below is (I hope) a bootleg recording that Jonathan made on his phone.

And today we are going over to our neighboring village, Cappezzano Monte (population either 176 or 354 people, depending on where you get your information) to hear the Cappezzano Monte Philharmonic perform their annual Christmas Concert. The excitement!

The early morning rain here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea has turned into a stormy afternoon, complete with rolling thunder and a steady downpour. Jonathan and I went down to town this morning during the calm before the torrents to do our shopping and got back home just before the heavens opened up. We are trying to reconcile ourselves to the fact that rain is a normal event here and not the cataclysm that it has been for all the years that we lived in the high desert. It is supposed to rain all weekend, but other than perhaps a quick jaunt down to the pub to sit by the fire and hear the latest news, we have nowhere in particular to go.

The Christmas market is going on in town -- a dozen or so little tents lining the street perpendicular to the main drag, selling hand-knit scarves and hats, fancy cheeses and artisanal chocolates, glass earrings, ornaments, crockery painted with pictures of Santa Claus or angels, wooden toys, wine. We didn't see anything we needed to buy, but it was festive just to walk around.

Then we did our usual shopping at the stores we used to ogle through Google Street View a year ago. Now they know us -- although not our names -- and are friendly and chatty when we go in. They have decorated for Christmas, too. I made Jonathan go into the Galleria del Pane by himself to buy our bread so that I could surreptitiously photograph him doing it. It's not every day that dreams come true so picturesquely.

Things have gotten a little more expensive here as winter and Putin make their presence felt, but we still marvel at the prices of things. We got our utility bill the other day and it runs about a quarter of what we regularly shelled out in the US. All the fruit and veg below totaled about twelve dollars, including the three pound (I weighed it) eggplant that I don't even know what I will do with, but that I couldn't resist. It was like buying a baby whale.

"I can't be too bothered with mushy-apple berries." Famous last words.

Jonathan "Maybe We Should Pick More Olives Just In Case" Poritz had the idea of making jam out of the corbezzoli berries. So we picked about two kilos of them, added some sugar and the juice and zest from a couple of lemons and boiled it down for a bit.

Turned out to be delicious and -- according to our friend The Internet -- alarmingly healthy, with a high content of antioxidants and anti-inflammatories and uses in therapy for hypertension and diabetes. Heavens.

Plus, they are another piece of data confirming one of my pet theories: "Add sugar and lemon and it will be fine" (second only in my Pet Theory Hierarchy to "Dredge it in salt and fry it in butter.") 

We are now making delightful treats by filling vol au vent pastry shells with half chestnut butter (rum and vanilla flavor) and half corbezzoli jam. How this is supposed to help with our high blood pressure is something of a mystery, but if the internet says it, it must be true.

Yesterday we went to the State Police Headquarters Immigration Department in Forte dei Marmi and finalized my paperwork for my Permesso di Soggiorno per Stranieri. Jonathan's brilliant idea to hire an attorney to shepherd us through this process was, well, brilliant. Our attorney knew everyone in the Immigration Office and we all had a lovely time together, catching up with family news, drinking coffee, chatting about movies, fingerprinting me (some slight difficulty with that owing to the delicacy of my finger grooves, proving once again that I missed out on my true calling: burglary), discussing kids and work and life in general, and finally making plans to get together soon for lunch (not sure if Jonathan and I are included in that last bit, though.) It was all very convivial and I understood about 20 percent of what was being said (a big improvement!), but smiled and laughed in (mostly) all the correct places. 

Jonathan and I had already gotten our 16 Euro stamp at the Tabacchi, but were at one point sent around the corner to get an 80 Euro stamp of a different kind at the Post Office. While we were waiting in line, another customer told us that we couldn't get a Soggiorno stamp at that Post Office, but would have to go to another Post Office. This seemed quite believable to us, but seeing as how our new best friend in the Immigration Office had told us to go to this exact Post Office (helpfully coming all the way out of the Police Station into the road to point it out to us), we ignored the very authoritatively certain-sounding stranger in line and everything turned out fine.

I do not have my official card yet, mind you. I will have to call them in two months or so to see if it is in, naturally. (Spoiler alert: it won't be.) But I have a temporary piece of paper with my picture on it, two signatures, and three stamps that everyone says will do fine in the meantime. I can't wait to see how many signatures and stamps the official version has. The mind boggles.

Then we came home and went down to the pub for lunch where you can get a first course, a second course, a glass of wine, dessert and coffee for 15 Euros. The old men were all eating at one uproarious table and the other tables all had workers from the new house being built down the road and maybe the road workers who have been painting very helpful white stripes along the edges of the death trap that is the only way up to here. It was all quite jolly and Jonathan and I drank prosecco to celebrate our bureaucratic morning. Then everyone went home for, presumably, a nap. I certainly hope the construction guys slept off their lunches well before hitting the power tools.

It is very autumnal here lately in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea. The chestnut leaves around the house have all turned yellow and orange so that it feels like we are living in the middle of a shimmering golden cloud. I have eaten 44 persimmons and have 37 still to go.

 

It's December 1st and the rosemary is still flowering here in Capriglia-by-the-Sea. And there are also lovely red berries that we have never seen before ripening in some of the trees. We never would have eaten them, but Mimmo tells us that we should dive right in. They are corbezzoli, from the tree arbutus unedo, the "Strawberry Tree," which is the national tree of Italy. Unlike the strawberry grapes on the vines out back, however, the corbezzoli do not taste like strawberries -- more like mushy apples, I think -- although the texture is vaguely strawberry-ish, I guess. And they are a lovely strawberry red color.

But I can't be too bothered with mushy-apple berries because the lovely Mimmo, who now shares a deep olive-based bond of brotherhood with Jonathan (their discussions together of olive lore have become lengthy, detailed, and specific) kindly helped us get some more of our many, many persimmons down from our burgeoning tree, where they dangle by the score just out of reach. He cut one smallish branch off with an extension saw and we harvested what we could from the wreckage. 

"What we could" turned out to be 81 persimmons, all of which are becoming ripe simultaneously.

When we first, many weeks ago now, mentioned our bounty of incipient persimmons to Jonathan's family, his sister-in-law responded with very dire anti-persimmon warnings about people who have perished from eating them, developing fatal bezoars in their stomachs from the tannins. This seemed iffy to us, but we looked it up on the internet and, sure enough, a guy in China did once die from eating some gigantic quantity of unripe persimmons in a very short space of time. But you have to eat a crazy big amount of them. "Who would do such a thing?" we asked each other at the time.

Me. It turns out that the answer is me.

I comfort myself with the fact that at least I am waiting until they are ripe.

And I am back in art class after a couple of weeks away because we were traveling and then I had a cold. I am happy to report that despite my prolonged absence, I have retained my position as the most completely hopeless hack in class (relatively speaking -- you should see the masterpieces my classmates toss out in 10 minutes), although I have now moved up to being a completely hopeless hack using the sanguine conte pencils that have been a hallmark of great Italian drawing for almost a millennium. My language skills are somewhat improving, though. So there's that.

And, through it all, I continue to work away on my book. The page proofs have arrived and I am proofreading them while making the index. It is enthralling, believe me, and quite frankly puts the whole death-by-persimmon thing into a much better light.