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.