This is what it is like to walk around in Pietrasanta. Even the debris casually cast off and left forgotten in back alleys and abandoned storerooms breaks your heart with beauty.

 

We eat seasonally and locally here, which makes me feel both very virtuous and a little bored. That is often the way with virtue, I find.

Right now, it is the season for artichokes. (And pears.) That's pretty much it. This wouldn't be so bad if we weren't shockingly bad at cooking them (the artichokes, not the pears.) I have no idea what the problem is. We cooked American artichokes with great success in America. Italians cook Italian artichokes with great success in Italy. But so far we are enormous failures at cooking Italian artichokes in our lovely rustic farmhouse kitchen. They end up watery and flavorless. 

I keep buying them anyway, mind you, both because they look so fabulous and also because eternal optimism is a hallmark of my character. 

We had the same problem back in October when the fabulous porcini mushrooms were everywhere tasting delicious in every recipe in every restaurant and we were incessantly disappointed with them at home. 

Now there are no porcini mushrooms in sight. Only artichokes. (And pears.) One of the nice things about eating seasonally and locally is that you can be a complete failure at cooking something new every month.

I guess there is still also lots of game meat around -- venison and game birds and wild boar. Daniele cooks it all down at the pub. He is a snout-to-tail kind of cook and it's a bit of a gamble to go down to the Workingman's Lunch on weekdays and possibly have some of the best slow-roasted venison in red wine sauce that you have ever put into your mouth, but also just as possibly get a big plate of organ meats. I am sure they are delicious to a person whose imagination is neither as vivid nor as visual as mine.

Our olives are ready to eat now and we've been tucking in. They are packed with flavor and ten or twelve of them in a little dish next to my plate at dinner makes a delightful treat for my palate. At the rate of ten or twelve olives a day, we will use up the olives and run out just in time for the olive harvest in the fall of 2037.

 It is winter here now and there is no one to serve dinner for down in the pub even on Friday nights. Alice and Daniele stay home. There are just Jonathan and Renata and I and the old men playing cards and drinking wine by the fire. Everyone wears their coats even though we are indoors. We greet each other like friends now.

Down in town, the cafes are mostly empty and the women waiting in line outside the butcher shop have scarves pulled tight around their heads. There are no tourists.

Jonathan and I stay home most days. I am wearing wool socks and two sweaters over my thermal underwear in an attempt not to be a spoiled American cranking the heat up to 11. The sun feels good on my face when I bring in the garbage bins or, ever optimistic, check the mail. Only a handful of the most stubborn persimmons still cling to the trees.

It is winter and I, who abhor the cold, find that I am nevertheless very happy in these days of solitude with Jonathan. We look out over the sea and shiver with the beauty of it.

It was almost a year ago now that, sitting at the dining room table in Colorado Springs, we found our rustic farmhouse for rent on the internet. We rented it, sight unseen, by email and phone (not quickly) for the beginning of September until the end of April. In person, it turned out to be not only beautiful, but also enchanted. But given the luxuriously leisurely pace of life in Italy, it is now time to start, sadly, finding somewhere else to go when our lease is up here.

So about a month ago we emailed the rental agent who brokered this place and, to our inexpressible delight, the lovely Signora, whose home this is, has agreed to let us stay another year -- until April 2024. This means that we will be here when the wisteria is in flower, when the olive trees bloom, when everyone down at the pub moves back out onto the terrace, when the house feels sweetly cool coming into it out of the hot afternoon sun, when the daylight over the sea lasts late into the evening. We will harvest olives again -- and chestnuts and persimmons. I will eat the strawberry grapes out back and we will make lots of corbezzoli jam. It is even possible that if we stay here long enough, our mail will eventually arrive. But I doubt it. Like the Persian carpets that are intentionally woven with one flaw, one must not expect perfection.

In May, when we still lived in the US, I said to Jonathan, "I really don't feel like writing anything for a while now." In June, I said, "Yeah, I'm done for good with writing books or, really, anything at all." In July (while I was doing the Text Log for the book that is coming out this June), I said, " I am so OVER this!" In August, I said, "If I ever talk about writing another book, promise me that you will SHOOT me!" In December, after I had submitted every last thing to the publishers, I said, "Thank god that is done! Never again!!!"

Yesterday, I started a new book. It is one of six (6) that I currently have on the drawing board, like planes waiting to take off at O'Hare. I blame Italy. 

So here is the first draft of the first few pages of it. It is a murder mystery. It will go through a million re-writes, of course. But this is the beginning as it stands now:

Dollar Store Robitussin and Starlight Mints

By Kathy Giuffre

January 2023

 

            It all started with the first armadillo. That was back when Clyde still lived in his trailer on the farm out in Babbitt, Arkansas. Well, he called it a farm, but he didn’t grow anything on it except for weeds and, I guess, armadillos.

            We should have recognized that first armadillo for the evil omen that it was, but sometimes I’ll admit that we’ve been known to be the little tiniest bit slow on the uptake. If we had of been a tad speedier, we would have caught on sooner. If we had of been a tad speedier, I wouldn’t be dead.

            What happened was that Clyde was living out on the so-called farm, like I said. Give the man his due, he kept himself busy out there making improvements on the place. Like for example, he put a great big handicap access ramp onto the front of the trailer and nailed down a piece of paisley-patterned indoor-outdoor carpet on it so that the ramp wouldn’t ever be at all slick in rain or ice. Nailed it down good and tight all over.

            And, Lord, he sure kept that pasture out there mowed. I bet there was nothing he like better than getting out there and mowing on that pasture. He had a John Deere riding mower with matching cap, but also a regular just walking around mower that he used more up close to the trailer. That was where he said he was doing his precision work. Also, one time he rode the big John Deere into a ditch that he didn’t see across his path and it was hell to get it out. It made him kind of cautious of using the big mower in tight places after that.

            He mowed and mowed those weeds, hoping it would somehow turn them into grass, I guess. It never did, but you can’t blame a man for trying. He had neighbors out there and I wondered if they were ever bothered by the noise, the pretty near constant whine of the lawn mower. But if they complained, I never heard about it.

            I guess you can tell that he was a house-proud man and so it was no surprise that he did not take kindly to a damned armadillo that showed up that spring and started coming around the place digging up roots and grubs and leaving holes all over the yard. Looked a sight, he said. Not to mention the personal safety hazard. Clyde had a good many years behind him and his night vision wasn’t all that it used to be. Day vision wasn’t so great either, if you come to it. Some people might even call him a blind old coot, in fact, but probably not to his face. So stepping in an armadillo hole and breaking his leg was not the distant danger for Clyde that it might have been for his more sprightly neighbors. We all remember the John-Deere-mower-hidden-ditch incident, after all.

            When it came to issues of personal safety, Clyde was always a stalwart believer in the simple efficacy of a dependable shotgun to fix whatever ailed you. A magic cure-all for any problem, large or small. You could have tried to argue with him about it if you didn’t mind completely wasting your breath (and possibly getting shot). So, naturally, Clyde took as much defilement of his well-mowed weeds as a house-proud man could take, which wasn’t much, and then he got old Bessie locked and loaded and set himself to wait.

            Clyde staked out the yard three nights running, drinking coffee and slapping himself to stay awake, but armadillos are wilier varmints than you might think from looking at them. Maybe its dumb instinct or maybe its sheer animal cunning, but they steer well clear of anything or anyone who smells like that much Aqua Velva. There are plenty of fully grown human women who would be a lot better off in their lives today if only they’d had the sense to do the same.

            The fourth night, Clyde figured that the armadillo must have moved on to greener pastures and went on to bed, although he kept Bessie loaded and leaned up against the wall right by the trailer door, ready just in case. Clyde was a man who liked to be prepared. And sure enough, that very night just as he was getting to the good part of the dream, Clyde was woken up by the noise of that durn armadillo out there, rooting around again, digging up the yard, bold as brass. Fortunately, Clyde had gone to bed in his underwear and mud boots just in case. He was up and out and on that critter like a duck on a June bug, blasting away in no time flat.

            Well, naturally, the armadillo was surprised. You would be surprised too if a blind old coot wearing nothing but tighty-whiteys and mud boots interrupted your dinner by shooting at you. Even in Babbitt, Arkansas, this is not the norm. No matter that on account of being pretty near blind out there, the old coot was missing by a mile, with all the pellets flying, it was almost inevitable that something was going to end up shot. The armadillo could see that as well as anyone and I guess it kind of lost its head and started running around all over the yard while Clyde was firing on it as fast as he could reload.

            Here’s thing you may or may not know about armadillos: their hides are hellaciously tough. So tough that a shotgun pellet can actually ricochet off them. This is a true fact. There was a story in the paper not too long ago about a man who accidentally shot his mother-in-law in the back with a small-caliber handgun while she was sitting in her chair inside and he was trying to shoot an armadillo outside. The bullet ricocheted off the armadillo, went in through the screen door of the house and then on through the back of her chair where she was sitting watching TV. It didn’t kill her, but I bet it shut her up. The armadillo may not have known that about itself, but Clyde probably did. It didn’t matter, though, because by that time Clyde had lost his head, too.

            The armadillo probably figured that no one would be stupid enough to fire at an armadillo sitting right in front of a propane tank right up against the side of their own trailer, especially not a house-proud man like Clyde. But that armadillo had figured wrong, because in the heat of the moment Clyde had not any qualms left at all and, having invested the better part of a whole box of shotgun shells already, he went all in. He aimed by the moonlight gleaming off the metal tank and I’ll be damned if he didn’t miss the tank and hit the varmint. It was a one-in-a-hundred shot and just goes to show what can be done if you steadfastly pursue your dreams with grit and determination.

            The armadillo squealed and ran under the handicap access ramp and there, dug in as far back as it could squeeze, breathed its last breath on this earth and passed on to those grub-filled pastures in the sky.

            Clyde’s blood was all riled up now with his victory and, being a no-time-like-the-present type of person and also having smelled his fair share of rotting armadillo carcasses in a long life filled with wholesome country living, he decided to go ahead and get the thing out from under his trailer while the getting was good and it was still fresh. Lord, the armadillo hadn’t made it easy, though. It had crawled up under the ramp as far as it could go and then had even dug down some before it expired. There was no reaching it from any side, even with the long-handled barn rake.

            Clyde hated to do it, but right then that very night he went ahead and pulled up each and every one of those carpet nails, all the way around the whole length of that indoor-outdoor carpet. He couldn’t risk tearing it because he had got it cheap from a friend of his at church who worked at Home Depot and there was no telling when he could ever get such a good deal again, especially since his friend had been let go under unfriendly circumstances not too long after the carpet had luckily become available to him.

Then Clyde started prying up boards on the handicap access ramp. It was almost sunrise when he finally got hold of the dead armadillo itself. He had to dig it out some with the shovel there at the end and then he grabbed onto its tail with a pair of pliers and dragged it out from under there. He pulled it on across the pasture and up into the edge of the woods. He left it there, just lying on the ground and went back to repair the damage to the handicap access ramp.

            By the time the sun was good and up, he had nailed all the boards back from where he had wrenched them free and was re-stretching the carpet so that it would lie down flat and tight again. You couldn’t hardly tell it had been taken up at all. He thought at one point that he might be going to run out of nails, he used so many. But it turned out okay and he saw the buzzards up in the early morning sky, circling and circling there at the edge of the woods where that dead armadillo’s body lay festering already. He figured there wouldn’t be a single trace of it left by afternoon.

            Now Clyde told this story to my mother and my mother told it to me and she didn’t have any answers to my main question about the whole episode, which was, “Where the hell were all the neighbors while all this was going on?” I mean, a blind man in his drawers shooting enough buckshot to kill ten armadillos and then doing major outdoor carpentry in the middle of the night is bound to raise a commotion. There was the family up at the big house – a nice couple and their three kids, all in grade school. And right across the road (technically, it was a state highway, but it only had one lane in each direction) was Denny Sims and his widowed mother who moved in with him after his daddy died. Everyone said Mrs. Sims didn’t sleep much at night anymore. And right smack next door was Travis, who was Clyde’s stepson from his third marriage, who was staying in Clyde’s old trailer until he could get his feet back under him after he lost his job at the chicken plant for being caught with unauthorized gizzards on his way out after his shift. You know he stays up late every night. But even with all the gunfire and the digging and the hammering going on in the middle of the night and even with those buzzards circling and circling up in the sky all day long, not a one of them so much as made a peep about it. That’s pretty telling, when you come to think about it. That’s the part that we should have noticed. That and the buzzards.

 

The Mistral continues to blow here and we continue to hang our laundry out in it. Our theory is that the wind will somehow work magic. This despite the fact that there were even a few flakes of swirling snow this morning.

The sea is whipped up so that it is luminous and milky, but France is very clear on the horizon and we can see St. Tropez from our front yard. It's breathtaking, but impossible to photograph in all its glory. We even dug out the telephoto lens (carefully packed and carried all this way for just such an occasion) and tried our best with that, but it is still so much better with the naked eye. We tell each other that you have to live here to see such things. Then we hurry back inside out of the cold and the wind.

We are very cozy inside, like hibernating bears.

I wondered how it would feel to be back in the US for our first visit since moving to Italy. I wondered if I would be overwhelmed with nostalgia, sink into the comfort of understanding everything being said around me and of knowing how everything works. I wondered if I would feel regret.

Um, no.

America seems gritty and frenetic and angry. There are many consumer goods and I was glad to be able to buy them, but people eat their lunches too fast -- it is not good for the digestion. And afternoon naps are frowned on for everyone over the age of four -- no wonder there is so much rampant crankiness. And the political scene is a chaotic dystopian morass that would be bizarrely fascinating, in a freakish circus sideshow sort of way, were it not in the global center ring, threatening to take the rest of the world's economy down the drain with it. That cretins such as the American Republicans (who by rights should be relegated to carefully controlled institutional settings out of the way of decent people) should have such global power makes their clown act no longer funny. It is horrifying.

But.

It was lovely to see the people I love. One cannot make an old friend over night. And to be with my boys, however fleetingly, is a piece of heaven.

One of my relatives asked me what I miss about America. I miss the people I love. I miss the boys being little and asleep, tucked into their beds at night in the quiet of our house and me as I was then, in those late evening hours of serenity. But all of that is gone and moving away to Italy had nothing to do with its loss.

So we did the slog of 23 hours of travel and arrived at last back to our little house  on the hillside just in time to see the sun setting blood red into the sea. The wind was very fierce last night -- these are the winter winds of the Mistral.

But the famous Tuscan sun is out this morning, drying all of our travel laundry. The winds blew the air so clear that right now from our windows we can see the snow on the mountain tops of Les Alpes-Maritimes across the Ligurian Sea in France.

 

The general consensus in art class is that at least my Italian is getting better.

"You still can't speak," Antonio says, "but you understand things now."

"Well, about half," I say.

"Oh, no," he says, encouragingly, "three-quarters!"

The model for this drawing of hands was amazed to find out that I am sixty years old.

"You look so young!" she said.

"It's the Italian way of life," I said. "So tranquil -- it keeps you young."

"I don't think so," she said. "I'm Italian and I look terrible."

It is difficult to know what exactly to say to a completely naked woman who tells you she looks terrible while a whole roomful of elderly men watch. Especially when you have a limited grasp of the language you are speaking. I mean, I guess you can never be too complimentary to naked people, but it can feel awkward.

Then we had to stop talking because Antonio was trying to paint her mouth.

It was probably for the best.

 

We are back in the US for a few days and I have some thoughts.

-- Customs and Immigration at JFK Airport is perhaps not the very most congenial place to get a good first impression of these Great United States. More of a shitstorm hellhole of bilge water. I once accidentally fell into an open sewer in Jakarta, Indonesia, during a cholera epidemic. (Long story.) A dead body was down there already. I looked back on that experience fondly while changing planes in JFK.

-- Signs here even in places like the International Arrivals area of major US airports are strictly English only. This is bizarre and contributes at least somewhat to the point above.

-- There is lots of space in the US. It is all over the place. There are hotel elevators in the US that are bigger than some hotel rooms in Italy.

-- Every single thing in the Walgreen's Drug Store in San Francisco is locked behind protective plastic to prevent shoplifting, including the toothpaste and toothbrushes. Apparently, this is common in big city drug stores all over the US. It speaks poorly of general standards of morality in the US, but quite well of general standards of dental hygiene.

-- Although the people we have encountered have been without exception kind and friendly, everyone seems very beaten down, just struggling to make it through the day. I blame the lack of good cheap wine, a culture that frowns on two-hour lunches every day followed by two-hour naps, and postindustrial neoliberal capitalism.

-- There is no food anywhere in Italy, under even the most extreme circumstances, that would be allowed to be as bad as the free breakfast at our hotel. Them's shootin' eggs.

-- On the other hand, you can buy things in the US that you can't (or at least we can't) in Italy -- like baby aspirin. But it is locked behind protective plastic.

It has been a week and a half since the New Year's Eve dinner at the pub and I am only now recovered enough to write down even the smallest facts about the evening:

-- I had to unbutton my pants at about 10:30 in order to accommodate my stuffed belly and we hadn't even gotten to the main courses yet.

-- There was tripe.

-- In an attempt to escape the company of his somewhat disapproving-seeming family members (with whom he was obligated to dine on this holiday, but whom he managed to lure to the pub to do it), we were joined at our table by one of the regulars.

-- It turns out that some of the regulars are "fabricators" -- the people who actually cast the bronze or carve the marble that the sculptors design. They are incredible artists in their own right, but deny that label and claim only to be "artisans."

-- Since then, he has gone out of his way to show us that we belong and that we are accepted by buying us bottles of wine.

-- I cannot drink this much.

-- Oops! It turns out that I can.

-- "La serata e lunga" means "The evening is long." Renata says this to us while uncorking another bottle at our table and smiling knowingly at us.

-- On Wednesday, we visited Almo at his studio. He is another one of the regulars, another fabricator. He showed us all around and it was fascinating.

-- My dear friends from graduate school, Indermohan and Art, were here visiting for a couple of days and Indermohan snapped the very cool picture below during our visit. (You can see Jonathan in it, but only the back of Almo's jacket.

-- Almo offered me a chance to give it a whirl with the pneumatic chisel, but I turned him down.

-- I regret it.

-- But I am nevertheless very happy.