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.