Today would have been my father's 90th birthday. I miss him very much.

And, because he was always more interested in giving presents than in receiving them, he seems to have sent me a gift from the great beyond. The camellia tree outside the kitchen door, in the midst of the bitter winds and the cold, has produced one early bloom. It emerged on the tree and then blew down to land at my feet.

"Ah," my friend Fiona says. "It must be camillia paulus paulus." Because my father's name was Paul. 

This house is enchanted.

The Mistral returned yesterday with ferocious winds and dazzling views of the sea. We should have predicted this because the last of our February guests left yesterday amid grey skies and mists. For two weeks, we've been apologizing for the rather indifferent weather and saying, "Oh, but you should see it on a good day!" So today the sea is sapphire blue and we can see the individual portholes on the ships heading towards the harbor at La Spezia. I feel like Jonathan and I are also in a ship, cozy and sunlit, sailing in a sea of Mistral wind.

Two days ago, down at the pub, I was talking to Alice about my new book coming out. We will have a reading there in June to celebrate its appearance. I said that Capriglia is a wonderful place to write -- always tranquil, always calm. "Yes," she said, deadpan, "just like in The Shining."

A couple of night ago, I dreamed that a giant tidal wave came and crashed over me. I survived by holding onto the handle of the door of my house. But I wasn't afraid or worried because I knew that my children were safe inside the house. I was surprised to find that I could breathe under water. 

I miss my boys.

It has been a long time since I published a book -- eight years. And during all of that time, I have been writing. But that work has just been one failed attempt after another. I think that maybe this is one form of writer's block -- you write all the time, but you write shit.

But failure is part of art. You just have to trust it and breathe.

So it is strange to be in the depths of serious writer's block and at the same time have a book coming out. While googling myself (a key activity of the blocked writer) a couple of days ago, I discovered that my newest book is available for pre-order on Amazon. I was surprised to see this because 1.) I feel somewhat disconnected from this book, having done nothing with it, except for tedious but necessary tasks like checking references and making an index, in over a year now, and 2.) I keep expecting the publishers to realize that they have made a terrible mistake and that they must not release this book. I check my email with dread in my heart, but nothing from them so far. It is still some months until it is actually available, of course, and many things may go wrong between now and then.

In the meantime, I have four (4) novels here, sitting in files on my desktop, that are either stalled or failed. I am thinking of taking up knitting.

Today, in a shop in town, when the cashier told me to "have a good day," instead of answering "you, too" (as I had intended), I said "whatever you want." He was probably pretty surprised by that. I know that I was.

We still don't know for sure what "sn" means, but whatever it is, it includes us. The power went out at 9:01 yesterday morning and, although at first it was delightful to sit in the sunlight coming in through the windows and read from books, houses made of marble and stone cool off more rapidly in the February chill than you might think and we abandoned the place in late morning.

We had a good time down in town paying the cell phone bill at the tobacco store and being told at the Post Office to go downstairs behind to check for the Posta Fermo that we could see very plainly sitting on the shelf behind the teller. Then we went over to Viareggio, where M.C. Escher got married and where they take Carnivale therefore unsurprisingly seriously, and failed to find a food processor.

But in the end it didn't matter because by the time we got home, the power was back on and our lives in the sunshine progress peacefully enough without processed foods or mail.

In Pietrasanta, we've been having the celebration of the Feast Day of our Patron Saint, San Biagio, who is one of the lesser-known saints -- known as (according to Wikipedia) the "so-called Auxiliary saints." This seems needlessly dismissive to me. He is a famous intercessor for the healing of throat maladies and we celebrated in town by having a traditional Blessing of the Throats in the piazza in front of the church and with an equally traditional and somewhat more popular Luna Park set up just outside of town. Actually, Jonathan and I attended neither of these, but we could see the lights and hear the calliope music from the main street up here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea. It is nice to know that people are eating tons of greasy carnival food and then riding contraptions that whirl them around wildly, even (or especially) if we aren't among them.

 What to do while the power is out:

One of the features of abandoning your old, comfortable life and uprooting yourself to move to a new culture in a new place is that every day is an adventure. Every day holds surprises. Our surprise for tomorrow is going to be whether or not we have electricity. Exciting!

Handbills appeared all around the village a few days ago announcing that the power would be off from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. tomorrow in various locations. Our street -- Via della Fornace -- is listed with only the cryptic note "sn." We do not know what "sn" means.

Our first thought was that it stands for "senza numero," meaning "without number" -- some place along the street where there is no address (and this could be a lot of places on lovely Via della Fornace, which is largely what is called "unspoiled") would not have power, assuming that it ever did have power and that someone in the middle of what is basically nowhere would have a sudden desperate need for power. Given that even taxi drivers and Amazon trucks refuse to risk coming up to the wilderness that is Via della Fornace, this seemed nonsensical to us, but no more nonsensical than any other bureaucracy, in Italy or the US or anywhere else on earth.

Two elderly women who came across us as we were staring at the handbill on the street assured us that we would all have plenty of power -- giant heaps of it. They did not tell us what "sn" means, even though we asked, and gave the impression of being rather addled, although very kind.

Jonathan's friend in Milan, who has been a source of much demystification for us and to whom he texted a picture of the handbill, tells us that "sn" means "sinistra" -- the left side of the road. We absolutely trust her, but have no idea which side of the road is the "left."

We are going to park the car on the other side of our electrically controlled security gates tomorrow morning not later than 8:45, just in case we end up with no power (temperatures just above freezing predicted) and decide to flee somewhere warm and lighted. 

Nothing says "you're really living the adventure now" like the prospect of having to flee for warmth.

 

Today I discovered that these little purple crocuses have begun to bloom all over outside our house. It is February and there should not be crocuses, but there are. 

And tonight at sunset, the sea was just this color, purple and luminous, and the sky was just this aching orange gold.  

Every night at sunset, Jonathan and I call out to each other "Look at the sky! Look at the sky!" from different rooms of the house. We have given up trying to photograph it.