It is hard to write about summer. Pietrasanta is jammed with sunburnt Germans and Americans looking hopelessly for parking places and open tables, but nothing much is happening up here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea. Of course, we are not hosting a crucifixion up here like they -- apparently -- are down in town. So that may account for presence of the more boisterous crowds down there.

It continues to be sweltering ("inferno" is the Italian word for "hell," incidentally) and we have been given conflicting information with regard to the prospects for this year's olive harvest. Mimmo is quite downcast, saying that we got too much rain in the spring and not enough now. The old men in the pub, however, assure us that it is no problem -- that the olives like the sun and that they can easily go as much as four months without water. Given that Mimmo spends his time farming olives and the old men spend theirs drinking wine under the shade trees, we have resigned ourselves to disappointment.

The summer sound is katydids. They seem to have an "on" switch that is suddenly hit every morning when the temperature reaches a certain point. They are so loud that they drown out even the birds (but not the singing that floats up from the pub sometimes in the late afternoons.) This is the sound of my own childhood summers (the katydids, not the Italian singing) and when we also catch sight of fireflies in the dusk-shadowed woods around our house, I am eight-years-old again in Arkansas and twilight is magic and the future is still only a jumbled-up dream.

We are not cooking much because of the heat, but eat salad after salad. The fruit spoils fast these days, even in the fridge, so I made peaches and apricots and lemons into a crostata. And I work away on a novel. I am at the place in the writing process where I have given up all hope over it, but work on it anyway -- perhaps from some sort of inner compulsion, perhaps just because it is too hot to go for a walk. Below is a section of it that is an actual true story that really happened to a high school friend of mine. He is an attorney now.

There’s a speed trap out on the highway at the edge of Babbitt, just before you get to the new feedmill, right where the Sonic Drive-In used to be before the emanations from the new feedmill significantly dampened down folk’s enthusiasm for outdoor dining in those particular atmospheric conditions. Jud sits out at the speed trap most afternoons in his police cruiser with the radar gun propped up on the dashboard and a good supply of international intrigue thriller novels in the seat next to him. He says he doesn’t mind the emanations now that he’s used to them.

            Jud loves those international intrigue thriller novels. He says they’re the reason he decided to go into crime prevention as a profession. There is no bookstore as such in Babbitt, but Darlene at the hardware store can get them wholesale from the same magazine distributor where she gets her Farmer’s Almanacs every year and she always does right by Jud whenever the magazine distributor comes around and, therefore, goes as fast as she wants out on the highway. She says she hit 120 one time, but Jud says she exaggerates and that it was only 115. Not a person in the world was surprised when they announced their engagement.

            Everybody in town knows about the speed trap and makes sure to slow down whenever they get close to it (which they can tell by the emanations) and to wave at Jud. Given this, it is unclear just how much of a trap it actually is, but Jud says he’s really there to catch the out-of-towners, the big-city speeders running through here with their tinted-window cars and their fancy high-octane engines like wild dogs through a cat’s pajamas. But there is nothing in particular in Babbitt for the fast-living jet set to come for – especially since the Sonic Drive-In closed down – and it’s not even remotely on the way to anywhere in particular, so Jud has himself a fairly relaxed beat out there at the speed trap. At one point there was even some talk of using town funds to get him a recliner to put next to the cruiser, but nothing came of it after Booty Cox took his driver’s license test.

            What happened was that Booty, who was known for having been kind of high-strung, was driving along with the certifier from the county DMV there in the car with him. He had already demonstrated how he could stop and start and turn right and turn left and merge onto the highway and was doing about as well as a high-strung person could be expected to do in a situation of uncommon tension like that when Jud saw him go by and, knowing how het up Booty was over the whole thing, waved real big at Booty for encouragement.

            Well, Booty didn’t see Jud wave on account of how tense he was having to look at the highway lines and the speedometer needle and everything else all at the same time, so Jud just tapped his horn to get Booty’s attention and waved real big again. But when a police cruiser taps its horn at a high-strung person like Booty Cox, all good intentions aside, it does not help the situation. In fact, it startled Booty, who thought Jud was waving him down and thought he had better stop. But in the excitement of the moment, he hit the gas pedal instead of the brake and went straight head-first into the drainage ditch by the side of the highway at about 60 miles an hour.

            He said later that it happened so fast he was hoping maybe he could fix the situation before the certifier from the DMV noticed. So he threw the car into reverse, kept his foot down hard on the gas, and shot backwards out of that drainage ditch like there were saber tooth tigers down there. He was thinking so hard about the gears, in the commotion, that he clean forgot that he needed to steer the car and lord only knows where he would have ended up if he hadn’t by chance backed straight into Jud’s cruiser going so fast that his car just kind of bounced off the cruiser and went directly right back into the ditch. Jud says he never would have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.

            When they finally came to a permanent stop, Booty asked the certifier from the DMV if this one incident would mean that he failed the test, given how well he had done with the stopping and the starting and the turning right and turning left and the merging and all, but the certifier wouldn’t even speak. Jud drove him back to the DMV in what was left of the cruiser and we heard later that he retired that very afternoon and moved away to Tulsa.

            Booty eventually passed the test six months later when the county DMV managed to convince another certifier to get into a car with him, but the town council decreed that Jud had to keep a lower profile from now on, so that was the end of the plan for the recliner. Folks felt that it would be conspicuous and might distract other high-strung people like Booty when they were out on the highway. For a time, people in Babbitt maintained a lively discussion among themselves as to who else in the world there could be who might even begin to do such a thing. Although several names were floated as possibilities, Booty was always at the pinnacle of the heap.

            All of this is just to say that the closer Brother and I got to Babbitt, the slower we drove, so that if Jud was out at the speed trap, we had absolutely no fear of a ticket. We weren’t going more than 20 miles an hour by the time we got to the Booty Cox Memorial Drainage Ditch and it still seemed too fast.