Just in the past week, the autumn has irrevocably arrived with rain and ripe fruit and the sea frothy and rough so that we hear it at night when everything else is quiet. This is the time of year when I am most aware that we live on a farm.

The olives were devastated this summer. We will have none. Some countries around the Mediterranean are now banning the export of olive oil because there just will not be enough. Fortunately for us, in our crazed state last year, we picked so many olives that we still have a dozen quart-sized jars of them in brine here on the shelves of the living room. What we thought we would do with so many olives, I have no idea, but it turns out that we were remarkably fore-sighted. We farmers have to be that way.

The pomegranates are getting ripe on the tree out behind the kitchen and the persimmon tree once again has lots of lovely orange fruits hanging around in its branches tantalizingly just out of reach. I have managed so far to pick exactly one (pictured below), but also feel no shame in just buying them at our fruit and veg store down in town. One must do what one must do when it comes to persimmons. The persimmon season (and, for that matter, life itself) is very short.

The chestnuts, on the other hand, are all too available, covering the grounds around the house with prickly burrs like ten thousand stranded tribbles. We have been making chestnut butter -- vanilla and rum or coffee and chocolate. We have reached that point where we are now only willing to take the trouble to even bend over and pick one up if it is particularly plump and promising. We took a giant shopping bag full of them down to Alice and Daniele at the pub to do something with and it didn't even make the tiniest dent in our own bounty. When Mimmo comes to work in the yard, he uses his leaf blower to blow them into the woods where the wild boar can gorge themselves on them.

And the first of the corbezzoli berries have started to fall. I will make jam later this week. Jonathan is baking bread on a pretty near constant basis to try to keep up with the nut butter and jam production. (Side note: this is not NOT the type of Mediterranean diet that is so insistently touted for weight loss. This is the type of Mediterranean diet that bulks you up to last out the winter sleeping by the fire. I now live in my stretchy leggings and have decided to just go ahead and become jolly.)

Pietrasanta may be the only town in the world where it is considered completely reasonable to install a giant marble sculpture (so big that this is just the base of it) into the main town square for only one day so that everyone can take a look at it before it is shipped off across the world.

We have been here 13 months now. The days are getting shorter and the most certain sign of autumn in Tuscany has appeared: the geckos have moved indoors. The one in the living room yesterday was so large that I heard it before I saw it.  A smaller one spent all day Thursday on the bathroom sink, huddled up against the hot water tap for warmth.

Jonathan is in Mexico City for a conference. He stopped off in the US just long enough to change planes and contract the new Covid variant. So he has now has spent a lovely week trapped in a Mexican hotel room drinking coffee from those little hotel room coffee pods and coughing. We are hoping that he will be able to fly home tomorrow.

I have spent the week that he has been gone re-arranging the spice cupboard and missing him, It is very quiet in the house (other than the galloping sound of the living room gecko) and I don't feel like going out without him. In these past 13 months, we have spent almost every moment together, usually in the same room. That, not Tuscany per se, is what has made this place heaven.

 

It is fall here now -- still blue sky-ed and warm, but the persimmons are starting to turn orange up in our persimmon tree and the famous Tuscan porcini mushrooms are in season. Lots of people around here go out early in the mornings to hunt them up in the woods. People have secret favorite haunts and regular spots where they have had luck in past years. Caterina at the pub is famous for always coming back with a big haul whenever she goes out hunting them. Given that the deer-hunting season has also begun and we regularly hear gunshots from the woods, also early in the mornings, I have decided to skip that step of the process and just purchase porcini at the market, where they are fat and plentiful.

I posted this picture on Instagram of me holding one. Then the next time I was in the pub, one of the boys said, "Hey! I saw that you found a really big mushroom!" "Yes," I said, "I found it in the market." The boys all laughed appreciatively. My reputation for hopeless ineptitude remains intact.

The party in honor of Leo's memory happened last Sunday night. Literally half the town of Capriglia was there and Daniele and Alice raised a gigantic donation for cancer research. I only cried once. "No," Almo said, "Last week, we cried. This week, we celebrate the joy of his life."