It is a misty morning and from where I am sitting next to the window, it is completely silent. There is not one sound, no birds, not even the sea. We are waiting for rain later, but for the now the sky is gray and quiet, like it's holding its breath. The air outside smells like woodsmoke.

The past few days, the air has been so cold and clear that we could count the containers on the decks of boats waiting in the sea lanes to go into the harbor at La Spezia. The sea itself has been bottle green.

At night, the full moon has been bright enough to cast strong shadows from the cypress trees that line our drive. I walk through them in stripes when I go to take out the trash in the evenings. Orion is down at the end of the drive again, one of the very few constellations I can identify with any certainty. He is an old friend. The moonlight is pale blue, but the lights in the house are warm and yellow and it is nice to come out of the cold into the warmth.

The winds have blown themselves out now, leaving behind colder temperatures, a sweeping crystalline view out over the sea, and a small amount of property damage. Mimmo came to work on the damage and after he left, I discovered that he had picked some persimmons for us and left them on the porch.

We are living now in wind. It has been blowing for three days -- so hard that we lost a big tree out back and a dozen fence posts. In one night, the big persimmon tree was stripped clean of all its lovely red and orange leaves and now scores of persimmons hang there on the bare branches, getting ripe, just out of reach, taunting me.

We got a literal windfall of corbezzoli berries, though, so I have been making giant pots of gritty jam. It was either that or step in all the sticky red berries whenever we walk out back, ending up afterwards tracking red splotches around behind us like a couple of very untidy serial killers.

There were a few very small and very unexpected sweet potatoes for sale in the fruit and veg store the other day. They were labelled "Patate Americane." This led me to attempt to bake Jonathan's favorite pie, Sweet Potato Pecan. The important ingredients for this are: sweet potatoes, pecans, dark corn syrup, brown sugar, eggs, and pumpkin pie spice. The ingredients from that list that are regularly available in Italy: eggs. For the rest, I just had to wing it. We are eating it anyway.

Last Sunday, we went to Capezzano Monte for the celebration of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. There was a mass with music by the Capezzano Monte Filarmonica in the church, then a little band concert in the park, and then a big fried-chicken lunch in the school house/community center, where we sat at long tables and talked (as is almost always the case in Italy) about food. Our friend Claudio from the pub was the head chef. It was like a lost episode of The Andy Griffith Show, only with wine. Lots and lots of wine.

We have more time to go to things like this lately  because two days ago, I finished the first draft of my new novel. Now it needs to sit and marinate while I clear my head of it. That way I can come back to it later with clear eyes.

Tomorrow we are going to the Merenda Allongata (Elongated Snack) at the pub to usher in the holiday season. It lasts from 4:00 to 8:00 p.m. and features much wild boar, including Daniele's homemade, secret-recipe wild boar sausage. We had planned to sort of diet and get in better shape before the holiday season kicked in, but it seems to have snuck up on us very quickly and we missed our chance. So now when we say we are "rolling in" to the holiday season, we mean it literally. I have no regrets.

Update Number Two: Looking more closely at the label from the wine of choice at the pub, I see that it is actually named for a quote from Baudelaire. Here is the whole quote, the first part of which is on the label:

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

 Update: Here is a picture of today's corbezzoli jam and two more pictures of mushrooms.

 

After a quarter century of desert life, I still can't quite get used to rain. It seems magical, but also a little dangerous and I can't help but feel that we should prepare for it in some way. So while it has rained on and off this past week, I have made enormous quantities of soup -- minestrone, leek and potato, pork and white bean with sage. Tomorrow is chicken. This soothes me with the feeling that I have done all I can in these perilous times.

The regulars at the pub have taken a less labor-intensive approach to the autumn weather and have merely switched from their usual summer prosecco to red wine for the season. Their preferred vintage is called "Sogni e Poesie" -- Dreams and Poetry. It may not be the very best wine in this country, but it has the most honest name.

Yesterday, Jonathan and I went down to town for a special mercatino agronomico in the Piazza del Duomo -- our favorite kind of mercatino. Tucked away in a corner of the piazza, we found a lady selling the cheese with red pepper flakes that we like. She also persuaded us to buy some very spicy salami.

"The red pepper is good for your circulation," she said. "It makes you strong! After  my husband eats this, he walks around on three legs!"

Jonathan and I roared with laughter at this and bought the sausage (which is hot enough to make me gasp) as well as the cheese. She then pressed a couple of free glasses of wine on us from her own private bottle. We tried to refuse, saying that we had to drive back up the mountain to Capriglia, but she dismissed the hair-raising and lovely drive up Via Capriglia with an airy insouciance that would have put Evel Knievel to shame. 

So I drank my wine and Jonathan's wine, he drove us home, and I did nothing productive the rest of the day.

Today, though, I made more corbezzoli jam. As with everything else after our baking hot summer, there aren't as many corbezzoli as there were last year, but I make a little batch every few days when I have managed to round up enough berries to make it worth the trouble. The corbezzoli have lots of crunchy seeds, so it would be very kind to call the resulting jam "textured" and more accurate to call it "gritty." Recipes on the internet suggest forcing the jam through a very fine meshed sieve a couple of time before serving. Seeing as how I actually have some other interests in my life beyond corbezzoli jam, we are having the crunchy version. I like to think of it as rustic.

 

Eight months ago, as required by law, we started the process of switching Jonathan's Swiss driver's license over to an Italian driver's license. There is an international treaty regarding this -- it is an automatic process (no tests or anything else required). "Oh," the man behind the counter said, "it takes five minutes. Come back when you have your new identity card and we will handle it." That was eight months ago.

We are now dozens of visits, emails, and phone calls in -- so many that we have lost count -- and still no license. The highlight of all of this for me was having to get a verified photo of Jonathan. This involves going to a photo booth on the street, taking a picture, and then making an appointment at the city offices for someone there to look at the photo, look at Jonathan, and officially confirm that this is a photo of him. The people at the driver's license place are not able to do this sophisticated task.

The person at the city offices, having looked at both the photo of Jonathan and at Jonathan, then issues an official piece of paper to say that the photo of Jonathan is, indeed, a photo of Jonathan. The piece of paper has many stamps on it, including one that cannot be purchased at the city offices or at the driver's license place , but only at a tobacco store. Naturally.

The verification of the photo actually took two visits because the first attempt was rejected. "It needs to be a recent photograph," the woman at the city offices said. "And I can tell this is not recent because you are wearing a different shirt." This is the kind of keen-eyed attention to detail of which the driver's license people are apparently incapable. So Jonathan had to go home and make another appointment to come back the next week wearing the same shirt he had on when he took the picture. As God is my witness, this is the truth.

But he was successful on his second attempt, got the paper all stamped and verified and signed, and brought it to the Driver's License place, where (having been the ones who told him he needed this in the first place) they now told him that they didn't need it.

In any case, we are now waiting for the official license to be available for pick-up. We have been waiting for about a month. Tuesday afternoon, Jonathan called to see if there was any news of it. We are now on a first-name basis with Magdalena at the Driver's License place (I left out the other dozen or so visits that the whole process has entailed). When Jonathan called and asked for an update, Magdalena just laughed. "She laughed at me," Jonathan said when he got off the phone.

We continue to wait.

Then yesterday we had to meet our immigration attorney at the Post Office to continue the apparently incessant process of procuring my long-term visa. We met her at the Post Office because that is, of course, where you make appointments to go to the Police Station and the Police Station is where the Immigration Office is. The procedure is that you mail the Police a stamp that you have bought in the tobacco store and when you do that, the clerk at the Post Office gives you an appointment with the Police. (Even after more than a year here, this seemed so convoluted that when our attorney told us to meet her at the Post Office, we thought there must have been a translation error somewhere along the line.) We had a couple of letters to throw into the wind mail, so we had already taken a number and were actually at a teller window throwing our letters into the wind mailing them when our attorney arrived. She joined us and tried to conduct our visa business, but was told that she couldn't and would have to get a new number and wait in line again -- not because you can't do two things at once at the window, but because she had walked into the building when we were already at the window. Our attorney took this completely in stride as a reasonable thing to do, which is why she is our attorney -- she understands what is going on, which we pretty much never do. In any case, the Post Office had just opened and there was no one else there, so we got a new number and then were seen right away.

So last night, to calm our nerves after so much bureaucracy, we went down to the pub, where we had not been since the "Incident Festival of the Big Chicken." Nonno was waiting for us -- he had a present for me. It was a book from his own library of the history of Pietrasanta, illustrated with beautiful maps and paintings and photographs. He was giving it to me, he said, because he thought I might be interested and because after he dies, he says, his family will "just throw everything out." So he is glad for me to have it, even though I only understand about one out of every ten words. I am better than no one.

This reminds me of when I lived in the South Pacific and once the old people on the island found out that I was there, they came to me in a steady stream with objects for me to see or old photographs or stories. I did not have to go searching for informants or pry secrets out of people through some sort of devious means. They said the same thing to me over and over: "No one around here wants to hear my stories. My children and grandchildren aren't interested." But they themselves needed so badly to speak, to know that these treasures would not vanish from memory when they died. I spent long afternoons sitting on Emily's shady veranda hearing these stories or seeing these photos and objects -- an ancient corset that the missionaries used to make the women wear, the photograph of a lover from long ago, the remnants of a dancing costume they had worn when they were young. They needed someone to see it, to hear about it, before they were gone.

I lived on Rarotonga twenty years ago. I am much closer in age to Nonno now than I was to the elders of Raro back then. And so now, when I sit and listen to Nonno's stories, I wonder if anyone will come around when I am 90 who will ever hear my stories and show an interest in the books in my library or look at the remnants of my old dancing costumes. I will need to speak about my treasures, too. So I write blog posts and throw them into the wind.

 

After it rained for two weeks straight in Italy, we went off to Paris for a few days to be rained on in France.

I had transcendent experiences in a couple of museums and one art supply store. Walking into the relatively unoccupied and quiet second room of Monet's waterlilies in L'Orangerie made me gasp -- like falling breathless into cool water on a hot day, not knowing which way is up, unable to find the surface and not wanting to. And the glowing Chagalls we stumbled on unexpectedly in the Pompidou changed the whole way I see the world now. But the only place I actually cried was in the Maison de Pastel, where they have been making pastels since 1720, and where they bring out ancient wooden cases with the sticks of color laid out on cotton like delicate jewels.

But after five days of big city life, I was happy to come back to lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea, where we were just in time for the Festival of the Big Chicken at the pub.

"I'm putting you at the table with the beasts," Alice said, which we took as a great compliment. Sitting among the beasts, we pass the dishes around family-style and pour each other wine from big carafes with great abandon. I was so abandoned, in fact, that when the plate of actual chicken heads passed by, I accidentally took one. (Spoiler Alert: the photo of it is at the bottom of this post, just past the pomegranates.) Then when I tired to stab it with a fork, the head spat juice out its beak and actually hit Jonathan in the face. An eyeball squirted out, too, but it only flew as far as my placemat. I did not continue my attempts to eat the head, but let it just sit there staring at me from the edge of my plate for the rest of the meal. When Alice tried to convince me to eat something made of chicken tongues by telling me it would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, I declined. It was a gorgeous feast and ended with roasted chestnuts from our yard, which made us feel very loved.

Here are six random recent pictures. The last one is the chicken head. You have been warned.