Jonathan has been gone for a week -- first to Switzerland to see his kids and then to New Jersey to see his parents. I stayed here because my permesso di soggiorno still has not arrived, shockingly enough. (Neither has Jonathan's driver's license, for those of you innocent enough to have believed that something promised for November would be ready no later than February.) And so I can't leave the country. Or at least I can't come back in if I do.

The first day that I woke up without Jonathan, the house felt lonely and empty and a little cold to me. "Ah," I thought to myself. "Everything is so bleak in the absence of my darling Jonathan that I actually feel cold from it. It is not the house that is cold -- it is my heart!"

It was the house.

It turns out that the furnace was malfunctioning and for those three days while the naughty gods waited waited for the truth of the situation to dawn on me, it got colder and colder in the house. Rain poured down outside and the Mistral blew through, searingly cold. Eventually I did come to the realization that this was more than emotional cold and figured it all out and everything is fixed now. But for the space of those days, it seemed like the house and the world outside it were all just a reflection of how much I missed him.

Also, this is a photo of what it looks like around here when we do laundry while it rains. Glamorous. They don't show you this side of things in all those romantic movies set in Italy.