I read in the news yesterday that there is a "heat dome" over southern Europe. I had not known until I read it that we are officially in a crisis -- the news does not, however, come exactly as a shock. It was 84 degrees at 4:10 a.m. in our bedroom this morning, where Jonathan and I lay side-by-side gently sweating into our sheets and waiting for it to be morning so that we can go down to the beach.

Our beach club is very tranquil and sedate in the mornings -- mostly just old people like us reading their newspapers or taking a stroll along the strand. Every now and then there is a parent or grandparent with a baby still asleep in their arms. Paolo smiles and greets us by name while the sleepy teenagers who work at the cafe clear up the remaining evidence of the previous night's festivities. (It is only in the evenings when the Riviera beach parties really get hoppin'.) Jonathan sits at the cafe and keeps me up-to-date on the developments in the love triangle among three of the teenaged cafe workers. 

These mornings even the sea seems sleepy -- like glass, clear and olive green. Every now and then a pale little ghost fish flicks by, hiding in the light refracted on the bottom sand. I wade out and stand waist deep in the cool water staring off at the watercolor horizon, washing away the sticky feeling of a hot and sleepless night. This morning, I saw a jellyfish, also ghost white but with a deep blue-violet edge around its cap, waving along just under the surface of the water. At that exact moment, I felt refreshed enough to head back to our umbrellone on the sand.

Back at the house, it is fresh fig and lavender season. We have made fig jam twice -- once with lemon and once with amaretto. But now it is too hot for jam making and we just eat the fresh figs whole and cold from the fridge.

And there are bundles of lavender hanging upside down, drying, all over the house. When it is dry, I will make lavender sachets with it to put in all the clothes drawers to keep away the moths. And when the winter comes, every time I pull out a sweater, there will be a little aromatic burst of summer and I will long once again for the heat. ("I won't," Jonathan says.)

Nonno's birthday party was last Friday night. We all chipped in and bought him a helicopter flight over these mountains that he has loved so much and that he used to hike in as a young man, but now cannot reach. At our house, almost at the top of the mountains, we saw the bright red helicopter fly over us late Sunday afternoon. We knew it was Nonno because it buzzed the terrace of the pub twice and we could hear the cheering.

"He seemed as happy as a bambino," Alice said, having gone with him to the helipad to see him onto the flight. "And now he will have a new story to tell." We will go down to see him sometime in the next couple of days and tell him that we saw him and he will tell us the story of it and I will be happy.

That is quite a statement, given the general situation. I'm starting to feel about ice the way Harrison Ford did in "The Mosquito Coast." The Italian word for jellyfish, by the way, is "medusa." (If nothing else, my vocabulary is expanding.)

 

Some updates:

Jonathan's Driver's License: The man at the Massa DMV now recognizes Jonathan on sight, which is nice because it means he is speedier about telling Jonathan that his driver's license is not there yet.

"There is a guy in the provincial office in Lucca who handles these things," he told Jonathan, "and he only comes in here once every two weeks."

"So I should come back in two weeks?" Jonathan asked.

"Sure, why not?" the DMV guy said. "Knock yourself out." (I'm translating here from what is, let's not forget, the language of Dante.)

Reptiles: It has gotten very hot here in the past couple of weeks. After he rides his exercise bike, Jonathan leaves his very sweaty t-shirt outside hanging over the railing of the porch, where it forms a little sauna-like tent on the top of the porch wall. The lizards like to go in under there and enjoy the warmth and the moisture. But now we have discovered that they have begun growing to enormous sizes, unlike anything we've seen before, and have turned a vivid glowing green. 

I contend that Jonathan's exercise sweat is so intense that it is actually radioactive and the lizards are mutating in extraordinary ways in response to their exposure to it. They will soon have some sort of lizard-y spidey powers. Jonathan doesn't think that this is funny.

Tarot Cards: The Tuscan tarot deck I've been making is finally finished and we received the first draft deck from the printer. It looks lovely, so we have ordered a ton more to give away to our friends as presents. While this is a happy conclusion to months of (rather sporadic) work, I am now left with no art project in the offing. So I am using a little book that Fiona gave me to paint pictures of our fruit and veg. There are 21 pages in the book and when it is all filled, I am going to call it "21 Views of My Groceries."

Street Umbrellas: The wind has had its way with the umbrellas on the Via Mazzini and blown them all around so that some of them have gotten their handles hooked together. It looks like they're holding hands up in the sky. I would not have thought that they could have been more beautiful, but it turns out that they are.

 

We are having a nice time at the Massa DMV getting Jonathan's driver's license. And by "nice," I mean long and leisurely. The first time we went, they told us to come back "next month." So we waited a month and went back and were told to come back in "two or three weeks." So we waited three weeks and went back last Tuesday. We were told to come back in "seven to ten days." It's the Zeno's Paradox of driver's licenses.

The internet at our house has now died, which is only very slightly different from the internet at our house when it was alive. But still. Friday, Jonathan had a zoom meeting with some clients in Washington state from the upper room of the pub while the boys outside on the terrace screamed joyously at each other. "Please excuse the background noise," Jonathan said to the people in Washington. "I'm in, um, a restaurant." Fortunately, it is doubtful that anyone in Washington understands Italian.

My broken toe is slowly mending, owing to the miraculous curative powers of sun and sea air. Jonathan's back is doing less well. He has put himself in the hands of the legitimate medical establishment and has been twice so far to the physiotherapist to have a massage and also a mild electrical current run through his body, which is a thing they swear by. It hasn't seemed to do any good but, as Jonathan points out, he can now charge his cell phone by resting it on his belly.

And the cheeping sound we have been hearing for the past few days turned out to actually be cheeping. Four baby birds have hatched in a  nest built in an empty flower pot attached high on the wall of our front porch. We are still trying to think of names for them. Send suggestions.

 

Unlike last week, when we were wrapped in tragedy, this week we've been beset by smaller disasters largely of our own making.

Jonathan read an article online touting the health-giving wonders of intermittent fasting. It was on the internet, so it must be true. On Mondays and Thursdays, we are only allowed to eat a quarter of our usual calories. Since our usual calories lately have included consuming entire bags of mini Snickers bars (thus the need for drastic action like fasting), you would think that eating only a quarter of them would be a cinch. But (in the spirit of taking ourselves firmly in hand) we are interpreting this as having one scrambled egg for lunch and a very small plain green salad for dinner. The rest of the week, you can eat normally (as long as your "normal" doesn't include entire bags of mini candy bars -- see above.) They say the first few times you do this are the worst and then it gets easier. All I have to say to that is, dear sweet Mary Mother of God, I certainly hope so.

So last night (a non-fasting night) we got very excited about trying out our lovely salt-cured lemons for the first time. We found a good sounding recipe on the internet (where, you will recall, everything you read is true) for salmon with salt-cured lemon, parsley, and olive pesto. It smelled great! 

It turned out that it smelled great because you can't smell salt. You can taste it, though. In fact, salt was ALL we could taste. So. Much. Salt. It was like we had made Dead Sea sauce. We scraped the pesto off the fish as best we could and tried to eat the remaining salmon because when you are going to be fasting the next day, you do not throw out your dinner -- no matter what. Last night's Festival of Salt is a testament to that. 

We are also reluctant to waste any food (although we may make an exception for the salt-cured lemons) because we are feeling rather poor lately. We got our first tax bill from the Italian government and it was slightly more than my entire take home pay for all of last year. Our friends in America keep saying that this must be a mistake, but it is not. It is this year's taxes, the advance payment for next year, and the Italian wealth tax to punish us for having squirrelled away all those American 401K nuts for the American winter of our old age. We should have just spent it all on hookers and blow when we had the chance.

But this is the price we pay now for living the life of grasshoppers who sing all summer. The good news is that our tax dollars support things like maintaining the terrifying-but-at-least-very-well-maintained vertiginous road up to our little mountainside haven, the pub where we eat and drink so cheaply (it is somewhat tax-supported because it is technically a social club for workers and pensioners), and the free national health care that we receive.

And we are certainly getting our money's worth with that. Jonathan went to the physiotherapist last week for his back. They massaged him and stretched him. It is sometimes hard for us to completely understand all of the unfamiliar medical terminology in Italian, but it seems that the national medical establishment has determined that Jonathan's problem is that he is both too tightly wound and too short. I said that I could have told him that. He has another appointment tomorrow. When this is all over, I expect he will look like Mike Teevee at the end of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

With Jonathan and I both less mobile because of our injuries, it takes us a long time to get the basic housework done. We hobble down to hang out our laundry in the back. We hobble from the car into the veg store and then hobble back to the car with our haul. (Fortunately, the veg store is so tiny that we can reach almost everything in it with just a few steps.) We hobble to the kitchen with our dirty dishes after meals. (Again though, fortunately, there aren't very many of them on two days each week.) Last night I was hobbling back to the house after putting our trash out at the street for pick-up this morning, when some animal very distinctly growled at me from inside the roof of the cantina as I went by. Given the way things have been going lately, this is probably no more than I should have expected. In any case, my rate of ambulatory speed suddenly increased quite dramatically. It was a miracle.

And, to complete the small disasters of the week, we are of course both angry and morose about the political situation in the US. But, to be fair, that one is not our fault.