Three mornings a week, Jonathan goes to town and takes classes for the Italian driver's license test while I stay home and write. If the weather is nice, he goes on his bike, but on rainy days, he takes the car. He says it makes him feel awkward to drive up to his driving lessons, but that's where we are now. He will take the written test in a couple of weeks and then he gets to begin his practice driving, which should be fun. The driving school has special practice cars with brakes on the passenger's side for the instructor to use as well as on the driver's side. My boys took driving lessons in cars like that back in Colorado. I remember Aiden having one session with a clearly spooked instructor who had spent one too many hours with teenagers learning how to merge onto a highway at high speed by doing it. "Well," Aiden said when I picked him up, "I was just a passenger in that car." I think about that man sometimes now and hope he is doing well.

Next week we will go to Viareggio to sign another one-year rental contract for this house. We came here thinking that it would only be for a few months. That was three years ago.

But the fourth year will be the last. We began last night to look on the on-line real estate sites for houses around here to buy. One of them was described as "rustic" and, from the pictures, was lacking a roof. I would have called that "very rustic." We never thought we would own a house again, but it looks like we were wrong. It wouldn't be the first time.

Jonathan had another out-patient operation on Friday to remove a lump under his left arm to be biopsied. We stopped by the pub on our way to the hospital to show Daniele and Alice the t-shirts we had made with my drawing of the pub on them. Daniele offered us a coffee but we told them we couldn't stop because we were on the way to the hospital for Jonathan to have a lump removed.

"Another one?" Alice said to me. "You're going to have to get a new husband."

"Not now," I said. "Not when I've got this one almost perfected."

Jonathan had local anesthesia so that he was awake for the procedure itself. They carefully draped a curtain, though, between his eyes and his arm.

"Do you put the curtain there because people get scared if they look?" he asked the surgeon.

"Oh, no," the surgeon said. "We just don't want you to see what we're doing because then you would do it yourself the next time."

It turns out that we needed some headshots. These things happen.