Jonathan and I went in to Firenze Saturday evening to see Yo-Yo Ma play some Bach cello suites. It was one of the most profound artistic experiences of my life.

There was nothing on the stage -- just a chair. And he himself didn't do any talking -- just walked out carrying his cello and sat down and started to play.

And it was like being hit by a tidal wave of purest beauty -- an intensely physical sensation, sitting still there in my auditorium seat, of love. I felt it -- all in a rush -- in every part of my body, but most especially in my heart. Jonathan cried.

It's a strange thing to be allowed to watch a man sit on a stage in the light and commune directly with his gods. It seems like that should be an entirely private affair, such an intimate moment -- something that we should not look upon with unshielded eyes.

But I think the thing that great artists have is that they can touch their gods and they can also give you the feeling that you are, for the space of that moment, touching them, too. It was like he was giving each one of us, personally, the gift of transcendence. And now my heart is changed forever.

"I always thought you were a little bit crazy to cry in front of that Botticelli Madonna in the Uffizi," Jonathan said later on the way home. "But now I understand."

I have reached the stage of my life where divesting myself of everything I own has enormous appeal. There is just something about having to physically lift up all of your possessions yourself that makes your treasures seem so much less precious. In ten and a half months, we will leave our hidden paradise here in the woods for a different paradise in a different place -- right in heart of bustling downtown Capriglia-by-the-Sea (pop. 255 people, counting us). And we will once again have to lift up all our shit.

In preparation for this, I have been very slowly ridding myself of books that I paid $30K to transport all the way across eight time zones, but now -- who was I kidding? -- will never read again. There is a Little Free Library in the big grocery store just outside town and every time we go there I bring two books to donate. My books are in English, but there is a very international community here and the books almost always have been taken by someone by the next time we go in. It's a slow process, but an oddly satisfying one.

Yesterday when Jonathan was putting out the trash, he found a book that had been left for us in our mailbox. It was from our neighbor Fabio. He left a note saying that he had come across the book in the grocery store LFL and took it for me because it seemed like the sort of thing I would be interested in. Indeed, it was -- so much so that I bought it in 2002 when I lived in the South Pacific and carried it back to the US and kept it for over two decades and shipped it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to Italy ($30K...) before I put it in the grocery store LFL last week.

It is nice to have thoughtful and caring friends who think about me when they come across books I would like. Apparently, I am keeping this one.

We have had another meeting with the owners of the belfry house. And, although we don't yet have a rental contract, we have a verbal agreement that one of these days we will make a written agreement to eventually sign a contract to rent the house. We are very excited about this because it means we will be renting an empty house and will, therefore, have room for all our stuff -- our stuff that I am currently busy donating to the LFL at the grocery store.

The belfry house is lovely -- maybe even slightly larger than this one, but without all the outbuildings and grounds. So no more grape arbor or olive grove with poppies blooming in it or chestnut trees turning golden in the fall and dropping their spiky nut bombs for us to make vanilla-rum chestnut butter with. We are planning to go crazy this fall brining olives and making enough corbezzoli jam to last us for the duration.

But the new house has enough M.C. Escher stairways and topsy-turvy layout to make us feel that now familiar and, frankly, beloved sensation of complete disorientation. We have been inside the belfry house twice now and still can't figure out where all the rooms are. (Jonathan is better at it than I am, but he has a Ph.D. in non-Euclidian higher-dimensional geometry and I feel that gives him an advantage.)

 Before:

After:

Jonathan passed his driver's license test!

 Un Bar Aux Folies Bergère

 

The exceptionally cool and rainy May followed by the last few days of glorious summer warmth has led to two unexpected pieces of magic.

The first is that there were wild porcini mushrooms at the greengrocers this morning. These are not usually in season until the fall, but the seasons are all cattywampus and so the mushrooms have been coaxed into appearing months ahead of schedule. I just finished making some rosemary-infused olive oil (we have masses of rosemary in our garden) and we will sauté the porcini in it and eat them with some of Jonathan's homemade bread. 

And the second piece of magic brought about by the rainy May is that we have an exceptionally abundant number of fireflies this year so that when we are walking in the dark through our olive groves or even along the road from the pub to our house, the air sparkles and shimmers all around us. It is easy to believe that fairies live in the summertime woods.

(photo by Tsuneaki Hiramatsu)

 

Summer is here now. It arrived all of the sudden with great waves of poppies and mosquitos and wild blue skies. We sleep now with the windows wide open with the sounds of the owls hunting in the dark woods and the larks rioting in the cherry tree at dawn.

Today is the Festa della Republica and there is a community potluck picnic here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea. We are bringing brownies and deviled eggs, which are exotic foreign delicacies here. We hope.

Saturday night, we lent a hand for the first time at the pub, doing the bills, sitting at the end of a table and trying to keep our arithmetic straight while simultaneously eating and talking to Nonno and participating in the life of our little world with the chaos of Saturday night clamoring all around us.

I once watched a documentary about the MIT Blackjack Team, who won thousands and thousands of dollars counting cards in Las Vegas casinos. The trick was not learning to count cards -- the trick was managing to count cards in the midst of a Las Vegas casino with waitresses offering you drinks and shouting discount prices in your ear and dealers keeping up a constant patter and other players exclaiming over wins and losses and odds. To make the team, potential MIT players had to pass a final test of counting and playing while being distracted by screaming undergraduates.

I bring this up for a reason.

I will just say that the steaks at the pub are 25 euros per kilo and one of the ones ordered Saturday night weighed 1.7 kilos. You do the math.

Fortunately, Jonathan did the math. He does, after all, have a mathematics Ph.D. -- albeit in higher-dimensional geometry. But I think we were OK. We are going again Monday night. If we can be of any help to Daniele and Alice, we want to help. Pray for us.

Then Sunday morning, our beach club opened and we hit the sand. We are Umbrellone #9 this year -- at the back of last year's #10. Sometimes, when I'm having a bad day or a hard time with something, I think to myself, "I want to go home." Then I think, "But where is my home?" and I have some amount of confusion about that. But when I stand in the sea and look out at the far blue horizon, I feel that, wherever home is, I am there.

My new bathing suit arrived at last. It doesn't fit. The top is too small, which has never in my entire life before ever been a problem for me. By turning it upside down, though, with the neck clasp at my back and the back strap around my neck, I can get it to pretty much work -- enough, anyway, to be wearable. So I will be spending the better part of the summer wandering around the Italian coast with my clothes on upside down. It's like I've finally achieved my life's ambition to inhabit the reincarnated spirit of Little Edie Beale.

S-T-A-U-N-C-H.