Jonathan being in law school is part of our routine now. Three mornings a week, he wakes up before dawn and rides his bike down to the train station in Pietrasanta for the half-hour train ride to Pisa and then peddles past the Leaning Tower as the sun rises on his way to his first class.

We went into Firenze last week and bought him a folding bike that is easier to get into the crowded morning train. Because it folds up to be the size of a carry-on bag, it has very tiny wheels and makes Jonathan look like an escapee from a travelling circus. He is now a local character and people make sure to tell him when they have seen him on it -- an interesting event in their day.

This is all well and good on the way down the hill, but at the end of the day when he comes home, he has to peddle up the mountain (a thousand-foot elevation gain over only about four kilometers of road) on his tiny wheels like a demented clown. The hard-core spandex cyclist crowd  -- many of whom are actually professionals who use the lovely Via Capriglia as a training ground for the Tour de France and the Giro d'Italia -- pass him easily, but often give him complements and friendly encouragement as they go by. One buff young man even circled back last Wednesday to say, "You are my hero of the day!" He didn't, Jonathan says, call Jonathan "Gramps," but he was clearly thinking it. So, a dubious complement, but we take whatever we can get from the whippersnappers.

When Jonathan goes past the pub, everyone on the terrace cheers wildly.

In the meantime, I am home making chestnut butter. We are in the height of chestnut season now and I can't seem to resist. If it weren't that peeling the nuts is such a tedious chore, we would probably be drowning in chestnut butter by now. So I guess the tedium is a blessing.

My drawing is now on the labels of the house wine at the pub, which is fun. The label says "Una comunita' e' una famiglia" -- "A community is a family."

And for purposes of historical record, below is a picture of everything I bought at the market last Thursday. It weighed 13 pounds all together and cost 14 euros -- about 15 dollars. Some day we will marvel at that.

Heavens -- that was fast! 

Friday night, Daniele asked me if I would try to design a label for the wine they are going to start selling at the pub. I did that on Saturday and Sunday and then yesterday (Wednesday) he sent me this picture of one of the bottles. 

 

Autumn is here now and I startled a beautiful deer in back of the house yesterday when I went out to hang up the laundry. It was a lovely dappled brown and black and it disappeared into the woods immediately.

The chestnuts have started to fall and so have the corbezzoli berries. The porcini mushrooms are still going. I am making plum jam later today, but chestnut butter is on the immediate horizon and corbezzoli jam after that. The air is cold in the mornings and very clear so that we can see the individual windows on the houses down on the coast. The sea looks smooth and burnished in the sun.

Daniele and Alice have decided to start a line of their own wine at the pub and Daniele asked me to design the label. (At first he hired an actual professional designer, but he didn't like anything the designer came up with and I happened to be sitting around drinking wine with the boys at the time, which is how most things happen to me. That has been true my entire life. Being underfoot has worked out well for me as a life strategy.) I did about four designs and they chose the one with the green door, which will be a good souvenir of the place. So I have, at long last, come into my true calling. Jonathan and I are anxiously waiting for the labelled bottles to appear. The naked bottles are already there and Daniele gave us one to take home to "inspire" my drawings.

I also made another book trailer. These are much easier to make than the actual books themselves are.