I've come down with the flu and so we have been holed up at home all week, missing the Christmas lunch at Pilar's house and the big Feast of San Stefano today at the pub. But our time has been enlivened by the wisteria seed pods that I picked a couple of weeks ago and brought inside so that we can take them with us when/if we move and plant wisteria at the new house if it doesn't already grow there. I did not know before this that wisteria seed pods are explosive and can burst open with a loud bang and such force that they shoot the seeds themselves across the room like bullets. One of them two days ago actually managed to shatter a ceramic cup. I had no idea about this. But after having to duck screaming behind the couch cushions in terror, I do now.

Here during the shortest days of the year, I mostly want to hide under the covers on our bed and watch Christmas-themed food videos on YouTube and then make the things and eat them. This has led to many trips to stores all over town searching for things like molasses -- which is impossible to find, despite very diligent nostalgia-and-hunger-induced effort.

So we go down to the pub and eat Daniele's pears roasted in red wine and then wander home while the wolves howl in an amazing chorus and I hurry to get safe inside our house and Jonathan lingers outside, hoping for a glimpse of one. So far, I am relieved to say, he has been unsuccessful. But the wolves are so numerous (and so convivial) that they woke me up before dawn yesterday with a rousing symphony of howling.

The winner of the raffle of the giant bottle of wine at the pub has not been determined yet. We bought our ticket (#17) last Easter, which was the first time the raffle was supposed to have been held, and have held onto it for these many months through many further announcements that the raffle was going to be happening any day now. But things do not rush forward and it may be many months still before the winner is known.

Still no word on my Italian citizenship, btw.

Likewise, we are supposed to be signing the lease and paying the rent and getting the keys to our new house in ten days' time, but there is no movement on that front and we are glad that we gave ourselves a whopping four months of overlap, while we still have this house, to actually make the move. We will doubtless need every bit of the time.

But I am in no particular rush, just savoring these last weeks living with Jonathan in this misty, hidden dreamworld where we can feel, especially on foggy days or in the mornings before the mist rises back into the sky, that we have somehow managed to travel back in time to the days before televisions and cell phones and traffic jams, when a person's whole world could be just one tiny village in the hills of Tuscany and the people and things found there would be enough for a full and complete life.

We went to hear our friends sing in the local choir concert last night. Because there are so few people up here, the choir makes up ten percent of the total population of the village. I like to think of them practicing together in the evenings, as they have done for decades now, from the time before there was anything else to do on a long winter night. I sent a clip last night to Jonathan's sons and Gabe replied, "No wonder it's easy for people to believe in the divine."

 

 Update: Jonathan just got home and he has passed his first exam for law school! I am so proud of him!

 

The wolves have been howling at night lately. It echoes around the forest and the ravine behind the house and, when we walk out at night, we are careful, peering into the darkness and intent, listening to every sound. The dark comes very early now. Somehow, it all makes Christmas seem so much more real.

The Christmas fairs seem sparkly in the dusky winter light. In Pietrasanta, there are stalls selling special cheeses wrapped in straw and special sausages. There are stalls with local wine and new olive oil and different types of honey -- chestnut and linden and acacia and "a thousand flowers." There are stalls with serving implements carved from swirly olive wood and ones with delicate lacy shawls and sweaters crocheted with wool from local sheep and one with handmade soap from local olive oil. There is a stall with fifty different types of herbal teas, including one called "butterfly." Everything seems to twinkle a little bit.

But despite all this, the holiday season doesn't seem actually commercial. Instead, everyone we know is busy exchanging homemade baked goods and homemade wreaths and homemade jams and jellies and pickles. Jonathan and I are bringing around jars of our lemon-ginger marmalade and loaves of Jonathan's fresh-baked bread.

The commune here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea has put up a creche in the little park that commemorates the fallen war dead. There are sheep that have been made by pinning cardboard sheep faces onto hay bales. They give off a very distinct "Little Prince -- please will you draw me a sheep?" vibe and every time we go by them, I feel warm in my heart.

 

One of the nice things about being a grandparent is that now I can do fun things for my grandson that I thought about doing for my sons, but never did because I was too busy actually, you know, parenting them.

So during these past couple of weeks, I wrote a very silly book for my grandson called "Muffin and the Circus of the Sun" that stars a little hedgehog named Muffin along with other characters like the Later Gator and the Gift Horse and some very nice Dingbats.

For $11, there is a company in the US that is printing my book and binding it nicely and shipping it to my grandchild who can't read yet, but maybe will one day.

So that is what I did with the first half of December and now it is one its way and I am free to fall into all of the holiday festivities -- markets and concerts and dinners and parties. Today's festivity is a General Strike all over Italy that means the trains aren't running and our paper recycling wasn't picked up this morning. So that is festive, but in a different way from the choir concert.

Now that the cold weather has come, the air out over the sea is crystal clear and we can see all of the individual houses and gardens down on the coast and even across the bay to the headlands at Porto Venere. The evening air often smells of woodsmoke and the only birds are owls and the sunset over the sea is the color of rubies. The leaves are falling every day and we can see down into the valley behind us now to the lights of Solaio. Late at night, wolves howl and the sound echoes around the valley forest.

We bought a two-foot-tall plastic Christmas tree at the big supermarket out on the highway and installed it in the living room. I thought that having at least a few of our old family ornaments hanging on it would make me feel more like it was Christmas. But now that it is up, I realize that I miss the smell of the fresh-cut fir trees that we used to have every year, hiking up into the high mountains and tramping through the silent snowy forest to find the one we wanted. We brought thermoses of hot chocolate and hot apple cider and scrambled eggs and bacon wrapped in tortillas and Christmas cookies. 

We always decorated the tree right away when we got home and the whole house smelled like the snowy winter forest. I will go out later and cut a pine branch or two from our woods and bring them into the house for the sake of their perfume. But I know that it will not be -- could not ever be -- the same.

Because there is a fried catfish motif running through Armadillo Massacre Number Three, I have made a new trailer based on that theme from an idea Tris came up with. The only problem was finding catfish and buttermilk, neither of which are readily available in Pietrasanta -- or even in Italy in general. For the catfish, I substituted the fish in the grocery store that looked to me most similar (it turned out to be plaice). 

And for the butter milk, I thought, "Well, we'll just make it ourselves." For my entire life, I have been under the impression that buttermilk was the milk left over after you churn cream into butter.

So we bought three half-liters of heavy cream and dutifully churned it into butter, carefully saving the leftover milk in a big bowl. When it was all done, I got set up to film and then while I was waiting for Jonathan to be ready, I gave the buttermilk a little taste -- just out of curiosity and to make sure it was right.

So do you know what is left when you churn butter out of cream? Not buttermilk, that's for sure.

It's skim milk. Just plain skim milk.

So at that point, I looked online to see how to make buttermilk. It turns out that buttermilk is a cultured product produced in a similar manner to yogurt, but using a different culture agent. All of the recipes for making it yourself begin with, "Take two tablespoons of buttermilk and add them..."

But if I already had access to buttermilk, why would I be making it myself? In the end, we stirred in a couple of spoons of plain yogurt to the milk and carried on. The end product was tasty nonetheless.

But now we are left with a giant ball of butter as big as a baby's head. We used some of it to make cookies and I also made a concoction of butter, honey, cinnamon, and cloves that we are eating on Jonathan's homemade bread. I've had worse things in my mouth. But we still have a lot of butter to go.