Jonathan has been gone all week visiting his parents in New Jersey. I have been here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea living in the winter wind and the air that is washed clear and the sea that glows like a pale blue pearl.

I am supposedly working on some of the pre-publication tasks for Armadillo Massacre Number Three. People are surprised that it takes so long to bring a book out, but I feel like I have so much to do and so little time to do it. There was a big zoom meeting last Friday night of all of the authors in our "season" -- Fall 2027 -- with the publisher. 

Now we are busy grouping up to make book tours together -- arranging readings, signings, panel discussions. I am in both the North Carolina group and the Colorado group. There are lots of dates to coordinate and bookstores. etc. to contact. And, of course, we are reading each other's manuscripts, so I have like 10 books to read in the next few weeks.

But there is also paperwork -- my very favorite thing. Multiple questionnaires to fil out with questions that require actual thought: "Who is your ideal reader?" "What is the number one reason booksellers should stock your book?"

I have no idea. With the world both literally and figuratively on fire, I don't know why anyone would do anything rational and calm.

I got an email this morning from a friend in the US who wrote: "Things are heavy. I'm weary of marching, signing petitions and screaming into the void. Yet we must carry on. ... I'm not sure my nervous system was meant for this."

We also feel that way, even here. During my Italian lesson yesterday, we spent half of our time discussing whether the demented orange madman will start World War III over Greenland. It's all so unbelievably insane. And yet, I fill out my little forms and send my little emails. I take showers and brush my teeth and still make the bed every morning and continue to eat kale -- just as if I think the world will wake up from this nightmare one fine morning. Maybe it will.

 

Semina (whose real name is Francesco) likes to hunt and is good at it and usually very successful and known around here as the go-to person if you need any sort of wild game, but especially wild boar, which is his specialty.

A couple of days ago, a chef at a high-end traditional restaurant in town asked if Semina could get him some boars' heads for some sort of ancestral Tuscan delicacy he was planning. So Semina went out and was very lucky, actually getting three boars, very fat from having spent the holidays gorging themselves on the last of the fallen chestnuts.

The chef only wanted the heads, so Semina severed those and put them all together in a bag, but then had to figure out what to do with all the rest of the boar meat. He kept some for himself and some undoubtedly went to Daniele at the pub to be roasted with red wine and wild herbs.

But Semina also knows three Albanian brothers who are sharing a house up here in the hills and could use a little neighborly generosity, so he cut off a couple of nice fat pork haunches and put them in a bag for the brothers as a little New Year's gift and then headed out to make his meat deliveries.

He stopped at the house of the three Albanian brothers first and dropped off their bag of boar meat, for which they were quite grateful, and then continued on towards the restaurant in town. He was only halfway down the mountain when his cellphone rang and it was the eldest of the Albanian brothers.

"Semina," he said, sounding serious and a little scared. "Are you sending us a message? Is this a threat? We don't understand what we have done."

Semina opened the bag of meat still on the floorboard of his car and saw that it had the haunches in it. He had accidentally given the three Albanian brothers three severed boars' heads in a bag.

When he told us this story last night in the pub, Jonathan laughed and laughed and laughed. He is still laughing this morning.

As we were leaving, Semina said to us, "Now remember -- if you don't let me help you move, then we are no longer friends."

So sometime at the beginning of February, we will have a moving party and invite our friends from the pub to help us carry boxes of books to the new house and then eat lasagna and drink wine together all afternoon.

Two important updates:

1. The raffle for the giant bottle of wine was finally held at the pub. We did not win. But the person who did win (#53) bought their raffle ticket so long ago that they can no longer be located. The word has been put out that they can come and get their prize, but no one has shown up yet. So the bottle may be raffled off yet again some time in the future. Fingers crossed!

2. At the pub the other night, two people came rushing in all breathless to find Mario. "We were just walking by your house," they told him, "and we saw a wolf in your yard, inside the gate!" Mario left with them to go see what was up, but by the time he got there, the wolf was gone. This reminds me of the time in Colorado when my friend Norma got a message from UPS that they couldn't deliver her package and she would have to come pick it up at the distribution facility herself instead. The reason they gave in the message was "Bear in driveway."

 

When Tris started middle school, I got him his first cell phone so that he could reach me in case of emergency. He recorded his voicemail message with deep seriousness in his own voice that, in those long ago days, sounded like a baby bird chirping, "Hi! This is Tris..." Then when he went to high school, he got a new better phone (and new phone number -- and, indeed, a new deeper voice) and I took over his old phone.

That was more than a decade ago, but although I have upgraded phones, I have never erased that beautiful little birdsong greeting. It has, admittedly, flummoxed certain callers on occasion in the past. But it is nevertheless precious to me.

Now that I have had my birthday and the new year has begun, I am at last eligible for social security, which -- having paid into it all these years -- I am anxious to get at least something back out of before the republicans take it all away from us to give to the billionaires. 

Am I bitter? Maybe.

In any case, I went through the online application, affirmed that my spouse had not worked longer than five years for the railroad (for some reason), and entered all of my relevant personal information, including my American telephone number. (There were not enough spaces to enter my Italian number, which is longer.) After I submitted the form, I got an email saying that sometime in the next 30 days, they will call the phone number I entered -- again, as with the railroad employment question, for reasons that they decline to give.

But I don't leave my American phone turned on all the time because that would be ruinously expensive. So, when the Social Security Administration calls my phone number, they will inevitably get the voicemail message. Guess whose.

I hope it doesn't scupper my chances to start getting my monthly payments. But I still won't erase the message.

We went last weekend to meet with our new landlords and see our new house once again. Things are moving along at an elegant and serene pace. Unhurried. We did, after all, move to Italy precisely for this vita that is so, so dolce. But the painters are scheduled to start re-painting all the walls of the new house tomorrow, which probably means next Monday, and they estimate that it will take two weeks to finish the whole house, which probably means three. We are going ahead and scheduling the movers, anyway, to bring all of our furniture from the storage unit in Lucca up the bracing Via Capriglia and then carry dressers and beds and cabinets through the twisted passageways and up the winding stairs into our new house.

The celebration of La Befana (Twelfth Night) happened Monday evening. Jonathan was busy with meetings, so we didn't go to the little parade and festival here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea, but since the whole celebration kicked off right at the pub, we could hear it very clearly from our front porch.

 

The winter flowers are out on the hillside now -- pale green hellebore and white daffodils. The holiday festivities are almost over now, although we still have the Befana celebrations on Twelfth Night.

We went to New Year's Eve dinner here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea where a big celebration had been organized at the empty school house. This was the first time that this had happened and there was a story in the local paper about it saying that the "old people" in Capriglia were gathering together to do this. Jonathan and I had been part of the planning of the event from the very beginning and were unaware that we are explicitly among the number of "old people" up here until we read about it in the paper. It was literally news to us.  But, honestly, we fit right in and weren't even the youngest people there -- although not by much.

The cuisine of Italy has just this past month been recognized by UNESCO as an important part of world cultural heritage (the first country to have its cuisine named by UNESCO) and the local grandmas who cooked the meal were absolutely proving it. 

So we ate until midnight and then watched the fireworks twinkling down on the coast below us. From up here, it looked like fireflies in the summer woods.

Mimmo gave us a precious bottle of local olive oil -- the supply this year is very limited because of the bad harvest. This year's vintage is being called Palle Verdi -- "Green Balls" -- which is slightly obscene in English, but not in Italian, where the slang for testicles is "scatole" -- "boxes" -- not "balls." So there's a piece of useful and important cultural knowledge that you can keep on hand for your next trip to Italy.

We are not in our new house yet, but -- much like the raffle drawing for the giant wine bottle at the pub or, for that matter, my Italian citizenship -- we have high hopes that it will happen very soon.

In the meantime, I am keeping myself busy by trying to come up with ideas to promote Armadillo Massacre Number Three. This week I made bookplate stickers that have my recipe for fried catfish on them. Fried catfish are an important part of the book -- an explicit ingredient of Heaven. I realized, when thinking about this, that it took me a whole 60,000-word book to say basically the same thing that Henry David Thoreau said in just one sentence: "Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads."