One of the delightful features of our new house is that we have a very clear view of the church here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea and of the priest's house attached to the side of the church and, therefore, of the clothesline on the side of the priest's house where the washing is hung out to dry. Because of this, today I learned that the priest's beach towel is McDonald's themed.

I was surprised by this as, for some reason, I didn't expect the priest to go to the beach with such a pedestrian towel. I guess I was expecting something a bit more... I don't know... ecclesiastical.

But what?

"The Shroud of Turin," Jonathan says.

 

Nonno got to come to the pub for lunch on Sunday. Everyone pitched in to hire an ambulance to bring him from the rest home in Seravezza. Elena and her parents cooked a big feast of special food from Cape Verde for everyone sitting out under the shade tree on the terrace. There was much singing. Elena played the guitar and Elena's mother, Elida, danced around with baby Celeste. Nonno stayed until almost 5:00 in the afternoon. It was almost like the old days.

Before and after:

Sometimes Jonathan and I just stay home, the two of us alone together here in our sunny little house on the hillside. Those are the best days. 

Sara gave me seventeen lemons from her tree on Wednesday and so yesterday we made lemon-ginger marmalade, apricot-lemon jam, lemon-chili salsa, and Moroccan salt-cured lemons. The salsa is a bit too salty, I think, but the apricot-lemon jam is, as Daniele would say, the end of the world -- "la fine del mondo." 

Every summer, for years and years, I scratched out a tiny backyard vegetable garden in the high desert Colorado hardscrabble. Through droughts and wildfires and late freezes and early frosts, every year we managed to get a few tomatoes, some zucchini, cucumbers once, strange spindly kale.

But I loved my little patch of garden and was forever digging compost into it and laying out drip hoses and putting down mulch. There were lots of summers when my boys were with their father in North Carolina and Jonathan was with his boys in Massachusetts when it was just Spotty and I alone for weeks on end and I would dig away in the garden and she would sit in the sun next to me, panting and keeping me company. When she passed away, 10 years ago now, we buried her ashes under the old apple tree at the edge of the garden because she had been so happy there.

It's kind of crazy to garden in Italy because the local produce available in the markets is so abundant and tasty and inexpensive and always fresh-picked that morning. There is really no rational reason to go to the expense and bother of having a garden. And yet.

This morning, I discovered the first almost ripe tomato.

 

I don't want to be dramatic, but damn, y'all. Our beach club opened last Monday and already we are seeing lots of jellyfish washed up on the sand. And they are not small, the jellyfish. They are honking big jellyfish.

Fabio says, "Oh, the little ones sting much worse." This is not comforting. 

So we go, Jonathan and I, to the beach and Jonathan studies for his next law school exam that is happening on Tuesday and I lie in the sun and believe that the warmth is healing all of my ills and purifying me. We take walks every now and then along the strand and watch the surfers, who are braver than we are, and look at the jellyfish that have been beached. The jellyfish used to not show up until August, when the water had gotten warm enough for them.

Global climate change has meant that the seas are getting warmer and more hospitable to jellyfish while being less hospitable to, for example, coral reefs, among other lovely and non-stinging things. Someday, we will tell our grandchildren about the old days when you could swim in the sea and it was cool and lovely and you didn't emerge from it covered in painful welts. They will look at the seething mass of ten billion jellyfish swarming the beaches of the Mediterranean and not believe us.