The page proofs for AM#3 arrived yesterday -- and the back cover copy: 

When Rosie’s father dies, he leaves behind $1.5 million in Walmart stock—an inheritance that promises to turn her family’s world upside down. At eighty-two, Rosie’s mother is already notorious among the church ladies of Babbitt, Arkansas, as “the meanest person who ever breathed God’s sweet air.” Now she has a new man in her life: Clyde, a secret boyfriend with boundless ambition and a talent for spending money that isn’t his.

Rosie and her brother, Brother, must save their mother—and the family fortune—before Clyde spends it all. But when Rosie herself turns up dead, the stakes take a decidedly darker turn. Who killed Rosie, and will there be more victims before the truth comes out?

Narrated by Rosie from the afterlife, Armadillo Massacre Number Three is a wickedly funny Southern tale of greed, murder, and small-town eccentricity. Beneath its laugh-out-loud humor lies a tender exploration of family, forgiveness, and the enduring power of love—even beyond the grave.

It's pretty nice.

Why, then, does this make me feel sick with fear? I think maybe because I made this present for you and I'm afraid you won't like it.

 

It is very easy to feel, up here in our tiny mountain village, that Jonathan and I arrived just at the end of a whole way of life. But maybe that is just the melancholy autumn weather talking. With Nonno gone to the rest home in Serravezza and other losses, there are empty places around the big marble table in the pub these evenings and so many other changes coming, even here.

Last night I went to an organizing talk for a protest planned against the big corporate marble extractors. They remove over 5 million tons of marble every year and then crush it into marble dust to put into things like whitening toothpaste and exfoliating soap. The mines have been purchased by the international uber-wealthy (including the bin Laden family) and they have been destroying the mountains at an astonishing rate and polluting all the water so that people whose families have lived in these mountains for literally millennia are being forced out. The slogan for the protest is "The Mountains Don't Re-Grow" ("Le Montagne Non Ricrescono"). People left the meeting with tears in their eyes, but it seems there is little that anyone can do. Not really.

So a down-hearted day. But I try to write down an honest account of our life here as it is now, while it lasts.

 

The olive harvest has begun in earnest now and when we went down to the pub the night before last, the guys had been working hard and they stretched out their arms and their back muscles ruefully. "Porca miseria!" they say in mournful tones to show that they are tired now and will be sore when they start working again tomorrow. The harvest doesn't wait for anyone, though, and there will be time to rest in December. 

But we are happy because it is a good year despite the summer weather. The trees are full of olives.

They harvest the olives using long rake-like implements that reach up into the highest branches of the trees. But standing under the trees and reaching up all day like that is hard on the back and the neck and the arms.

And there are other bodily hazards. Claudio made us laugh telling us a funny story about looking up and a little olive falling and hitting him right in the eye. "Porca miseria!" he said and we all laughed. "Has that ever happened to you?" he asked Valerio. "Oh, sure," Valerio said. "Lots of times. Such a little olive, but when it gets you right in the eye ... porca miseria!" And then we all laughed and drank some more wine.

"Ah," I said to them, "but the fresh oil -- there is nothing better! Some new bread and a bit of fresh garlic and salt and the fresh oil, a glass of wine -- there is nothing I would rather eat in all the world. We are so lucky that we get to have it, even if it is hard work."

"Yes, that is true," Claudio said. "But all the same, I could just buy it in the store." Everyone laughed at the absurdity of such a thing.

Jonathan and I have no olive trees anymore now that we have moved to our new house and it is taken for granted by everyone in the pub that this is a sadness for us. Porca miseria!

[update 24 Oct: Claudio now has a black eye from where the olive hit him.]

 

Friday, Jonathan went to a three-hour seminar for his graduate school called "The Administration of Justice and the Challenge of New Information Technologies" ("L'amminstrazione della giustizia e la sfida delle nuove technologie dell'informazione"). This is the room at the University of Pisa where it was held. 

We are not exactly overwhelmed by the new technologies here, though. The new technology is not the thing that is really dominating our daily lives, if you see what I mean. Like, our attention is kind of taken up elsewhere, for the most part.

Good luck with your powerpoint slide deck competing with this, my dude.

But the thing is that EVERYTHING around here is like that. The doctor's waiting room has marble statues and 25-foot ceilings and intricately carved door frames. Ditto the DMV. The pub has medieval frescoes. You can't swing a cat without hitting a beautifully decorated shrine to the Virgin Mary. I've got one directly across the street from my house, right where I park my car.

There was a movement, at least for a while, to build schools in the US that didn't even have windows because the idea was that the children were distracted by the view outside and that they would learn better in an environment where there was nothing visually appealing going on to interest them and they could focus better on their studies without anything drawing off their attention.

I dunno -- I'm not an expert in educational theory. But the University of Pisa has certainly not followed the "have nothing visually appealing around lest it distract the students" philosophy. And while I admittedly have learned absolutely nothing about new information technologies (as it relates to the administration of justice or otherwise), I am, nevertheless, glad.

The olive harvest this year seems, thank god, to be going gangbusters. It's been rather iffy the past few years and, with the unprecedented heat this summer, naturally we worried. Everyone did.

But the nets are going out among the trees in the olive orchards now and people we have talked to say the trees are full of olives.

Last night at the pub, as we sat outside and watched the sunset turn the leaves of the big sycamore tree golden against the lilac sky, Claudio told us about the old days when, at the olive presses up here in the hills, people would show up and take turns working for an hour or two and there was always a table with bread and cheese and wine and people would sit at it and gossip and then work some more and then eat and drink and gossip some more.

There is, truth be told, still a fair amount of standing around chatting at the olive presses these days. The Italian word for chatting is "chiacchierare." It is a word that sounds exactly like what it means.

 

It's the season of fairs here in northern Tuscany. The summer tourists have gone away and the beach clubs have all rolled up their umbrellas and stacked the deck chairs for the season. The boys at the pub have switched from cold white wine back to red and have moved their card game from the table outside under the shade tree to one inside. The wood-burning stove has not been lit yet, but it will be soon. The chestnuts have started to fall and we will need somewhere to roast them.

And every weekend now, there are little fairs in the towns and villages. Last weekend we went to a chocolate fair in Lucca and then to the book fair in Pisa. We foolishly restrained ourselves in Lucca (not wanting to buy too unseemly an amount of chocolate) and now we regret it. The book fair was a larger version of the Scholastic Book Fairs of my youth, with the same air of quiet excitement and discovery and the promise of staying up too late lost in reading something entrancing.

This weekend was a pepper fair in Camaiore and we bought four different kids of crushed hot peppers, a jar of tiny hot peppers stuffed with tuna, a long garlic braid, a jar of honeysuckle honey, two bottles of salted caramel rum, and two buddha hands -- the only time we've ever seen them in Italy -- and the buddha hand vendor gifted us a kaffir lime, which smells like heaven.

There will be lots of fairs now -- chestnut fairs and wild game fairs and medieval fairs and panettone fairs and olive fairs -- that will last until the Christmas fairs start in December. The choral society in Capezzano Monte is already practicing for their holiday concert.