Today is our last day at our beach club. We don't go in August when the price and the jellyfish are both at their biggest.

Instead, we stay up here in the hills where a secret summer life happens away from the notice of the tourists.

The joint birthday party for Nonno and Celeste lasted from noon to midnight last Sunday. We all got t-shirts and there was eating and drinking and singing al day long. It's cooler under the shade tree on the terrace of the pub and laughter drowns out the katydids screaming and the heat doesn't seem quite so post-apocalyptic when we are all together.

At the house, my tomatoes are flourishing in a way that has become oppressive -- an outcome to be expected as soon as we found out that Jonathan can no longer eat anything -- tomatoes especially -- with seeds. So I have been making sundried tomatoes to try to preserve part of our bounty for the seemingly mythical cold days of winter. We have plenty of tomatoes and, god knows, plenty of sun.

 

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.

 

The katydids started up their annual screaming this year precisely at dawn on July 1st. In the long lost innocence of my younger days, I was rather fond of katydids. I even used them in books I've written as a shorthand for sultry and romantic summer nights. Then I moved to Italy.

Three solid months of incessantly droning screams -- loud enough to drown out all the birdsong -- eventually wears on the nerves. And not just for me. I was sitting on the terrace of the pub one evening last summer when the katydids all simultaneously paused their cacophony for a moment. Everyone on the terrace spontaneously burst into cheers.

Then the katydids started up again.

But five days ago, I finally made my peace with them. After a particularly troublesome and difficult call with the "outside" world, I went onto the front porch of our house and was immediately enveloped in the overwhelming drone of the katydids. But now they seemed like some sort of giant sonic protective shield -- a big comfy blanket of sound. For some reason I can't explain, I felt safe -- like nothing bad could get to me as long as I was inside that sound.

The beach is the same way, with surf and the sound of children playing. And so is the pub, where we are now part of the secret society of workers. While the outside world descends further and further into the frightening chaos of fascism and we have to take breaks from reading the news for the sake of our mental well-being, in our protective sound bubble here, nothing can hurt us.

The ice cream store at the beach has permanently closed. It had been there for 90 years, but over the winter the family who ran it decided they were done and so it sits empty now. I had become addicted to the Apple-Cinnamon gelato and doubt that I will ever taste its like again. Fortunately, in an act of what now appears to be great prescience (but wasn't really), I gorged myself on it last summer. Everyone says that there are plenty of other gelaterie around, and that is true. But it is also true that there will never be another one like that.

Even though we are in mourning, Jonathan and I are helping out every weekend at the pub, doing the bills and waiting for Alice's baby to be born. When that happens, we will work every night for a while. We do this surrounded by our friends who could be sitting out on the cool terrace, but decided to come in to be with us so that we won't be lonely. It is sweltering inside, but they are kind and lovely friends. They speak to us in Italian while we are adding numbers in our heads in English, making it impossible for me to either speak or add correctly and demonstrating beyond any doubt, because he can do both simultaneously, that Jonathan is a goddamn genius.

At the house, both the olives and the grapes are coming along nicely despite the heat. The olives are the size of small peas now. The grapes are a little bigger. Jonathan and I live very sedately in front of the fans, drinking ice water and not doing much else. In the mornings, we often go to the beach. Little kids build sand castles with buckets or play with beach balls at the edge of the surf. 

 

Summer is here now. It arrived all of the sudden with great waves of poppies and mosquitos and wild blue skies. We sleep now with the windows wide open with the sounds of the owls hunting in the dark woods and the larks rioting in the cherry tree at dawn.

Today is the Festa della Republica and there is a community potluck picnic here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea. We are bringing brownies and deviled eggs, which are exotic foreign delicacies here. We hope.

Saturday night, we lent a hand for the first time at the pub, doing the bills, sitting at the end of a table and trying to keep our arithmetic straight while simultaneously eating and talking to Nonno and participating in the life of our little world with the chaos of Saturday night clamoring all around us.

I once watched a documentary about the MIT Blackjack Team, who won thousands and thousands of dollars counting cards in Las Vegas casinos. The trick was not learning to count cards -- the trick was managing to count cards in the midst of a Las Vegas casino with waitresses offering you drinks and shouting discount prices in your ear and dealers keeping up a constant patter and other players exclaiming over wins and losses and odds. To make the team, potential MIT players had to pass a final test of counting and playing while being distracted by screaming undergraduates.

I bring this up for a reason.

I will just say that the steaks at the pub are 25 euros per kilo and one of the ones ordered Saturday night weighed 1.7 kilos. You do the math.

Fortunately, Jonathan did the math. He does, after all, have a mathematics Ph.D. -- albeit in higher-dimensional geometry. But I think we were OK. We are going again Monday night. If we can be of any help to Daniele and Alice, we want to help. Pray for us.

Then Sunday morning, our beach club opened and we hit the sand. We are Umbrellone #9 this year -- at the back of last year's #10. Sometimes, when I'm having a bad day or a hard time with something, I think to myself, "I want to go home." Then I think, "But where is my home?" and I have some amount of confusion about that. But when I stand in the sea and look out at the far blue horizon, I feel that, wherever home is, I am there.

My new bathing suit arrived at last. It doesn't fit. The top is too small, which has never in my entire life before ever been a problem for me. By turning it upside down, though, with the neck clasp at my back and the back strap around my neck, I can get it to pretty much work -- enough, anyway, to be wearable. So I will be spending the better part of the summer wandering around the Italian coast with my clothes on upside down. It's like I've finally achieved my life's ambition to inhabit the reincarnated spirit of Little Edie Beale.

S-T-A-U-N-C-H.

 

Eternal optimism is a beautiful hallmark of my character. In other words, I am a chump.

I have ordered a new bathing suit to be sent in the mail in preparation for the summer. I had to order it online to be shipped because the style of bathing suits around here -- every single one, no matter how grandmotherly and modest is the rest of the suit -- is to have only a thin string of dental floss going up your butt, leaving the rest uncovered. Now, I make no judgements about the amount of butt that other people choose to exhibit to the world. You go, girl. But if I were to wear such a suit, I would spend the whole time trying to pick that bit of string out of my butt crack. And I just don't think that would be attractive.

So I ordered this new bathing suit and crossed my fingers that my friends at the Post Office would somehow allow it to come to our house here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea -- perhaps in a moment of inattention. I am following its progress very closely. So far, it has gone to Milan, then to Rome, then back to Milan again. It is now at Milan Malpensa Airport (MXP) -- the international airport in Milan, as opposed to Milan Linate, which is for domestic flights -- waiting to fly out of Italy to god-only-knows where. One thing about our mail -- it certainly gets to see the world. I will update on its whereabouts when/if I get news.

We continue to search for houses to buy. We were offered one that is about halfway down the mountain at a very reasonable price. True, it has no bathroom, but -- on the bright side -- it is surrounded by dense forest which could possibly suffice. We also have a lead on one that is next to the church almost at the level of the belltower. Jonathan thinks that this is a mark against it, but I think it would be lovely to be able to see straight into the belfry and watch the hunchback ringing the bells. Not to mention how much we would probably learn about the habits of bats.

We are going to help out a bit at the pub this summer now that it is getting close to the time when Alice's baby is due. We will be in charge of adding up all the bills and doing the money on nights when it is very busy and crowded. This will now make the second time in my life when I have ended up working in a bar just because I was around all the time anyway. The first time was in North Carolina at The Cave and The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato is based on that. If I ever write another book about our time here (after the one that I'm currently writing about our first thousand days), I will call it Barflies in the Belfry.

We are having very romantic winter weather these days -- rough seas and skies like the inside of an oyster shell. But even though the wind is clear and cold and often fierce, hellebore and white daffodils are nevertheless blooming in sheltered little corners all over our garden.

Jonathan is slowly on the mend from his operation and can speak and eat regular food now, but still no word from the doctor about the biopsy results, so we worry. Next weekend is the Festa di San Biagio -- the patron saint of Pietrasanta and also of throats. So there is a Luna Park set up in a usually vacant field at the edge of town and next Monday there will be a Blessing of the Throats in the Duomo. Jonathan snorts dismissively, but I think this is too good an opportunity to pass up and intend to take him and his throat down to town to be blessed. This will doubtless involve some amount of trickery on my part. Or possibly crying.

And we are still working away on our video podcast project -- the second episode dropped today and we already have the third ready to go. Jonathan knows that this is all just procrastination because I am supposed to be working on a new book. So putting together a 50-episode video podcast series to keep from writing one paragraph seems quite reasonable.

We had lunch at the pub on Sunday, sitting at the Tavolo di Marmo with Ugo and Nonno and Alice's mother, Marzia. The secret of Alice's pregnancy is out now and everyone is so happy. Daniele is gently jovial and Alice is serene and beautiful. Marzia is busy encouraging Alice to eat more, while Alice glows happily.

One thing I miss about winter in Colorado Springs is the way the sky turns orange at night in the snow. But I look down on the jeweled plain below us and I am not too sad.

Yesterday, on a whim, Jonathan and I decided to go see if the gelato store at the beach was still open. The beach clubs are all closed now and the striped umbrellas and beach chairs have all been put away for the winter. The sand is empty. But, miraculously, the gelato store was open even though no one was in it and the owner was sitting on a chair out front under the awning watching the white geese in the park quack at each other and the misty rain fall. We chatted with him a bit and he told us that today would be their last day of the season and then they would close up until next spring. "So come by tomorrow," he said, "and get something to keep in your freezer."

So today we went down and bought two big tubs of gelato to put in our freezer and eat this winter while we dream of hot sand and cool ocean water and sunshine. And then his wife (we don't know their names -- yet) said to us, "Would another container fit in your freezer?" And they gave us as a gift another giant container of gelato and a bunch of cookies -- the kind that I always associate with gelato on the Riviera. The white geese came up almost right into the store while this was going on, honking and looking around. There are no tourist crowds these days to shoo them away.

These are the six flavors of gelato we got:

1. Mango (mango), 2. Frutti di Bosco (blackberry, raspberry and blueberry, mixed), 3. Caramello Saltato (salted caramel), 4. Cioccolato (chocolate), 5. Pompelmo e Campari (grapefruit and Campari), and 6. Limone, Salvia e Menta (lemon, sage and mint). They did not have my favorite Cinnamon Apple today, but that gives me something to look forward to next summer. We brought them home and took all the ice cubes out of the freezer so that we could fit the containers in. 

Sometimes, it seems like Jonathan and I have behaved in a very rash and foolhardy manner by moving to Italy on a whim like we did, instead of acting sensibly, with forethought and prudence. And so we keep expecting one day to get our comeuppance. We keep expecting to have to pay the price for our recklessness. So far, though, for at least today, the comeuppance seems to mostly have taken the form of free ice cream and cookies. I've had worse comeuppances, quite frankly.

The summer tourists all had to leave their rental houses yesterday. So today, even though it is still as hot as ever and sunny, the beach has an atmosphere of winter coming on. Only a few of us are left. We have been nodding at each other all summer and now we recognize each other -- not only as faces, but as members of the fraternity of permanence.

The sea is strangely flat and still and clear today. The cold water feels lovely after a sleepless, sticky night. I saw four dead meduse washed up on the sand. Their season is coming to an end, too.

We are in the last days of summer now. It is meltingly hot and the meagre charm of the katydid chirping has long ago worn thin.

Forty years ago, I ate a pistachio gelato at a little gelateria by the beach here and it was so perfect, so intensely creamy and flavorful and rich, that I have never really recovered from it, but remembered it -- through all the years and all the other ice creams -- as the pinnacle, the Platonic Ideal of gelato in comparison to which all merely earthly gelatos would, inevitably, fall short. It was no fault of their own -- such ice cream as I ate on that summer day in 1984 cannot exist in great quantities in our limited universe and to ask that there be two such pistachio gelati would be greedy. The gods have their limits, too.

But the same shop is still there. I recognized it immediately. So after months of going past without going in (out of fear of finding the old idols fallen in the dust and also laziness), on Tuesday -- here at the end of the summer season just when everything will soon close down -- we had an ice cream.

My god.

It was so good that I became an instant addict and spend all my mental energy now trying to figure out when I can have more, how I can have more, how much more I can have... Like any addict, I plot ways to justify needing (not just wanting, but actually needing) more of it and of tricking Jonathan into going for just one more hit.

I had Cinnamon Apple and Salted Caramel. Jonathan had Lemon Zest and Campari Grapefruit. I dream about the Cinnamon Apple at night.

In the meantime, between ice creams, I have been working on my series of paintings, "21 Views of my Groceries." 

We are in fig season now and stringhe season and apricot season, waiting for the first porcini mushrooms to arrive. Barbara and Sara gave us some very lovely gourds to photograph and more honey from their hives. The bees have been getting nectar from the lemon tree blossoms and you can taste it in the honey.

Our olives are looking good, but we don't know yet if the flies will come again this year and lay their eggs in them so that every olive is ruined by larvae. Mimmo is pessimistic, but sometimes that is just our way of placating the gods. They delight in overthrowing our expectations, so it is prudent to expect the worst. 

We are leaving for a short trip to the US week after next -- seeing the boys and supervising getting all of our old belongings into the container to be shipped to Italy. Tragically, we will be missing the soccer tournament that will be held at the pub in Leonardo's memory. The soccer itself is not all that exciting for me, but the announcement poster says that there will also be "jugglers, fire eaters, and singing animals."* I am very sorry to miss that, but Alice says that she will send me a video.

*It really says "singing and animals," but we have all agreed that singing animals would be even better.

 

When we first moved here, I bought a little clock at the Ikea in Pisa for our bedroom. It has a clock, a timer, an alarm, and a thermometer. This is a picture of the thermometer at 4:00 a.m. this morning in our bedroom.

What I am saying here is that it is hot. Fucking hot.

We went down to the big Esselunga supermarket in Lido di Camaiore yesterday just to hang out for a while in the cold foods aisle. I'm thinking of bringing a folding chair with me next time and just setting up camp in front of the gelato.

Instead, for now, I have filled our bathtub with cold water and take a dip in it three, four, five, six times a day. Inside my head, I think of it as "the swimmin' hole."

The beach is lovely, of course, although the sand is burning hot by 10 a.m. and the jellyfish are a regular feature now. They are, apparently, a species called "barrel jellyfish" and all advices are that we should not worry about them -- their sting is hardly ever fatal. This information is not as comforting as I am sure it is intended to be.

The olives and the grapes are looking good, though. And we went to a concert that the Coro di Versilia held in an abandoned Roman-era marble quarry over in Capezzano Monte. In a tribute to our life at the pub here, they sang a song with the phrase: 

L'Aqua mi fa male, il vino mi fa cantare.

Water makes me sick, but wine makes me sing.

We consider it our theme and live by its message.

I read in the news yesterday that there is a "heat dome" over southern Europe. I had not known until I read it that we are officially in a crisis -- the news does not, however, come exactly as a shock. It was 84 degrees at 4:10 a.m. in our bedroom this morning, where Jonathan and I lay side-by-side gently sweating into our sheets and waiting for it to be morning so that we can go down to the beach.

Our beach club is very tranquil and sedate in the mornings -- mostly just old people like us reading their newspapers or taking a stroll along the strand. Every now and then there is a parent or grandparent with a baby still asleep in their arms. Paolo smiles and greets us by name while the sleepy teenagers who work at the cafe clear up the remaining evidence of the previous night's festivities. (It is only in the evenings when the Riviera beach parties really get hoppin'.) Jonathan sits at the cafe and keeps me up-to-date on the developments in the love triangle among three of the teenaged cafe workers. 

These mornings even the sea seems sleepy -- like glass, clear and olive green. Every now and then a pale little ghost fish flicks by, hiding in the light refracted on the bottom sand. I wade out and stand waist deep in the cool water staring off at the watercolor horizon, washing away the sticky feeling of a hot and sleepless night. This morning, I saw a jellyfish, also ghost white but with a deep blue-violet edge around its cap, waving along just under the surface of the water. At that exact moment, I felt refreshed enough to head back to our umbrellone on the sand.

Back at the house, it is fresh fig and lavender season. We have made fig jam twice -- once with lemon and once with amaretto. But now it is too hot for jam making and we just eat the fresh figs whole and cold from the fridge.

And there are bundles of lavender hanging upside down, drying, all over the house. When it is dry, I will make lavender sachets with it to put in all the clothes drawers to keep away the moths. And when the winter comes, every time I pull out a sweater, there will be a little aromatic burst of summer and I will long once again for the heat. ("I won't," Jonathan says.)

Nonno's birthday party was last Friday night. We all chipped in and bought him a helicopter flight over these mountains that he has loved so much and that he used to hike in as a young man, but now cannot reach. At our house, almost at the top of the mountains, we saw the bright red helicopter fly over us late Sunday afternoon. We knew it was Nonno because it buzzed the terrace of the pub twice and we could hear the cheering.

"He seemed as happy as a bambino," Alice said, having gone with him to the helipad to see him onto the flight. "And now he will have a new story to tell." We will go down to see him sometime in the next couple of days and tell him that we saw him and he will tell us the story of it and I will be happy.

That is quite a statement, given the general situation. I'm starting to feel about ice the way Harrison Ford did in "The Mosquito Coast." The Italian word for jellyfish, by the way, is "medusa." (If nothing else, my vocabulary is expanding.)

 

We are having a nice time at the Massa DMV getting Jonathan's driver's license. And by "nice," I mean long and leisurely. The first time we went, they told us to come back "next month." So we waited a month and went back and were told to come back in "two or three weeks." So we waited three weeks and went back last Tuesday. We were told to come back in "seven to ten days." It's the Zeno's Paradox of driver's licenses.

The internet at our house has now died, which is only very slightly different from the internet at our house when it was alive. But still. Friday, Jonathan had a zoom meeting with some clients in Washington state from the upper room of the pub while the boys outside on the terrace screamed joyously at each other. "Please excuse the background noise," Jonathan said to the people in Washington. "I'm in, um, a restaurant." Fortunately, it is doubtful that anyone in Washington understands Italian.

My broken toe is slowly mending, owing to the miraculous curative powers of sun and sea air. Jonathan's back is doing less well. He has put himself in the hands of the legitimate medical establishment and has been twice so far to the physiotherapist to have a massage and also a mild electrical current run through his body, which is a thing they swear by. It hasn't seemed to do any good but, as Jonathan points out, he can now charge his cell phone by resting it on his belly.

And the cheeping sound we have been hearing for the past few days turned out to actually be cheeping. Four baby birds have hatched in a  nest built in an empty flower pot attached high on the wall of our front porch. We are still trying to think of names for them. Send suggestions.

 

Thursday night, the Italian National Soccer Team played against Spain in the European Cup. I got a series of four texts from Daniele that morning:

"Catherina buongiorno"

"This evening we are making a spaghettata to watch the game."

"All together"

"If you would like to join us, we are happy."

(I am translating this to the best of my limited ability from Italian. "Spaghettata" is beyond the scope of Google Translate, but is also pretty self-explanatory.)

It is nice to be part of "all of us together."

It was a lovely night out on the terrace of the pub and Daniele is a genius with sauces, especially when he is just cooking for friends and lets his imagination go. He made a light glaze with lobster and parsley that looked like nothing on the plate, but exploded with a dozen layers of flavor in our mouths.

Italy lost the game 0-1 because one of the Italian players accidentally kicked the ball into our own goal. I felt just terrible for the guy. I mean, I have fucked up plenty in my life (and in far more serious situations), but never with an entire nation watching me.

Semina (whose real name is Francesco and who was wearing a t-shirt that said "This is business -- nothing personal" and had a picture of Marlon Brando on it) said that if the Spaniards were polite, they would follow suit and kick a ball into their own net. But they didn't and so now we know.

We all drank beer because Daniele told us we should when watching soccer and because the beer was free. But it amazes me that anyone in Italy drinks beer voluntarily when the beer is so bad and the wine is so good. But the price was right.

I think about how much my dad would have loved all this -- sitting all morning in the sun at the beach and reading while little kids dig holes in the sand with their tiny spades and then going in the evening to sit on the terrace of the pub and have a glass of wine with the old men and talk about the day's events.

We are only a few weeks away from Nonno's 91st birthday, but he doesn't think he will have a party this year, unlike last year's giant blowout for his 90th. It would be too sad with Mirio still so sick. I haven't seen Mirio in many weeks now and my heart sinks whenever I hear the ambulance siren coming up the hill from town below. And Renata is still not back from Poland.

Other than that, we have been very homebound. Jonathan threw out his back on Tuesday and, despite taking some pills from the doctor, is walking around all hunched over and groaning. And on Monday, I managed to break my right baby toe at the beach by gracefully slamming into the only hard object (the edge of a walkway) on the entire expanse of soft sand and cool blue water. So I hobble around with my foot all wrapped up like I've begun to explore a future in mummification.

In spite of all this, we are happy. The baby olives and baby grapes are doing well, the Lemon Bar has decorated itself with actual lemons lately, the beach club is fully open as are the hydrangeas, we have nowhere particular to go.

Renata has been gone for many weeks now. Her mother passed away unexpectedly and she has gone to Poland to be with her elderly and sick father. Her husband, Stefano, is here and we see him driving their car, but no one knows when or if she is ever coming back. It is hard to be far away from family that you love, especially when they need you.

Alice says that Renata no longer answers anyone's phone calls -- except for Nonno's. This makes sense. During all those long winter evenings when no one was in the pub except for us and the Beasts and Renata, she and Nonno had an ongoing battle -- Renata firing prosecco corks at Nonno whenever she opened a bottle and Nonno threatening to smack her with his cane. Now he is the only one who can reach her.

So last week, I asked Nonno when Renata is coming back. "Soon," he said. "Someday soon -- in a few days." I don't know if that is what Renata told Nonno so he wouldn't feel bad or what Nonno is telling me so I won't. She has been gone a long time. Nonno's 91st birthday will happen in July andI hope she will be back for that.

Last night Jonathan and I sat between Nonno and Geppollino at the tavolo di marmo during that golden late afternoon hour while Federica is setting the tables for all the summer diners who come now that the season has started and Daniele goes back and forth to the kitchen and tries to round up enough players for a game of cards and Alice tells Almo where to put the tables for the night and takes reservations on the phone. Claudio comes in and then leaves and then comes back bringing his dog, Lila. Guglielmo is there and Valerio and Ugo shows up still sporting his new moustache that Renata did not like, but I do. Federica tells us that her son has passed his test for his driver's license. Her face lights up when she talks about him.

A recent addition to the circle of beasts, Matteo, was there, talking about eating avocados on toast. Nonno pretended to think that he was talking about an "avvocato" (the Italian word for "lawyer") and said that he would not like to eat a lawyer on toast because it would be too expensive. 

Then Matteo told us all that he had refused to do his national military service. 

"You have to," Nonno told him. "If you don't, they come and get you and put you in jail."

But Matteo insisted that he had not done his.

"I didn't do it," I said. Geppollino thought that was pretty funny.

This morning, I went down to the beach for a while, but now it has clouded up and the air is heavy and thick with the aroma of jasmine. Maybe it will rain.

 

Just past our beach club is a little smoothie bar set in a grove of beachside trees and/or Wonderland. It is called either the Lemon Bar or the Lola Juice Bar -- nothing in this place is certain.

I have never been someone who writes sitting in cafes, but I have never been in a cafe under the trees with crystal chandeliers before. So I am giving it a go.