So, I have this newsletter that I'm sending out. It fills me with shame, but what are you going to do? Here is the latest utterance. If you want to get them fresh out of the hopper, just let me know by emailing me at AskTheArmadillo@ proton.me

Hi, everybody –

How are you all holding up? It seems like a lot of us are trying to balance being at least minimally well-informed about the horrors that our governments are committing in our names and not becoming so overwhelmed by our grief and our rage that we can’t function. It’s a hard tightrope to walk sometimes.

And escaping into a good book for a while can provide much needed rest and reinvigoration. Literature can change us as we read it and can become a part of who we are. So when The Guardian published a list of “The 100 Best Novels of All Time” two weeks ago, it is not surprising that it became a viral hit, with people flooding the electronic waves to agree, disagree, discuss, poke fun at, and in general do all the entertaining things that people do from the quiet and anonymity of their own couch. The link to the list is here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026/may/12/the-100-best-novels-of-all-time?lid=9v1n4cszeo8g

But for me, the question of “best book” is like the question of favorite color or favorite song. Favorite for what purpose? The song that I want to hear when it’s 2 a.m. and I’m missing people long gone is very different from the song that I want to hear when I’m cooking dinner (if we do, in fact, want to be able to eat the dinner at some point) or when I’m out dancing.*

So the idea of “best,” for me at least, begs the question “best for what?”

It seems to me that in these days of grief and rage, we have certain needs that certain books may address and that others, no matter their individual merit, may not be suited for. The number one book on The Guardian list (spoiler alert!) is George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

I love Middlemarch. It is one of my favorite books and George Eliot is one of my favorite authors. But Middlemarch, which may for all I know indeed be the best novel ever written, is not the book that I myself need in these days.

So I have made my own list:

The Twelve Best Books for 2026 (And May God Have Mercy on Our Souls)

Number 12: The Once and Future King by T.H. White

From the back cover: “The magical epic of King Arthur and his shining Camelot; of Merlyn and Owl and Guinevere; of beasts who talk and men who fly; of wizardry and war. It is the book of all things lost and wonderful and sad.”

Why I chose it: It’s good to think about leaders who have honor and of ideas of honesty and decency among the powerful. It’s good to think about what really makes a hero.

Important line: “[Arthur] was only a simple and affectionate man, because Merlin had believed that love and simplicity were worth having.”

 

Number 11: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

From the inside flap: “A dark Faustian parable of science misused.”

Why I chose it: The Creature, in all his humanity, reminds us that we are all born with the capacity for great good and that it is circumstances and the cruelty of others that can make us into not what we want to be, but what we ourselves are sorrowful to see.

Important line: “For a long time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or even why there were laws and governments; but when I heard details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased, and I turned away with disgust and loathing.”

 

Number 10: The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

From the back cover: “In a series of brilliantly plotted episodes, Bertie and Jeeves help Bingo Little with his love life.”

Why I chose it: Technically, this isn’t a novel, but a set of connected short stories. But I don’t care. Sometimes, we just need some joy. As Christopher Buckley said, “It is impossible to be unhappy while readings the adventures of Jeeves and Wooster. And I’ve tried.”

Important line: “‘My God, man!’ I gargled. ‘The cravat! The gent’s neckwear! Why? For what reason?’”

 

Number 9: Wind, Sand, and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

From the back cover: “The exciting realism of air adventure… combined with lyrical prose and the soaring spirit of a philosopher, makes these memoirs one of the most popular books about flying ever written.”

Why I chose it: Again, not a novel. Again, I don’t care. A memoir about the author’s days as a pilot flying the mails in the earliest days of commercial aviation, this is a book about people who do things well – with bravery and with care. In our world of AI slop and fake-it-til-you-make-it, it is important to celebrate, with gorgeous prose if possible, people who never took a short cut, but did their very best, without fanfare, even when no one was looking.

Important three paragraphs: “I remember, once, a homecoming of Bury, he who was later to die in a spur of the Pyrenees. He came into the restaurant, sat down at the common table, and went stolidly at his food, shoulders still bowed by the fatigue of his recent trial. It was at the end of one of those foul days when from end to end of the line the skies are filled with dirty weather, when the mountains seem to a pilot to be wallowing in slime like exploded cannon on the decks of an antique man-o’-war.

“I stared at Bury, swallowed my saliva, and ventured after a bit to ask if he had had a hard flight. Bury, bent over his plate in frowning absorption, could not hear me. In those days we flew open ships and thrust our heads out round the windshield, in bad weather, to take our bearings: the wind that whistled in our ears was a long time clearing out of our heads. Finally Bury looked up, seemed to understand me, to think back to what I was referring to, and suddenly he gave a bright laugh. This brief burst of laughter, from a man who laughed little, startled me.

“For a moment his weary being was bright with it. But he spoke no word, lowered his head, and went on chewing in silence. And in that dismal restaurant, surrounded by the simple government clerks who sat there repairing the wear and tear of their humble daily tasks, my broad-shouldered messmate seemed to me strangely noble; beneath his rough hide I could discern the angel who had vanquished the dragon.”

 

Number 8: Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood (usually published these days along with The Last of Mr. Norris in one volume under the combined title of The Berlin Stories)

From the back cover: “A charming city of avenues and cafes, a grotesque city of night-people and fantasts, a dangerous city of vice and intrigue, a powerful city of millionaires and mobs – all this was Berlin in 1931, the period when Hitler was beginning his move to power. … It is art alone, the art of an extremely gifted writer like Isherwood, which makes these often comic episodes tell us truth about the tragedy of Germany which cannot be found in any history book.”

Why I chose it: It is good to remember that we have been here before.

Important line: “Eventually, we’re all queer.”

 

Number 7: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus

From the back cover: “With lyric eloquence, Albert Camus brilliantly posits a way out of despair, reaffirming the value of personal existence, and the possibility of life lived with dignity and authenticity.”

Why I chose it: I swear that most of these books are, in fact, novels. But not this one. Again. But the six pages of Camus’s short essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” can save us from our own despair.

Important line: “There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.”

 

Number 6: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

From the back cover: “Their Eyes Were Watching God is a celebration of black folk culture, of love between equals, of a woman’s self-discovery.”

Why a chose it: It’s important to remember the small victories of our lives – victories of managing, in spite of everything thrown at us by the world at large, to find ourselves and to know ourselves.

Important paragraph: “Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”

 

Number 5: The Animal Family by Randall Jarrell

From the back cover: “This is the story of how, one by one, a man found himself a family. Almost nowhere in fiction is there a stranger, dearer, or funnier family – and the life that the member of The Animal Family live together, there in the wilderness beside the sea, is as extraordinary and as enchanting as the family itself.”

Why I chose it: For all of us strange outcasts out there, alone and different, it is good to know that love can make a family, and that we can always be our true, wild selves with people who love us.

Important line: “The hunter and the mermaid were so different from each other that it seemed to them, finally, that they were exactly alike; and they lived together and were happy.”

 

Number 4: The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf

From the inside flap: “In Spain lives a big and strong bull whose name is Ferdinand. Unlike the other young bulls, Ferdinand does not like to fight. He would rather sit in the shade of his favorite cork tree and smell the flowers.”

Why I chose it: Is it a children’s book or a metaphor for the power of peaceful passive resistance and the story of a very effective sit-in? Maybe we should all be like Ferdinand and refuse to comply with cruelty and violence and warfare.

Important line: “His mother saw that he was not lonesome, and because she was an understanding mother, even though she was a cow, she let him just sit the and be happy.”

 

Number 3: The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

From the  inside flap: “Hawthorne’s great Puritan novel of sin and regeneration observes the consequences of adultery for three people of superior consciences: a passionate young woman, Hester Prynne; the father of her child, Arthur Dimmesdale; and her aging husband, Roger Chillingworth. Each has been marked by sin in a different way. Hester, publicly confessed and shamed, is spiritually ennobled. Dimmesdale, too weak to reveal himself, is ravaged with self-torment. And Chillingworth, wronged and secretly dedicated to vengeance, is transformed into a monstrous being.””

Why I chose it: Although being force-marched through this book in high school English classes (when, frankly, none of us has had enough life experience to even begin to understand what this book is about), nearly ruined this book for me, now that I’m older and have more life behind me, I understand Hester Prynne as one of the most powerful female figures in American literature. In these days of attacks on female bodily autonomy, it’s good to remember that Hester, not the feckless Dimmesdale or the malevolent Chillingworth, is the one who ultimately triumphs.

Important line: “And, once, Hester was seen embroidering a baby-garment, with such lavish richness of golden fancy as would have raised a public tumult, had any infant, thus apparelled, have been shown to our sober-hued community.”

 

Number 2: Silas Marner by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)

From the inside flap: “When his precious money is stolen and, shortly after, seemingly and mysteriously replaced by the child Eppie, Silas is awakened to life by the redemptive power of love.”

Why I chose it: Another book foist upon unprepared high school students that rings much deeper when you’re a bit older. The greedy, deceitful, and cowardly Cass family don’t get what they want in the end. They find out, indeed, that you can’t buy real love, no matter how much money you have. A truth that lives through the centuries.

Important line: “‘I can’t feel as I’ve got any father but one,’ said Eppie, impetuously, while the tears gathered. ‘I’ve always thought of a little home where he’d sit i’ the corner, and I should fend and do everything for him: I can’t think o’ no other home.’”

 

Number 1: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

From the back cover: “There are a few stories that in some way, in some degree, change the world forever for their readers. This is one.”

Why I chose it: It is an antidote for everything wrong with this moment in time. That’s all.

Important line: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

 

So that’s it – my own little list of books that might help in this moment. You probably have others. Send along suggestions for additions to the list to AskTheArmadillo@proton.me and I will include them in future newsletters as a way of helping each other make it through these rough times. They won’t last forever. And the first person to send me a suggested book to add to the list will get a lovely Ask The Armadillo t-shirt. Suzanne already got hers and sent a picture of herself wearing it. She looked beautiful – but that might be more about her soul than her clothing, as is often the case.

Take care everyone.

Love, Kathy

 

* There was a place on the road in Rarotonga where, driving along in our car twenty-five years ago now, we would come out of a patch of cool seashore forest and the wide sweep of the bay would open out in front of us, a thousand shades of fractured blues and greens, like the pieces of a constantly shifting kaleidoscope, appearing and disappearing endlessly into pure light, while my sons, aged seven and four then, chatted to me and to each other in the back seat, and the road unspooled in front of us going nowhere, and at night we all slept in our one airy room in Emily’s house and the boys held hands in their sleep and the palm trees made their curious rattling sound and the ghosts of Emily’s ancestors watched over us and kept us safe. So I guess that is my favorite color. But whenever I’m buying shoes, I always find myself drawn to red.

The movers came a week ago and delivered all of our furniture from the storage unit to the belfry house. Since then, Jonathan and I have been carrying box after box of heavy books every day from the rustic farmhouse to the belfry house. I am too old for this.

How did I end up with so much stuff? We got rid of so many possessions when we left Colorado -- so many trips to the ARC, so many donations to the library, so much furniture put out on the curb marked "free." So much left behind -- we came here with only two suitcases and two carry-on bags. And yet I've spent all week carrying boxes of books around. I don't understand how my stuff has once again metastasized in this unholy way. It's a complete mystery and I said as much to Andrea in the bookstore when I was shopping in there yesterday.

 

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.

 

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."

 

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.

It is very quiet in the house just now. The birds seem to have gone further south since autumn has come. The mosquitos, alas, have not followed the birds and, in fact, have taken full advantage of the recent rain to breed like rabbits and rampage around in giant clouds of ravening bloodsuckers. At night, we scratch ourselves and listen to the owls (the only birds left, it seems) riot in the woods.

Jonathan goes three days a week now to the University of Pisa where he is enrolled in law school. This was an unexpected summer development, sparked by a casual comment made by the official Italian translator while she was officially translating some of my citizenship documents into official Italian. And, since this is a civilized country that recognizes the benefit of having an educated populace, higher education is fantastically cheap (especially compared to the exorbitant cost in the US) and readily accessible. Jonathan just had to prove that he has an undergraduate degree -- which he does -- and then he started going to classes ten days ago.

The best things (besides the actual education and fascinating information gleaned, of course) are that 1.) he takes his bike on the train with hm and then bikes past the Leaning Tower of Pisa on his way to class every morning, and 2.) in one class there is only one other student and Jonathan is older than the student and the professor combined.

I am still riding the incredible high of having my novel under contract with a publisher, which really says something given that I spent the day yesterday changing all the n-dashes in my manuscript to m-dashes and reformatting my paragraph indentations. Today I begin my dance with the endlessly fascinating Chicago Manual of Style. It has hidden depths.

So many hidden depths.

But I also made a book trailer. It can never be used because I don't have rights to the music. But I went ahead and did it anyway just for the fun fun fun of it.

My novel, Armadillo Massacre Number Three, has won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and will be coming out from the amazing Regal House Publishing, one of the best presses in the US, in Fall 2027. I can almost not believe it.

I got the email while we were sitting in the departure lounge at Dulles Airport waiting to fly back to Italy. At first, I kind of couldn't take in the email -- I was just sort of confused by what it seemed to be saying. Then the light dawned and I started to cry sitting right there in the middle of the crowded airport. (For the record, no one around me even batted at eye. Except, of course, for Jonathan.)

My friend Jessy says I should have gone and had myself paged: "Will Kathy Giuffre, award-winning author, please pick up a white courtesy telephone for a message..."

I have reached the stage of my life where divesting myself of everything I own has enormous appeal. There is just something about having to physically lift up all of your possessions yourself that makes your treasures seem so much less precious. In ten and a half months, we will leave our hidden paradise here in the woods for a different paradise in a different place -- right in heart of bustling downtown Capriglia-by-the-Sea (pop. 255 people, counting us). And we will once again have to lift up all our shit.

In preparation for this, I have been very slowly ridding myself of books that I paid $30K to transport all the way across eight time zones, but now -- who was I kidding? -- will never read again. There is a Little Free Library in the big grocery store just outside town and every time we go there I bring two books to donate. My books are in English, but there is a very international community here and the books almost always have been taken by someone by the next time we go in. It's a slow process, but an oddly satisfying one.

Yesterday when Jonathan was putting out the trash, he found a book that had been left for us in our mailbox. It was from our neighbor Fabio. He left a note saying that he had come across the book in the grocery store LFL and took it for me because it seemed like the sort of thing I would be interested in. Indeed, it was -- so much so that I bought it in 2002 when I lived in the South Pacific and carried it back to the US and kept it for over two decades and shipped it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to Italy ($30K...) before I put it in the grocery store LFL last week.

It is nice to have thoughtful and caring friends who think about me when they come across books I would like. Apparently, I am keeping this one.

We have had another meeting with the owners of the belfry house. And, although we don't yet have a rental contract, we have a verbal agreement that one of these days we will make a written agreement to eventually sign a contract to rent the house. We are very excited about this because it means we will be renting an empty house and will, therefore, have room for all our stuff -- our stuff that I am currently busy donating to the LFL at the grocery store.

The belfry house is lovely -- maybe even slightly larger than this one, but without all the outbuildings and grounds. So no more grape arbor or olive grove with poppies blooming in it or chestnut trees turning golden in the fall and dropping their spiky nut bombs for us to make vanilla-rum chestnut butter with. We are planning to go crazy this fall brining olives and making enough corbezzoli jam to last us for the duration.

But the new house has enough M.C. Escher stairways and topsy-turvy layout to make us feel that now familiar and, frankly, beloved sensation of complete disorientation. We have been inside the belfry house twice now and still can't figure out where all the rooms are. (Jonathan is better at it than I am, but he has a Ph.D. in non-Euclidian higher-dimensional geometry and I feel that gives him an advantage.)

 

We've been having a week here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea. On Monday, we realized that we put my birthdate on the formal citizenship request in the place where Jonathan's should have gone. You already know about that. On Tuesday, the doctor told Jonathan that the strange lump under his arm is probably not cancerous, but that it should nevertheless be biopsied. On Wednesday, in the middle of the pouring rain, I went into the cantina and discovered that the floor was a centimeter deep in water. Sitting on the floor, soaking it all in, were multiple boxes of our books. Now, the books are all over the house, opening up like crinkled flowers as they dry out. On Thursday, I got seven mosquito bites on my right thigh and one on my left. These are the Southern Tiger Mosquitos -- brought north by climate change -- that leave big red welts that itch like fire for days and days.

On Friday, we found out that on the day almost a year ago when we sat in our attorney's office and I said, "Don't I need my criminal record from every state where I've lived?" and she said, "Oh, no -- only the FBI federal one." and I said, "Well, how nice! Tra-la-la-Tra-la-la-Rum-tum-tiddle-um-tum," we were very much mistaken. I am now in the process of trying to figure out how to get a money order for US$7 to the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, DC, and -- even more fun -- how to get the lovely Apostilles from all the states where I've lived. And of course, all week long, the political horrors coming out of the US continue to be godawful. I now personally know five people who have either already lost their jobs because of these monsters or are on the verge of losing them.

On Saturday, nothing too disastrous happened here at the house, although the cantina continues to be a flood zone (but we have moved all of our boxes out of there and they are -- once again -- piled all around the living room.) Jonathan and I went to the big Esselunga HyperMarket at Lido di Camaiore and bought a bunch of adorable mini-lemons and brought them home and candied them. We then invented a new dessert called Exploded Cannoli.

I don't want to seem immodest, but we are geniuses.

 

One of the nicest and most surprising things about living in our hidden little world in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea is how much music there is here -- not music to make the musicians famous or music to sell merch or music to impress a sea of social media followers. But music for the joy of making music, for the love of it -- music among friends to make the winter days and nights more lively and more beautiful. In the past two weeks, Jonathan and I have marched in a parade through Capezzano Monte (pop. 355) following the Filarmonica as they played to unveil a new mural in town, gone to listen to our neighbor Fabio play in his blues band at the little cafe near the Lucca Gate (first video below) and driven to Pruno (pop. 90) -- far back in the hills above Stazzema, deep along winding roads to an ancient stone town with cobbled streets -- to hear Avi and Adele, our friends from the pub, play a concert in the tiny 13th century church of San Nicolo on a rainy, windswept night (second video below).

But there is also the casual music of everyday happiness. Below is a snip of the usual lunchtime pandemonium at the pub as it existed last Friday during lunch, the regular exuberance (Avi playing again -- this time on the wildly out-of-tune piano, which sounds so weirdly beautiful that I hope it never gets tuned.) I would say that this sort of commotion is nothing special -- meaning nothing out of the ordinary -- but that would be wrong because, of course, it is special and I am very aware that this will someday come to an end.

Some other updates:

Property is bondage: We have begun the process of bringing boxes of our stuff from the storage unit in Lucca to our house and unpacking it. This is tricky because the house was already full and there is no space to further absorb our belongings.

And, although opening box after box of our books is like greeting very dear old friends after a long and lonely absence, I somehow wonder if maybe we were better off when we had nothing.

The Netherworld: We went to visit Jonathan's son in Holland, where he is in school, and to visit the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which -- to tell by the pungent aroma coming off many, many of the other visitors -- is a favorite haunt of stoned people. Possibly this is not specific to the museum, though. We also went to a big Asian market and stocked up with ramen to bring back to Italy. It's funny the things you miss. Let's not judge.

Remembering What is Truly Important (Food): I took my language test for Italian citizenship last Thursday and now we're waiting for the results. Could go either way. Among the dozen people taking the test, I was by far the newest arrival in Italy, having arrived only two years ago. The next newest has been here five years -- most of the others have been here between 10 and 15 years. One woman has been here 26 years. So I may have some grave doubts about how I did, but in another 24 years, I think I will have a decent shot. 

In any case, when we finally arrived back home after my extremely trying morning, we found that Mimmo had very sweetly managed to get a bunch of ripe persimmons down from our tall persimmon tree and left them for us on the porch.

Personality Defects: We have made tiny little bottles of our olive oil to give to friends, but (being hyper-aware of our own novice olive-oil-making status) we are too shy to actually give them to anyone.

Dead Geniuses: The Campanile down by the Duomo in Pietrasanta, which is always locked up tight, was unexpectedly open for viewing one day and we stumbled across it and were able to go in, although not up (which is probably just as well). Michelangelo designed it when he was living and working here and it is famous to us all -- the spiral staircase reproduced on postcards and paintings and refrigerator magnets -- although most of us had never seen it in person.

Episode IV -- A New Hope: Walking up the drive last week, I caught sight out of the corner of my eye of what I at first thought was the daytime moon. It turned out to be a wasp nest as big as a beachball high up in one of our trees. The bad news is the wasps. The good news is that it now gives Jonathan and I plenty of opportunities to look at each other and say "That's no moon" and "I have a bad feeling about this."

Lights: Everyone is now decorating for Christmas. It is all very magnificent down in Pietrasanta. But my heart belongs forever to the two and a half strings of lights over the road up here in Capriglia. What we lack in flash, we make up for in convivial drunkenness and good humor.

 

Eight months ago, as required by law, we started the process of switching Jonathan's Swiss driver's license over to an Italian driver's license. There is an international treaty regarding this -- it is an automatic process (no tests or anything else required). "Oh," the man behind the counter said, "it takes five minutes. Come back when you have your new identity card and we will handle it." That was eight months ago.

We are now dozens of visits, emails, and phone calls in -- so many that we have lost count -- and still no license. The highlight of all of this for me was having to get a verified photo of Jonathan. This involves going to a photo booth on the street, taking a picture, and then making an appointment at the city offices for someone there to look at the photo, look at Jonathan, and officially confirm that this is a photo of him. The people at the driver's license place are not able to do this sophisticated task.

The person at the city offices, having looked at both the photo of Jonathan and at Jonathan, then issues an official piece of paper to say that the photo of Jonathan is, indeed, a photo of Jonathan. The piece of paper has many stamps on it, including one that cannot be purchased at the city offices or at the driver's license place , but only at a tobacco store. Naturally.

The verification of the photo actually took two visits because the first attempt was rejected. "It needs to be a recent photograph," the woman at the city offices said. "And I can tell this is not recent because you are wearing a different shirt." This is the kind of keen-eyed attention to detail of which the driver's license people are apparently incapable. So Jonathan had to go home and make another appointment to come back the next week wearing the same shirt he had on when he took the picture. As God is my witness, this is the truth.

But he was successful on his second attempt, got the paper all stamped and verified and signed, and brought it to the Driver's License place, where (having been the ones who told him he needed this in the first place) they now told him that they didn't need it.

In any case, we are now waiting for the official license to be available for pick-up. We have been waiting for about a month. Tuesday afternoon, Jonathan called to see if there was any news of it. We are now on a first-name basis with Magdalena at the Driver's License place (I left out the other dozen or so visits that the whole process has entailed). When Jonathan called and asked for an update, Magdalena just laughed. "She laughed at me," Jonathan said when he got off the phone.

We continue to wait.

Then yesterday we had to meet our immigration attorney at the Post Office to continue the apparently incessant process of procuring my long-term visa. We met her at the Post Office because that is, of course, where you make appointments to go to the Police Station and the Police Station is where the Immigration Office is. The procedure is that you mail the Police a stamp that you have bought in the tobacco store and when you do that, the clerk at the Post Office gives you an appointment with the Police. (Even after more than a year here, this seemed so convoluted that when our attorney told us to meet her at the Post Office, we thought there must have been a translation error somewhere along the line.) We had a couple of letters to throw into the wind mail, so we had already taken a number and were actually at a teller window throwing our letters into the wind mailing them when our attorney arrived. She joined us and tried to conduct our visa business, but was told that she couldn't and would have to get a new number and wait in line again -- not because you can't do two things at once at the window, but because she had walked into the building when we were already at the window. Our attorney took this completely in stride as a reasonable thing to do, which is why she is our attorney -- she understands what is going on, which we pretty much never do. In any case, the Post Office had just opened and there was no one else there, so we got a new number and then were seen right away.

So last night, to calm our nerves after so much bureaucracy, we went down to the pub, where we had not been since the "Incident Festival of the Big Chicken." Nonno was waiting for us -- he had a present for me. It was a book from his own library of the history of Pietrasanta, illustrated with beautiful maps and paintings and photographs. He was giving it to me, he said, because he thought I might be interested and because after he dies, he says, his family will "just throw everything out." So he is glad for me to have it, even though I only understand about one out of every ten words. I am better than no one.

This reminds me of when I lived in the South Pacific and once the old people on the island found out that I was there, they came to me in a steady stream with objects for me to see or old photographs or stories. I did not have to go searching for informants or pry secrets out of people through some sort of devious means. They said the same thing to me over and over: "No one around here wants to hear my stories. My children and grandchildren aren't interested." But they themselves needed so badly to speak, to know that these treasures would not vanish from memory when they died. I spent long afternoons sitting on Emily's shady veranda hearing these stories or seeing these photos and objects -- an ancient corset that the missionaries used to make the women wear, the photograph of a lover from long ago, the remnants of a dancing costume they had worn when they were young. They needed someone to see it, to hear about it, before they were gone.

I lived on Rarotonga twenty years ago. I am much closer in age to Nonno now than I was to the elders of Raro back then. And so now, when I sit and listen to Nonno's stories, I wonder if anyone will come around when I am 90 who will ever hear my stories and show an interest in the books in my library or look at the remnants of my old dancing costumes. I will need to speak about my treasures, too. So I write blog posts and throw them into the wind.

 

It is hard to write about summer. Pietrasanta is jammed with sunburnt Germans and Americans looking hopelessly for parking places and open tables, but nothing much is happening up here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea. Of course, we are not hosting a crucifixion up here like they -- apparently -- are down in town. So that may account for presence of the more boisterous crowds down there.

It continues to be sweltering ("inferno" is the Italian word for "hell," incidentally) and we have been given conflicting information with regard to the prospects for this year's olive harvest. Mimmo is quite downcast, saying that we got too much rain in the spring and not enough now. The old men in the pub, however, assure us that it is no problem -- that the olives like the sun and that they can easily go as much as four months without water. Given that Mimmo spends his time farming olives and the old men spend theirs drinking wine under the shade trees, we have resigned ourselves to disappointment.

The summer sound is katydids. They seem to have an "on" switch that is suddenly hit every morning when the temperature reaches a certain point. They are so loud that they drown out even the birds (but not the singing that floats up from the pub sometimes in the late afternoons.) This is the sound of my own childhood summers (the katydids, not the Italian singing) and when we also catch sight of fireflies in the dusk-shadowed woods around our house, I am eight-years-old again in Arkansas and twilight is magic and the future is still only a jumbled-up dream.

We are not cooking much because of the heat, but eat salad after salad. The fruit spoils fast these days, even in the fridge, so I made peaches and apricots and lemons into a crostata. And I work away on a novel. I am at the place in the writing process where I have given up all hope over it, but work on it anyway -- perhaps from some sort of inner compulsion, perhaps just because it is too hot to go for a walk. Below is a section of it that is an actual true story that really happened to a high school friend of mine. He is an attorney now.

There’s a speed trap out on the highway at the edge of Babbitt, just before you get to the new feedmill, right where the Sonic Drive-In used to be before the emanations from the new feedmill significantly dampened down folk’s enthusiasm for outdoor dining in those particular atmospheric conditions. Jud sits out at the speed trap most afternoons in his police cruiser with the radar gun propped up on the dashboard and a good supply of international intrigue thriller novels in the seat next to him. He says he doesn’t mind the emanations now that he’s used to them.

            Jud loves those international intrigue thriller novels. He says they’re the reason he decided to go into crime prevention as a profession. There is no bookstore as such in Babbitt, but Darlene at the hardware store can get them wholesale from the same magazine distributor where she gets her Farmer’s Almanacs every year and she always does right by Jud whenever the magazine distributor comes around and, therefore, goes as fast as she wants out on the highway. She says she hit 120 one time, but Jud says she exaggerates and that it was only 115. Not a person in the world was surprised when they announced their engagement.

            Everybody in town knows about the speed trap and makes sure to slow down whenever they get close to it (which they can tell by the emanations) and to wave at Jud. Given this, it is unclear just how much of a trap it actually is, but Jud says he’s really there to catch the out-of-towners, the big-city speeders running through here with their tinted-window cars and their fancy high-octane engines like wild dogs through a cat’s pajamas. But there is nothing in particular in Babbitt for the fast-living jet set to come for – especially since the Sonic Drive-In closed down – and it’s not even remotely on the way to anywhere in particular, so Jud has himself a fairly relaxed beat out there at the speed trap. At one point there was even some talk of using town funds to get him a recliner to put next to the cruiser, but nothing came of it after Booty Cox took his driver’s license test.

            What happened was that Booty, who was known for having been kind of high-strung, was driving along with the certifier from the county DMV there in the car with him. He had already demonstrated how he could stop and start and turn right and turn left and merge onto the highway and was doing about as well as a high-strung person could be expected to do in a situation of uncommon tension like that when Jud saw him go by and, knowing how het up Booty was over the whole thing, waved real big at Booty for encouragement.

            Well, Booty didn’t see Jud wave on account of how tense he was having to look at the highway lines and the speedometer needle and everything else all at the same time, so Jud just tapped his horn to get Booty’s attention and waved real big again. But when a police cruiser taps its horn at a high-strung person like Booty Cox, all good intentions aside, it does not help the situation. In fact, it startled Booty, who thought Jud was waving him down and thought he had better stop. But in the excitement of the moment, he hit the gas pedal instead of the brake and went straight head-first into the drainage ditch by the side of the highway at about 60 miles an hour.

            He said later that it happened so fast he was hoping maybe he could fix the situation before the certifier from the DMV noticed. So he threw the car into reverse, kept his foot down hard on the gas, and shot backwards out of that drainage ditch like there were saber tooth tigers down there. He was thinking so hard about the gears, in the commotion, that he clean forgot that he needed to steer the car and lord only knows where he would have ended up if he hadn’t by chance backed straight into Jud’s cruiser going so fast that his car just kind of bounced off the cruiser and went directly right back into the ditch. Jud says he never would have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.

            When they finally came to a permanent stop, Booty asked the certifier from the DMV if this one incident would mean that he failed the test, given how well he had done with the stopping and the starting and the turning right and turning left and the merging and all, but the certifier wouldn’t even speak. Jud drove him back to the DMV in what was left of the cruiser and we heard later that he retired that very afternoon and moved away to Tulsa.

            Booty eventually passed the test six months later when the county DMV managed to convince another certifier to get into a car with him, but the town council decreed that Jud had to keep a lower profile from now on, so that was the end of the plan for the recliner. Folks felt that it would be conspicuous and might distract other high-strung people like Booty when they were out on the highway. For a time, people in Babbitt maintained a lively discussion among themselves as to who else in the world there could be who might even begin to do such a thing. Although several names were floated as possibilities, Booty was always at the pinnacle of the heap.

            All of this is just to say that the closer Brother and I got to Babbitt, the slower we drove, so that if Jud was out at the speed trap, we had absolutely no fear of a ticket. We weren’t going more than 20 miles an hour by the time we got to the Booty Cox Memorial Drainage Ditch and it still seemed too fast.