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.

 

The heat continues to be post-apocalyptic. Right now, I am sitting still and gently sweating in the coolest place in the house that I can find. The only sounds are the katydids screaming and a distant ambulance coming closer and closer on its way up the hill to tiny Capriglia. Jonathan -- whose body heat radiates in a way that makes him the perfect husband in, say, February -- is too hot to touch.

And yet, the social life in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea is in full swing. Last night, we went to see Turnadot at the Puccini Festival in Torre del Lago. It was a lovely production and we were gifted tickets by our landlords, whose three children sang in the chorus. They were adorable.

But for all that, it is clear that anyone who complains about the immorality, etc., of rap/rock music has never been to the opera.

And then tonight is a big Capriglia community dinner in the tiny park next to our miniature soccer field up here. Jonathan has been accepted in amongst the group of ladies of a certain age who run everything in Capriglia (except for whatever happens at the pub). He is their mascot, the only man allowed in with the women. They have a WhatsApp groups chat called Capriglia Insieme ("Capriglia Together") but that we call Capriglia Unbound. He has been getting at least a hundred texts a day in the lead-up to tonight's big dinner. His phone is constantly buzzing so that if anyone else (like, for example, me) needs to get in touch with him, the message invariably gets lost in the shuffle. Since the beasts at the pub are mostly male, we had been wondering where all the women get together. Now we know.

Speaking of the pub, tomorrow is the big joint birthday party for Nonno (93) and Celeste (1). It will last all day and most of the night. We are busy hydrating today in preparation.

For my homework this week, my Italian teacher found this video for me to watch. It's very exciting because we see overhead shots of our house in it and also some of our friends -- Luana and Ilario. Not to mention some views of the pub. Now we are all famous!

 

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.

 

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."

Here during the shortest days of the year, I mostly want to hide under the covers on our bed and watch Christmas-themed food videos on YouTube and then make the things and eat them. This has led to many trips to stores all over town searching for things like molasses -- which is impossible to find, despite very diligent nostalgia-and-hunger-induced effort.

So we go down to the pub and eat Daniele's pears roasted in red wine and then wander home while the wolves howl in an amazing chorus and I hurry to get safe inside our house and Jonathan lingers outside, hoping for a glimpse of one. So far, I am relieved to say, he has been unsuccessful. But the wolves are so numerous (and so convivial) that they woke me up before dawn yesterday with a rousing symphony of howling.

The winner of the raffle of the giant bottle of wine at the pub has not been determined yet. We bought our ticket (#17) last Easter, which was the first time the raffle was supposed to have been held, and have held onto it for these many months through many further announcements that the raffle was going to be happening any day now. But things do not rush forward and it may be many months still before the winner is known.

Still no word on my Italian citizenship, btw.

Likewise, we are supposed to be signing the lease and paying the rent and getting the keys to our new house in ten days' time, but there is no movement on that front and we are glad that we gave ourselves a whopping four months of overlap, while we still have this house, to actually make the move. We will doubtless need every bit of the time.

But I am in no particular rush, just savoring these last weeks living with Jonathan in this misty, hidden dreamworld where we can feel, especially on foggy days or in the mornings before the mist rises back into the sky, that we have somehow managed to travel back in time to the days before televisions and cell phones and traffic jams, when a person's whole world could be just one tiny village in the hills of Tuscany and the people and things found there would be enough for a full and complete life.

We went to hear our friends sing in the local choir concert last night. Because there are so few people up here, the choir makes up ten percent of the total population of the village. I like to think of them practicing together in the evenings, as they have done for decades now, from the time before there was anything else to do on a long winter night. I sent a clip last night to Jonathan's sons and Gabe replied, "No wonder it's easy for people to believe in the divine."

 

 

The wolves have been howling at night lately. It echoes around the forest and the ravine behind the house and, when we walk out at night, we are careful, peering into the darkness and intent, listening to every sound. The dark comes very early now. Somehow, it all makes Christmas seem so much more real.

The Christmas fairs seem sparkly in the dusky winter light. In Pietrasanta, there are stalls selling special cheeses wrapped in straw and special sausages. There are stalls with local wine and new olive oil and different types of honey -- chestnut and linden and acacia and "a thousand flowers." There are stalls with serving implements carved from swirly olive wood and ones with delicate lacy shawls and sweaters crocheted with wool from local sheep and one with handmade soap from local olive oil. There is a stall with fifty different types of herbal teas, including one called "butterfly." Everything seems to twinkle a little bit.

But despite all this, the holiday season doesn't seem actually commercial. Instead, everyone we know is busy exchanging homemade baked goods and homemade wreaths and homemade jams and jellies and pickles. Jonathan and I are bringing around jars of our lemon-ginger marmalade and loaves of Jonathan's fresh-baked bread.

The commune here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea has put up a creche in the little park that commemorates the fallen war dead. There are sheep that have been made by pinning cardboard sheep faces onto hay bales. They give off a very distinct "Little Prince -- please will you draw me a sheep?" vibe and every time we go by them, I feel warm in my heart.

I have been away from lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea for a while, but I'm back now. After a long, hot August working almost every night in the pub and then sleeping as late as we could in the cool mornings with all the windows open and all the sheets pushed off the bed onto the floor, we left to go to the US and visit our new baby grandchild.

We have decided not to rate him with regard to beauty ("the most beautiful baby ever") because my own two tiny sons were, of course, breathtakingly gorgeous. But we have agreed that this child is definitely "top five." He is laughing now. Baby laughter is my favorite sound in the world.

But the US seems like a scary, angry place now -- a place where everyone is on the edge. With Putin's lapdog sitting in the White House, it is looking more and more likely that there will be a war here in Europe, but it is still not as frightening as daily, violent life in the US.

When we got back, I left again almost immediately to go to England to see Fiona, who had a health scare a couple of weeks ago during which I bought a plane ticket. But she had recovered by the time the visit actually happened. (Which is, after all, the best outcome.)

While I was gone, some of the ladies from the village came over to show Jonathan how to find the wild porcini mushrooms in our woods. They waited for him on the terrace while he was inside putting on his boots. When he came out, Gilda said to him, "So, we're here to teach you how to hunt porcini mushrooms?"

"Yes," Jonathan said.

"Well, we might start with this one," she said and pointed to a giant one growing straight out of the mossy wall of the terrace, smack in plain sight. "Shouldn't be too hard around here, apparently."

It's good to give your neighbors a source of amusement. Makes you more part of the community.

Nonno's birthday was at the end of July. We had a big lunch that lasted many hours at a long table behind the pub. There was seafood risotto and acciughe e gamberi fritti and lots of wine and singing. Late in the afternoon, I wandered inside and found Elena singing to Nonno.

But Daniele and Alice weren't there because they were at the hospital where Alice was in active labor. About five o'clock, the word came that the baby was born. Irene and Lucia Mora sprang into action putting up a giant pink bow and teddy bear on the front of the pub to announce the good news to all of Capriglia. Or, actually, they sprang into action directing Valerio -- "Up, higher, a little to the left, no, to the right, lower" -- who was perched up in the big sycamore tree actually hanging the bow and displaying superhuman levels of patience. 

"A pretty good birthday present for you," I said to Nonno.

"My birthday wish for the baby," he said, "is that she has a life as long and healthy and happy as mine has been."

Other updates:

Wheels: Now that Jonathan has a valid Italian driver's license, we have finally bought a car -- it is tiny and red and gently pre-owned. The people we bought it from also live here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea, renting a house from our friends Fabio and Luciana. We still don't actually have possession of the car yet, of course. That will come eventually. I hope it doesn't take two years to get, like the driver's license did. (There is a part of the movie of Under the Tuscan Sun where the heroine impulsively buys a house in Tuscany in only one day. Whenever I think about that, I laugh and laugh.)

Flora and Fauna: In the past week, overcome by the gorgeous abundance of the summer produce, I have made apricot jam, fig jam, cherry preserves, and zucchini relish. It's a sickness. And Milo went on a family trip to the mountains and brought us back some of the trout he caught. We cooked them with fresh ginger and garam masala and they were lovely.

 

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.

 

Today marks 1000 days that we have lived in Italy. When we first came here to our rustic farmhouse in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea, we knew no one and understood almost nothing. We were so dazed (by the move) and so dazzled (by the beauty) that it took us a while to get our bearings. We are still getting them, still dazzled.

But we know people now and understand, if not the post office, at least how the grocery store works. We know our butcher and our greengrocers and the people at our olive press and our flour mill. We know our neighbors and their families. We know the old men down at the pub who sit under the shade tree and drink wine and gossip all day. We know Alice and Daniele and are happily waiting for their baby to arrive. We know the baby's name.

Yesterday, Jonathan ran into the owner of the lovely house next to the belfry that we hope to rent for the next ten years. He says that they are happy to rent to us -- so all is well there. We still don't know what the rent will be, but we have our fingers crossed.

We also spoke to our immigration attorney yesterday and she says everything is good to go for my citizenship application even though only one of my state-level non-criminal records has come so far. She is going to check in person today to make sure that is true and get back to us.

The poppies are blooming in our olive groves now and the olive trees themselves are covered in flower buds that are just about to open. The chestnut trees are starting to bloom. The cherry tree is alive with joyous songbirds eating all the cherries. I have an Italian lesson later this morning. Jonathan is busy right now baking bread.

 

We are still wrestling with the Arkansas state bureaucracy, trying to get my non-existent criminal record and the ever-elusive apostille. Who knew that petty government officials in Arkansas (ground zero for denigrating all education except Bible study) would have so much difficulty handling official documents?

Meanwhile, Jonathan is scheduled to take his on-road driving test in his now years-long quest for an Italian driver's license. Whenever we go anywhere, he practices driving according to the official regulations as mandated by law. This gets us honked at a lot and overtaken by cars behind us who figure it's probably worth risking death by passing us on a dangerously narrow and winding cliffside road rather than continuing to drive behind an obvious madman.

So to cheer ourselves up, we have made another trip to the flour mill and also one to the cannoli shop by the beach in Viareggio, where everything is beautiful.

And we went to meet the owners and see the house with the view of the church belfry that we hope to be able to rent. It is a gorgeous little house with starlings fluttering around it and a dazzling view of the sea from almost every window. From the top bedroom, you can, indeed, look directly over at the bell hanging in the bell tower. We are anxiously waiting now to see if they are willing to rent it to us and if we will be able to afford it. I am trying not to get my hopes too high. But, honestly, both of us were smitten and we may, once again, act rashly in pursuit of beauty.

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.

 

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.