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

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

But what?

"The Shroud of Turin," Jonathan says.

 

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.

 

I finally got the results back from my Italian Language Test for Citizenship and it seems, in contrast to all reasonable expectations, that I passed. So we have made an appointment with our immigration attorney and I am now beginning the formal process to become an Italian citizen. This would have shocked all my ancestors who fled from Italy for the bright dream of America, the land of milk and honey. They lived in a very different world.

So I am looking forward to the bureaucracy of the citizenship process. It should be epic, given the red tape we have encountered so far. Even as I write this, in fact, Jonathan is down in town in class taking driving lessons because, two years in to the process, we have been so soundly defeated by the red tape and bureaucracy of the Italian DMV that it finally seemed that the only option was to just start at the beginning. He is the oldest person in class and the only one, he says, who takes notes.

But to counter-balance the good news, a wild boar got into the garden last week and dug up a huge amount of ground in the olive grove. It is difficult to even photograph because the area is so big. Jonathan is sad that we apparently slept quite peacefully though all the excitement. Jonathan would like to see a wild boar in action. Jonathan is nuts.

But in other pork-related news, Monday and Tuesday were the festival for San Biagio. We went early Monday morning and stopped in to the Duomo to get Jonathan's throat blessed. Our friends at the pub assured us that it was happening all day long. But we were such eager little beavers that we arrived too early and wound up being there right at the beginning of the early morning mass. So we backed out as unobtrusively as possible and instead enjoyed all the booths for the fair. Roast pork sandwiches called "porchetta" are the big thing for the fair and it is never too early around here for roast pork. There were whole pigs laid out everywhere we turned. There were also plenty of roast pig heads arranged to appear so as to be calling out to passersby, proving that the porchetta sellers of Pietrasanta know how to have a good time.

We bought some wild-rose-infused oil and dried citrus slices from our friend Manuela at her booth and then a big bunch of yellow mimosa -- the first I've seen this year -- from a flower seller. Then we went to see the animals that were waiting for the Blessing of the Animals in the piazza by the Uffizi di Commune and the mimosa flowers made me very popular with the horses. 

Barbara assure us that, having missed the official activities at the church, I can bless Jonathan's throat myself up at the house as well as any priest could. Yesterday we blessed it with celebratory champagne because of my language exam results. But it was French champagne, so the blessing may not have taken. We will bless it again with the boys down at the pub with good, cheap local red wine. That will do the trick.

Sometimes, lately, the sea turns burnished orange at sunset and sometimes it is deep ink blue. Last night Jupiter and Venus and Mars were all lined up with the moon in a bright band across the sky and Jonathan and I stood out in the yard to look at them and at our shadows on the drive cast by the moonlight. "Let's always remember this moment," we said to each other.

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.

 

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.

 I worry.

I know that it doesn't do any good, but I worry anyway. One of my big worries about moving to Italy, where I don't know the systems and don't understand the logic behind the processes by which things happen (and I am not alone in this, btw) is what would happen if we had a medical emergency.

Now I know.

Some friends from the US came to stay with us for a couple of days and one of them had a medical emergency their first day here -- not life-threatening, but incredibly painful and needing real medical attention.

So we went down to the little hospital at the very foot of Via Capriglia, where there is an after-hours walk-in clinic. The doctor warned us that since we are not Italian, we would have to pay upfront for the care. Being Americans, of course, we are used to astronomical medical bills. I once had to pay upfront at the emergency room in Colorado Springs when one of the boys had broken his arm, even though I have medical insurance, because the other boy had broken his leg (jesus!) the weekend before and my insurance payment had not made its way through the system yet. If I had not been able to instantly cough up several hundred dollars, they would not have treated my child because his injury wasn't life-threatening.

This is the reality of US health care and so we were prepared for the worst -- especially because we were so carefully warned. The doctor there treated my friend and then the bill came.

Twenty bucks. The entire, uninsured cost of the visit was twenty bucks.

We went to the all-night pharmacy to get his prescription filled thinking, "Ah, now -- here it comes! Prescription medicine with no insurance -- this will certainly cost a pretty penny!" Once again, we were carefully warned that because we are not Italian, we would have to pay.

Thirteen bucks. Entire, uninsured cost -- thirteen bucks.

The whole process took less than an hour. There was no waiting anywhere. The total cost was 33 euros. My friend is doing well. We dropped them at the Pisa train station yesterday to continue their trip.

Jonathan pointed out that the reason for all of the careful warnings about payments was because an Italian would have paid nothing. Ever. So that is what happens when you have a medical emergency in a country with socialized medicine. Just fyi.

We also discovered that in the duomo down in Pietrasanta, you can take communion, should you wish, with the gluten-free version of the Body of Christ. Again, just fyi.

And I have tried out egg tempera painting using the pigments that I got from Zecchi and a traditional recipe from the early Renaissance for mixing up the paint using egg yolks and white wine. It just takes a splash of wine, but since you then have an open bottle, you can have quite the relaxing time while painting. I painted a tiny artichoke. I think I'm in love (with both the paint and the produce.)

We have made reservations for Easter lunch this Sunday at the pub. They are holding a raffle to win the big chocolate egg that didn't get sat on. We are number 49 -- our hopes are high!

 

It's another beautiful day here in Capriglia-by-the-Sea. Alice has been decorating for Halloween down at the pub. This makes us love her even more than we already did.

When we went down night before last, she was busy making a big spider out of a trash bag and some sticks. She had already made a dead body wrapped in a bag hanging upside down from a tree on the terrace with a sign saying "He Didn't Pay." We thought this was pretty funny, but she told us that the priest (the main employee of the only other place in the village that is open to the public) will certainly preach a sermon against Alice and Daniele because of the decorations.

Last Easter, she told us, they served a very playful menu featuring such dishes as "The Passion of the Tordelli" and "Lamb of God Chops." The priest came to eat -- and he ate deeply, with fortitude and vigor, enjoying his meal to the fullest. Then he went back to the church and wrote Alice and Daniele a very stern letter calling the menu "blasphemy" and threatening to report them to the Catholic Church Office of the Inquisition, which is a real thing that still exists.

In the end, Alice apologized profusely, took down the menu, and managed to mollify the priest with protestations of remorse and also cheesecake. But clearly there were no feelings of great love left between the parties.

It could have been very serious for Alice and Daniele. The priest could have caused them to be shunned in the village, forbidden the members of the congregation (i.e., everyone) from going to the pub. It would have been an interesting measure of the lingering power of the Catholic Church, though, to see if a priest's interdiction would have had any effect on the old men who sit all day under the trees drinking bottles of wine and gossiping. It is not clear to me which side would win in a contest between eternal damnation and having to go all the way to Capezzano Monte to drink wine with one's friends.