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.

 

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.

 

If there is a person who holds our fragile world here together, it is Alice. She organizes people to go see Nonno in the nursing home. She gives us rides in her car. She introduces strangers to each other. She sets up people with jobs, functioning as an employment agency, and finds houses for them to rent, an  informal real estate agency. When Mattia shows up later today to mow our lawn, it will be because Alice set it up. She is kind and smart and funny. The single funniest line in my new manuscript wasn't invented by me, but was said by her (called Celeste in the book): 

Two days ago at The Lark, I was talking to Celeste about my new book that will be coming out this summer. We will have a reading there in June to celebrate its appearance. I said that Trespolo is a wonderful place to write – always tranquil, always calm.

            “Yes,” Celeste said, deadpan. “Just like in The Shining.”

 

Renata is back for a short visit and we went with her and Alice and Celeste to visit Nonno at his house last Tuesday. He had a hospital bed in the living room and his niece Cristina there taking care of him. But yesterday he was moved to a Casa di Riposo in Lido di Camaiore where he can get professional nursing and physiotherapy. 

Valerio took him and got him all settled in, but half an hour after he left, Valerio's phone rang and it was Nonno saying, "There are only old people here!"

The physiotherapist says that Nonno is very motivated doing his exercises to try to get some mobility back in his legs. He wants to get back to his life and his friends at the pub. Jonathan and I are going to see him again tomorrow and taking Ugo with us.

We are in the final dregs of moving to the new house and may start sleeping there in a week or so. We still haven't found our drinking glasses or our duvet. I suspect we never will. But the boys' baby shoes made it and the Christmas tree ornaments and the drawing of a sunflower that Tris made when he was six and the easel my grandfather made for me when I was a little girl and he believed I would become an artist someday.

The wisteria vines out back all have big buds on them and the cherry tree is looking ready to burst into flower any day now. Jonathan saw a lizard yesterday -- the first so far this year. The fava beans are in season and we sit around in the pub shelling them all together. Summer is coming.

We are still in the process of moving, although this is so embarrassing to admit that whenever anyone asks me if we have finished yet, I say, "Almost!" I have been saying that for a week now.

Putting out the (increasingly copious) trash at the rustic farmhouse a couple of days ago, I saw a young man standing in the middle of the road scrolling his phone while a little white dog on a long leash snifted at Fabio and Luciana's wall. I spoke to the dog, naturally ("Hai trovato qualcosa di interessante?") and then to the young man ("Buona sera. Come si chiama il cane?") The young man looked very startled and said, "Oh! Errr! Ummm... I don't speak Italian." And so I said to him in English, "I asked what your dog is named." And we chatted together for a bit. He is visiting from London and his dog is named Whiskey -- meaning that both of the dogs whose names I know in Capriglia are named Whiskey. At the end of our chat, he complemented me and said that I speak excellent English. I don't want to brag, but this is absolutely true.

I turned to go back in and realized that our electronic security gate had closed behind me while I was talking to dogs in the street and I was now locked out of our property.

"Oh, shit," I said, demonstrating that my mastery of the English vernacular extends even to the most colloquial and profane. "I'm locked out." 

"Ah," said the young man. "You can probably climb over it." And with that, he and Whiskey took off. It's a tall fence and he could see as well as I could that he didn't want to get involved.

But I did manage to climb over it, even though it is much taller than my head and even though I am 63 years old. I tell you this because I am prouder of this achievement than I am even of fooling ungallant English sops into thinking that I am Italian.

But really, I am hardened now to these sorts of trials and tribulations by having faced down, just this week alone, both an American insurance company and also my dire mortal enemy -- the Italian Post Office.

The battle with the Post Office involved me spending two entire days (10 hours each) sitting on the belfry house terrace overlooking our mailbox from a hidden position and then suddenly pouncing out on the mailman, taking him by surprise just as he was planning to leave a notice saying that he couldn't make the delivery because no one was at home. I mean, he still sent an email notification later saying that, but at least now he can't look me directly in the eye. And I did get the delivery the next day.

So I won that one. The American insurance company, tragically, is still up in the air. They are so evil, the insurance companies, that -- on the FIFTH international long-distance telephone call -- I did something that I have never done before in my life: I cursed at a service worker. The curse I used was "bullshit."

I'm not saying that I have never cussed anyone out before, but I think (as best I can remember) that that sort of thing has always before been reserved for boyfriends. (As one of my colleagues at Colorado College once said, apropos of a faculty meeting that went especially awry, "'Motherfucker' can actually be a term of endearment.")

So this morning, I went to have blood tests ordered by my doctor, who is upping the strength of my blood pressure medication. I am not joking.

But the big news these days is that Daniele is a finalist in the Tordelli D'oro Competition. Tordelli are a filled pasta, sort of like ravioli, a delicacy of this region, that Daniele serves with a zippy and aromatic meat sauce. He goes next week and all of the finalists will make tordelli for the judges at a public event in Bologna. We would go and cheer him on, but tickets are 60 euros each and it is a school day for Jonathan. But Daniele says if he wins, we will all eat free tordelli that night. "Aw, c'mon," Manuela says to him, "even if you don't win, we will all eat free tordelli that night!"

 

At long last, on Saturday we finally signed the lease for the belfry house and paid our rent and got the keys. The movers are scheduled to come on Friday to deliver all of our old furniture and the last of the ghosts from our house in Colorado.

In the meantime, we went on Sunday to see the house for the first time on our own. The owners had warned us on Saturday that the latch to the gate to get in was somewhat broken and quite tricky to open. 

They did not lie. It was so tricky, in fact, that in the end Jonathan had to scale the two-meter-high security fence -- no mean feat -- and drop down on the inside of the yard to let me in from there.

The neighbors presumably watched all this in amazement from behind their curtains while shaking their heads at the inexplicable ways of Americans. We will doubtless provide them with hours and hours of amusement for the next few years.

In the meantime, we are celebrating the "Giorni dei Merli" -- "Days of the Blackbirds" -- here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea. These are called the Days of the Blackbirds because they are supposed to be the coldest days of the winter and Nonno tells us that when it is so cold, the blackbirds fly down into the chimneys to get warm and the soot from the smoke there gets onto their feathers and that is why the birds are colored black.

There have been special celebratory feasts every day at the pub and the big bottle of lottery wine, which was never in the end claimed by its winner, was drunk by all of us.

But the signs of spring are all around. I saw some yellow daffodils blooming on a sunny slope in the olive groves yesterday and the mimosa trees are glowing. The wolves are also flourishing and on the most recent night of the full moon, one sat right outside our dining room windows and howled at it. He was answered by friends on the next hillside. There is nothing like wolves howling literally right outside the door to make a house feel cozy on a winter night.

 

The Italian word for "ticket" is "biglietto" and there are various kinds of biglietti for all sorts of purposes. 

When you buy bread at the bakery counter in the supermarket outside town, first you get a biglietto from the little machine and then when your biglietto number is called, you go to the counter and get your bread. When you go to the post office, you get a biglietto from a little machine and then when your biglietto number is called, you go to the counter and get told to fuck off because you can neither send nor receive the mail you want. It is very orderly.

When you get a coffee, sometimes you pay first and get a biglietto from the cashier that you then present to the barista, who makes you a coffee. Sometimes, however, you get the coffee first from the barista and pay later. There is no way to tell which method any particular place uses, but if you are desperate and deprived enough, you can figure it out eventually.

When you take the train from Pietrasanta, there are no actual humans who work in our miniscule and unimportant train station, so you buy your biglietto from a machine at the station. Then you are supposed to go to another machine out by the tracks and stick the end of your ticket in it to be "validated." On the train itself, sometimes a conductor comes through and checks everyone's ticket and sometimes they don't. When I went with Jonathan to Pisa two weeks ago to watch him give his presentation in his mock trail for International Law, I forgot to validate my ticket and the conductor did come through checking, but she didn't care about my lack of validation. "They never care about the validation," Jonathan said and it is true.

When you park your car on the street, there is usually a machine somewhere around fairly nearby where you buy a biglietto for a certain amount of time to leave on your dashboard. You have to estimate how long you are going to be parked and, given our leisurely pace of life, it is prudent to overestimate that. By a lot.

All the parking biglietto machines work a bit differently so that when you park someplace new, it is always a bit touch-and-go trying to figure out the new machine and get back to your car with your biglietto before the parking patrol comes by and gives you the other kind of parking ticket.

When you park at a big parking garage or an airport parking lot, you get a biglietto when you go in and then you have to remember to pay at a machine somewhere else before you try to leave in your car at the exit gate, where there are no human attendants, but only a little machine that takes your already paid biglietto and then, for some reason, gives it back to you -- a little souvenir of your stay. I wander around with all sorts of used biglietti in my coat pockets and the cup holder of the car, like confetti. I'm pretty much always ready for a parade.

Jonathan came back from his trip to the US on Friday. His plane was an hour late leaving Newark and we were worried that he would miss his connecting flight in Zuruch for Firenze.

"If I miss my connection to Firenze," he texted me, "I'm going to see if they will send me to Pisa instead." Pisa is much closer to home than Firenze is. He had tried to buy tickets to leave and return from Pisa when planning this trip, but there were no workable flights from there that fit his schedule.

But he made his connecting flight in the nick of time and I jumped immediately into the car to drive the hour and a half to Firenze to get him. I got there just as the flight from Zurich was supposed to be touching down. But the info board said the flight was going to be 20 minutes late. Then it changed to 40 minutes late. Then 60, which is quite a lot for a 90 minute flight that is already in the air, so I settled in to wait.

At last, Jonathan texted that they were on the ground, but not in Firenze. They were in Pisa.

They had been diverted because of fog. So since he was already in Pisa, we decided that he would take the train to Pietrasanta and I would drive back there as quickly as I could and pick him up at the train station there.

Only when I tried to pay my parking biglietto at the little machine, the machine didn't seem to want my money. I tried everything -- turning the biglietto upside down, putting it in backwards, entering my license plate number into the keypad, inserting my credit card anyway. Nothing worked. So I got in the car and tried exiting the parking lot with the unpaid biglietto, but the exit gate was unmoved.

So I had to do the Exit Gate Backup Of Shame and then I re-parked the car and wandered forlornly around the airport until I found a man working in some sort of office.

"Excuse me," I said, "but this ticket is not functioning." ("Mi scusi, ma questo biglietto non funziona.")

He took the ticket and looked at it for a minute.

"Signora," he said very solemnly, "this is a biglietto for the train to Pisa."

"Ah," I said. "Well, that would explain it then."

In my defense, I need a lot of biglietti and, although they are all different, they are not that different.

But Jonathan is at last back home now. He brought a suitcase full of New York bagels and his old viola from high school. We stopped at the supermarket and bought smoked salmon before heading back up the hill to lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea.

Saturday, we went to lunch at the pub. Alice was there with Celeste. At one point, singing broke out. Jonathan is very happy to be back home.

Two important updates:

1. The raffle for the giant bottle of wine was finally held at the pub. We did not win. But the person who did win (#53) bought their raffle ticket so long ago that they can no longer be located. The word has been put out that they can come and get their prize, but no one has shown up yet. So the bottle may be raffled off yet again some time in the future. Fingers crossed!

2. At the pub the other night, two people came rushing in all breathless to find Mario. "We were just walking by your house," they told him, "and we saw a wolf in your yard, inside the gate!" Mario left with them to go see what was up, but by the time he got there, the wolf was gone. This reminds me of the time in Colorado when my friend Norma got a message from UPS that they couldn't deliver her package and she would have to come pick it up at the distribution facility herself instead. The reason they gave in the message was "Bear in driveway."

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 third draft of my memoir is sitting quietly marinating for a while so that I can come back to it with some "objective distance." Fat chance.

But, in any case, I am using my free time since I am not working on it (and since the chestnut butter days are now behind us) to work on some promos for Armadillo Massacre Number Three. Last night, we shot some footage in the pub. Did I ever imagine my life would end up this way? Um, no.

 

Some updates:

Wildlife: The wild boar in our woods has been going, well, wild. Last night. for the first time, we heard him rustling around out in the garden up close to the house and this morning there were new trenches uprooted all in between the grape vines. We have not, thank god, had any face-to-face interaction with him.* But we were visited by the biggest grasshopper that I have ever seen in my life. I realize, of course, that this is not the same.

* (Jonathan says he is disappointed by this, but I didn't notice him rushing down into the dark and noisy woods last night.) 

Festive Season: This weekend is the Festa di San Martino. Jonathan and I went into town this morning to the special holiday mercato and celebrated by buying sweet baked goods and killer booze. I am on a diet (to try to make up for my rather debauched summer) where I am trying not to eat any sugar or to drink any alcohol at home. So that's going well.

Yesterday, we inaugurated the official winter season with a big Bollito at the pub. Daniele made a gorgeous tortellini al brodo and we all ate and ate and drank much wine and then finished off with Punch Livornese, which is hot rum with espresso floating on top of it. This is for when you want to feel absolutely shitfaced and simultaneously totally wired. Festive season, indeed.

Italian Language: Now that AI runs our lives -- whether we want it or not -- whenever my Italian teacher sends me homework to do between my lessons, Gmail offers to translate it for me. Very considerate, but not likely to improve my language skills.

Persimmons: Mimmo has figured out how to get the persimmons down from the tree out back and, knowing that I love them, has very sweetly made a project of getting as many as he can for me. On Thursday, he got 21. I have them all sitting around in the kitchen getting ripe, which they will do either one-by-one (best case scenario) or all at once (most likely scenario).

Law School: Jonathan has become the sweet grandpa of his year in law school. The other students, who are mostly younger than our youngest child, all use the informal pronouns with him and treat him with great affection. He is on the group chat with them, where they mostly seem to discuss the parties that they have every weekend night and not a small number of other nights as well. I think we should start going to the parties, showing up with a bit platter of deviled eggs and suggesting we all play charades.

 

It has been raining lately and up here on our mountainside sometimes we are inside the clouds and sometimes we are above them. 

The wild boar have found their way into our garden again and left long trails off dug-up trenches in between the grape vines and all across the olive terraces. Mimmo says they aren't really hurting the plants, so we just quietly co-exist with them here in the rain.

In the pub, everyone has moved inside now to sit around one table near the wood-stove. They have put up a sign on the door that says if someone neglects to close the door after themselves when they come in, the next round of drinks is on them.

We sit so close together that our knees are touching. There is the smell of wood smoke. Two different people brought bottles of wine with them Friday night and Daniele railed against them -- but gently -- from where he was playing scopa in the corner with Almo and Alvaro and Luca. Our national tennis hope, Jannik Sinner, won in two sets -- 6-4, 6-3 -- on the television over the door to the kitchen. 

Nonno bought us all punch al mardarino and we drank them as if it was deepest winter although it was only a cloudy evening after a long day of rain and the dark of true winter is still three months away. We ate spicy salami from Napoli and then gorgonzola bruschette and then octopus bruschette and there were, at the height of the evening, twelve people squeezed in around a table for six and when the actual diners started showing up at 8:30, we wandered away and Jonathan and I walked home the long way, holding hands in the wet streets with the moon coming in and out of the clouds and an owl, sounding lost, calling again and again in the woods.

Luciana sent a picture that she took from her bedroom window of our drive and our red maple tree. She can't see our actual house from hers -- no one can see our house because it is hidden away of the back side of a little hill. Jonathan didn't recognize the view and thought she was sending a photo from some fabulous vacation spot. "Wow! Where are you?" he texted back.

She is here, looking at our house.

 

Jonathan being in law school is part of our routine now. Three mornings a week, he wakes up before dawn and rides his bike down to the train station in Pietrasanta for the half-hour train ride to Pisa and then peddles past the Leaning Tower as the sun rises on his way to his first class.

We went into Firenze last week and bought him a folding bike that is easier to get into the crowded morning train. Because it folds up to be the size of a carry-on bag, it has very tiny wheels and makes Jonathan look like an escapee from a travelling circus. He is now a local character and people make sure to tell him when they have seen him on it -- an interesting event in their day.

This is all well and good on the way down the hill, but at the end of the day when he comes home, he has to peddle up the mountain (a thousand-foot elevation gain over only about four kilometers of road) on his tiny wheels like a demented clown. The hard-core spandex cyclist crowd  -- many of whom are actually professionals who use the lovely Via Capriglia as a training ground for the Tour de France and the Giro d'Italia -- pass him easily, but often give him complements and friendly encouragement as they go by. One buff young man even circled back last Wednesday to say, "You are my hero of the day!" He didn't, Jonathan says, call Jonathan "Gramps," but he was clearly thinking it. So, a dubious complement, but we take whatever we can get from the whippersnappers.

When Jonathan goes past the pub, everyone on the terrace cheers wildly.

In the meantime, I am home making chestnut butter. We are in the height of chestnut season now and I can't seem to resist. If it weren't that peeling the nuts is such a tedious chore, we would probably be drowning in chestnut butter by now. So I guess the tedium is a blessing.

My drawing is now on the labels of the house wine at the pub, which is fun. The label says "Una comunita' e' una famiglia" -- "A community is a family."

And for purposes of historical record, below is a picture of everything I bought at the market last Thursday. It weighed 13 pounds all together and cost 14 euros -- about 15 dollars. Some day we will marvel at that.

Heavens -- that was fast! 

Friday night, Daniele asked me if I would try to design a label for the wine they are going to start selling at the pub. I did that on Saturday and Sunday and then yesterday (Wednesday) he sent me this picture of one of the bottles. 

 

Autumn is here now and I startled a beautiful deer in back of the house yesterday when I went out to hang up the laundry. It was a lovely dappled brown and black and it disappeared into the woods immediately.

The chestnuts have started to fall and so have the corbezzoli berries. The porcini mushrooms are still going. I am making plum jam later today, but chestnut butter is on the immediate horizon and corbezzoli jam after that. The air is cold in the mornings and very clear so that we can see the individual windows on the houses down on the coast. The sea looks smooth and burnished in the sun.

Daniele and Alice have decided to start a line of their own wine at the pub and Daniele asked me to design the label. (At first he hired an actual professional designer, but he didn't like anything the designer came up with and I happened to be sitting around drinking wine with the boys at the time, which is how most things happen to me. That has been true my entire life. Being underfoot has worked out well for me as a life strategy.) I did about four designs and they chose the one with the green door, which will be a good souvenir of the place. So I have, at long last, come into my true calling. Jonathan and I are anxiously waiting for the labelled bottles to appear. The naked bottles are already there and Daniele gave us one to take home to "inspire" my drawings.

I also made another book trailer. These are much easier to make than the actual books themselves are.

After a full week of trying my best, Goodreads still refuses to acknowledge that the author known as Kathy Giuffre is me and Facebook refuses to acknowledge that I am a human being at all. It's disheartening.

On the up side, the boys at the pub are teaching me to play scopa, the rosemary in our garden is flowering and I'm having fun making promo trailers for my book. Here is the one I made this morning: