I started working on a new novel on Sunday. Just now, I came across this story in today's Guardian.

This is a picture of my spice cabinet's current state. I feel that the gods have spoken.

(p.s. When I showed Jonathan the headline, he laughed and laughed. "Well," he said, "they've got you pegged.")

 

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.

Before and after:

Sometimes Jonathan and I just stay home, the two of us alone together here in our sunny little house on the hillside. Those are the best days. 

Sara gave me seventeen lemons from her tree on Wednesday and so yesterday we made lemon-ginger marmalade, apricot-lemon jam, lemon-chili salsa, and Moroccan salt-cured lemons. The salsa is a bit too salty, I think, but the apricot-lemon jam is, as Daniele would say, the end of the world -- "la fine del mondo." 

 We usually end up stopping by our old house for some reason or other every day -- today it was to pick flowers and put out the paper recycling. But it is very quiet and still there now and the rooms echo when we walk through them. We live among our half-unpacked boxes at the casa campanile now.

I am in the throes of doing the advance publicity for Armadillo Massacre Number Three. In furtherance of that, today I was standing at the kitchen stove in full armadillo costume making a blackberry cobbler while Jonathan filmed me. I looked out the open kitchen window and the neighbor's gardener was standing in their yard staring at me.

"Buon gionro, signora," he said and nodded.

"Oh, buno giorno!" I said, all perky. And then we both went back to what we were doing. Tonight he will tell his wife what he saw at work today and she will perhaps accuse him of starting his drinking too early in the day.

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!"

 

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."

 

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Daniele has been baking pears with sweet red wine sauce. Last night there was a big pan of them keeping warm on top of the wood-burning stove that is right inside the front door of the pub. The aroma of warm red wine and pears and woodsmoke was perfect for a late autumn evening.

The air was so clear yesterday that we could see the French Maritime Alps and all the little red-roofed houses down on the plane seemed so close that we could almost see inside their windows. The horizon line is sharp and crisp and by mid-afternoon, there is a peach-colored glow that begins just above the edge of the sea.

The two and a half strings of Christmas lights that are hung above the street just outside the pub have now been installed to inaugurate the holiday season and we can look down on them from the bathroom window here at the house and feel festive.

 

The olives are really coming into their own now and Mimmo has sent a text saying he won't be able to be around much these days because of the harvest. I myself was out this morning gathering a small batch of ripe olives from our own trees to brine here at the house. I would have gotten more, but I walked face first into a big spider web, danced around a bit like a lunatic out there in the middle of the olive grove, and immediately after that decided that we probably have enough olives for now.

The autumn wildflowers are blooming all over the hillside and we are being deluged with the corbezzoli. Jonathan and I have made a pact between ourselves to never buy commercially produced jam again. Even so, we will never eat all that we have already made.*

We went yesterday to a food and wine festival in Pisa. We bought tickets (10 euros each) to go to a Cheese and Honey Tasting run by the National Organization of Cheese Tasters, the representative of which was jovial, but also gravely serious when it comes to matters of tasting cheese. We sat in a room for an hour with 30 other people paying very close attention to cheese -- sniffing it in the approved manner (one piece in each nostril) and tasting it very solemnly and deliberately while the cheese guy discoursed knowledgably about the attributes we should be noticing and the festival photographer wandered around taking pictures of people putting cheese up their noses.

We were given four different spoons to taste four very different types of honey and then pair them with the cheeses. The honey came from a place called the Queen of Nuts and if they had had a t-shirt, I would have bought it.

We wandered around the festival and bought three types of pasta, two types of pasta sauce, two jars of Tuscan soup, honey vinegar, melon liquor, honey-and-orange-flower-infused gin, and a cake. The best part, though, was that for three euros, you could get a wine glass in a pouch to hang around your neck and then when you went up to one of the numerous wine stalls, they would give you a free taste in your glass.

We each got a glass because we thought they were funny, but we actually drank no wine because when we got back to lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea, we were going to the regular Sunday night Giro di Pizza at the pub and it isn't wise to begin drinking too early in the day if you are going to end your evening with the professionals.

We are in the midst of a slow-motion tragedy there. Our beloved Renata is moving back to Poland after 22 years in Italy. Her mother passed away and her father is now alone and needs her, so she is moving back in November. It will be a terrible loss for us all and they did not tell Nonno right away.

She spent the evening teasing and playing as usual, making Ugo's hair stand up like a shark fin on the top of his head and turning Nonno's baseball cap around backwards. But at one point, she noticed that Geppolino's shoes weren't tied because he has a hard time now bending down that far, so she tied them for him, very tenderly and sweetly, and I thought I might cry.

Of course, how Geppolino would get his shoes off again once he got home is anybody's guess.

*Here is the recipe for the Italian Polenta Cookies with Corbezzoli Jam Thumbprints:

1. Make the corbezzoli jam by getting a lot of corbezzoli berries out in the garden, washing them gently, putting them in a pot with about half their volume of sugar, and a big squirt of lemon juice. Heat until boiling, stir frequently, and cook down a bit until it seems jammy. The corbezzoli berries are naturally very sticky, so this shouldn't take long. Let it cool while you proceed with the cookie dough.

2. Make the cookie dough by first creaming together one cup butter, one half cup sugar, and two tablespoons honey. When it is light and fluffy, add in one egg, one teaspoon lemon zest, and half a teaspoon each vanilla and salt. Mix thoroughly. Then add two cups flour and a half cup polenta (or grits or cornmeal). Mix until just combined. Then cover the bowl and refrigerate for at least an hour. Entertain yourself during this hour possibly by brining some olives or drinking some wine.

3. Assemble the cookies by rolling the dough into little balls about the size of a jumbo/colossal olive. Press you thumb down into the middle of each ball to make it into a little cup. Fill each little dough cup with corbezzoli jam. Bake in an oven at 325 degrees for 13-14 minutes. Cool on wire racks.

4. The texture is supposed to be gritty like that, I swear. Also, tragically, I'm sorry to say that this will not use up very much of your jam.

 

The nets are out in the olive groves now, waiting for the harvest. They look like ghosts floating in the trees. We are all happy that there will be a good harvest this year after last year's disaster.

The autumn mists have moved in and, in between days of startling blue-skied beauty, we have wet red tile roofs (which are so much more vivid than the dusty red of summer) and mossy stones and storms sweeping across the sea.

The chestnuts are ripe now and I have made chestnut butter twice this week -- coffee, chocolate and cinnamon. And the corbezzoli berries are ripe -- much fatter than they were last year when we all gasped in the heat until late autumn and waited, anxiously, for rain. Our persimmon tree even has ripening persimmons in reach, just waiting for me.

So I have been playing at being a good farm wife -- brining olives and making chestnut butter and corbezzoli jam. And tonight we are having a fall vegetable lasagna -- a "lasagna bianca" with cream sauce instead of tomatoes. It has baked sweet potatoes and fresh sage mixed into the ricotta. And more sage with sausage and caramelized shallots. And, of course, porcini mushrooms sauteed in rosemary-infused olive oil. Then there are roasted carrots and butternut squash and mozzarella and well-aged parmesan. I wish I had a sprinkling of pine nuts to add, but I didn't think about that until just this minute.

Later, we will go down to the pub and have a glass of wine with the boys and then come home and eat lasagna together and then go to sleep curled against each other while it rains in the night.

 

It's rainy today, with clouds and mist huddled around the house blocking our view of anything other than the dripping chestnut trees and the moss-covered stones. There are no sounds.

Jonathan is baking bread. The first corbezzoli have started to fall, so soon we will make corbezzoli jam. And then it will be chestnut season again and we will make our famous (if only to us) butter-rum chestnut butter. I feel somehow that I should learn to knit.

Instead, I have made a caramel-apple pie and a batch of late plum jam. We have been gorging ourselves on wild porcini sauteed in rosemary-infused olive oil. We are cautiously hopeful about the upcoming olive harvest.

Last Friday night, we celebrated Oktoberfest at the pub, even though it was still September. In these precarious days, we feel we should not delay our fun.

And Avi's father passed away early Saturday morning. He was a musician, a violinist, and Avi was his only child. We went to the funeral and then home alone in the rain. It's hard to believe that only one month ago, we were so hot and so tired of the katydid song and so glad to go into the cool water at the beach.