I don't want to be dramatic, but damn, y'all. Our beach club opened last Monday and already we are seeing lots of jellyfish washed up on the sand. And they are not small, the jellyfish. They are honking big jellyfish.

Fabio says, "Oh, the little ones sting much worse." This is not comforting. 

So we go, Jonathan and I, to the beach and Jonathan studies for his next law school exam that is happening on Tuesday and I lie in the sun and believe that the warmth is healing all of my ills and purifying me. We take walks every now and then along the strand and watch the surfers, who are braver than we are, and look at the jellyfish that have been beached. The jellyfish used to not show up until August, when the water had gotten warm enough for them.

Global climate change has meant that the seas are getting warmer and more hospitable to jellyfish while being less hospitable to, for example, coral reefs, among other lovely and non-stinging things. Someday, we will tell our grandchildren about the old days when you could swim in the sea and it was cool and lovely and you didn't emerge from it covered in painful welts. They will look at the seething mass of ten billion jellyfish swarming the beaches of the Mediterranean and not believe us.

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.

 

The European Union has released guidelines advising everyone in Europe to stock up on at least 72 hours worth of food and water, in case of "emergencies". The immediate "emergency" at hand is the possibility of war now that it has become so abundantly clear that Trump has bowed down completely to his master, Putin, and that the US, far from being any part of our defense, is just another enemy with which to contend.

How 72 hours worth of supplies will help should World War III break out is unclear to me. It is also unclear to me how we would manage to pack 72 hours worth of artichokes and lemons for transport to wherever it is that we would be evacuated to. Jonathan and I talked about it and came to the conclusion that the only hope for us would be here in this community and that, should war come, our job would be to help as best we can to care for our friends who are even more elderly than we are. All we have is each other.

 

It's been quite a week for us. Monday we released the first episode of our new vodcast, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: The Theory and Practice of Resistance. It is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xELKX54aKI

We feel like we can't just sit here silently on our hillside while the great wave of fascism swallows the US whole. We only have tiny voices, but we will use them anyway, as best we can. The vodcast is kinda wonky and very homemade, but we hope that what we lack in flash, we make up for in sincerity. And fresh vegetables.

And then Tuesday, we spent ten hours in the hospital while Jonathan had a polyp removed from his vocal cord. We are certainly using the hell out of the fabulous free Italian health care system. Now we wait for the results of the biopsy to come back. So the terrible word "biopsy" hangs in the air here and we stay very close together all the time, as if we are protecting each other from something.

But the good news is that we have discovered the perfect way to make French toast by using leftover pan d'oro from the holidays. Sliced horizontally, it is shaped like a star and it is impossible to be glum while eating stars.

 

Unlike last week, when we were wrapped in tragedy, this week we've been beset by smaller disasters largely of our own making.

Jonathan read an article online touting the health-giving wonders of intermittent fasting. It was on the internet, so it must be true. On Mondays and Thursdays, we are only allowed to eat a quarter of our usual calories. Since our usual calories lately have included consuming entire bags of mini Snickers bars (thus the need for drastic action like fasting), you would think that eating only a quarter of them would be a cinch. But (in the spirit of taking ourselves firmly in hand) we are interpreting this as having one scrambled egg for lunch and a very small plain green salad for dinner. The rest of the week, you can eat normally (as long as your "normal" doesn't include entire bags of mini candy bars -- see above.) They say the first few times you do this are the worst and then it gets easier. All I have to say to that is, dear sweet Mary Mother of God, I certainly hope so.

So last night (a non-fasting night) we got very excited about trying out our lovely salt-cured lemons for the first time. We found a good sounding recipe on the internet (where, you will recall, everything you read is true) for salmon with salt-cured lemon, parsley, and olive pesto. It smelled great! 

It turned out that it smelled great because you can't smell salt. You can taste it, though. In fact, salt was ALL we could taste. So. Much. Salt. It was like we had made Dead Sea sauce. We scraped the pesto off the fish as best we could and tried to eat the remaining salmon because when you are going to be fasting the next day, you do not throw out your dinner -- no matter what. Last night's Festival of Salt is a testament to that. 

We are also reluctant to waste any food (although we may make an exception for the salt-cured lemons) because we are feeling rather poor lately. We got our first tax bill from the Italian government and it was slightly more than my entire take home pay for all of last year. Our friends in America keep saying that this must be a mistake, but it is not. It is this year's taxes, the advance payment for next year, and the Italian wealth tax to punish us for having squirrelled away all those American 401K nuts for the American winter of our old age. We should have just spent it all on hookers and blow when we had the chance.

But this is the price we pay now for living the life of grasshoppers who sing all summer. The good news is that our tax dollars support things like maintaining the terrifying-but-at-least-very-well-maintained vertiginous road up to our little mountainside haven, the pub where we eat and drink so cheaply (it is somewhat tax-supported because it is technically a social club for workers and pensioners), and the free national health care that we receive.

And we are certainly getting our money's worth with that. Jonathan went to the physiotherapist last week for his back. They massaged him and stretched him. It is sometimes hard for us to completely understand all of the unfamiliar medical terminology in Italian, but it seems that the national medical establishment has determined that Jonathan's problem is that he is both too tightly wound and too short. I said that I could have told him that. He has another appointment tomorrow. When this is all over, I expect he will look like Mike Teevee at the end of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

With Jonathan and I both less mobile because of our injuries, it takes us a long time to get the basic housework done. We hobble down to hang out our laundry in the back. We hobble from the car into the veg store and then hobble back to the car with our haul. (Fortunately, the veg store is so tiny that we can reach almost everything in it with just a few steps.) We hobble to the kitchen with our dirty dishes after meals. (Again though, fortunately, there aren't very many of them on two days each week.) Last night I was hobbling back to the house after putting our trash out at the street for pick-up this morning, when some animal very distinctly growled at me from inside the roof of the cantina as I went by. Given the way things have been going lately, this is probably no more than I should have expected. In any case, my rate of ambulatory speed suddenly increased quite dramatically. It was a miracle.

And, to complete the small disasters of the week, we are of course both angry and morose about the political situation in the US. But, to be fair, that one is not our fault.

This morning when Jonathan went out to hang up the laundry, he heard a great rustling noise from the woodpile right next to the clothes line. Given the recent goings on here, we have determined that it is, in all probability, a snake. And, given the volume of noise, not a snake of modest proportions.

We have evaluated the situation and decided that these are not our favorite clothes anyway and that we can get along without then until the cold sets in this coming fall. There is no need to go near the clothesline for a while. We are prudent. And naked

 

Tragically, I was on my last bite and Jonathan was halfway through his piece of the creme torta we bought at our new bakery when we discovered that the bottom of it was completely covered in mottled green mold. Being the Mensa brain trust that we are, we decided to sterilize our gastro-intestinal tracts (and our memories of the event) by drinking way too much alcohol. We both felt like crap the next day, but whether it was the mold or the hangover is anybody's guess. We have decided that since the weather is getting cooler anyway, we will start baking our own bread.

And two days ago, while Jonathan's sons were visiting, Rafe found an actual scorpion lurking underneath the edge of a door. Jonathan trapped it in some tupperware and released it far out in the woods. I helped by screaming a lot. There is also the corpse of what was, in its heyday, a monstrously large and vicious-looking wasp laid out on the front porch.

Our friend Almo gave us all a little tour of his studio while the boys were here. I find the whole workspace, coated as it is in a very fine layer of marble dust, beautiful. 

Hunting season opened last weekend and we hear shots in the woods behind the house in the mornings. Soon wild boar will appear on the menu of the pub, instead of merely in the olive grove. I find them much more congenial slow-roasted in red-wine sauce. And our pomegranate tree now has seven fast-ripening pomegranates on it now.

There is a price to pay for paradise. But it is still paradise.

 

It's nature red in tooth and claw out there lately, kids.

This morning, I innocently went out back to hang up our laundry on the line. While I was busy with my clothes pins, there a scuffling commotion and a loud thump and a big SNAKE fell from the roof of the house -- the house that I myself live in -- and landed on the paving stones at my feet. It did not bite me because it was locked in mortal combat with a big lizard that it was trying to consume head first. The lizard was having none of it and the two of them thrashed around underneath the clothesline -- the lizard half in and half out of the snake and the snake whipping its tail/body around in a frenzy. The lizard was using its tail and back feet (the only non-ingested parts of it visible) to fight off the snake. I have no idea what the ingested parts of it were doing. 

I screamed, but Jonathan didn't hear me. I had to run inside and call him to come out and save me, but by the time we got back, the snake and the lizard had both vanished. 

"I wish I got to see as much wildlife as you do," Jonathan said, while sort of poking at the wood pile that is just there in a attempt to flush them out.

I wish Jonathan got to see MORE wildlife than I do -- perhaps all of it, in fact. I would be content to hear the stories after the fact. Although I guess that the news that the roof of the house where you sleep (ha!) at night is infested with snakes is not particularly any more comforting for being second-hand.

Our friend Luciana who lives across the street tells us that she hit a wild boar with her car on the lovely Via Capriglia the other night. She says it sounded like an explosion. Fortunately, her car has "pedestrian air bags" that deploy outside the car when you hit someone. This seems like a very good idea to me and I'm surprised it has taken this long to come into common practice. The boar seems to have gone off uninjured and will live to be eaten later in the fall.

And the first wild porcini mushrooms showed up in the market this morning. How they managed to grow is a miracle given the searing heat and complete absence of rain for weeks on end. But they were there and I bought them and later today they will be sauteed in rosemary-infused olive oil and then eaten. They would go nicely with some roasted boar, but at the moment, all I have is the possibility of roasted viper.

 

The reception for my new book happened Saturday afternoon down at the pub, out on the terrace under the tree leaves. As Jonathan and I left the house to go to it, we ran into (not literally, thank god) a big snake sunning itself on our porch. We decided (not immediately, I admit) to view it as a good omen -- the adrenalin certainly helps to put you into the pepped-up party mood and the screaming warms up the vocal cords wonderfully.

Because I have truly debilitating stage fright, fortuitously combined with truly abysmal Italian language skills, I wrote out the presentation in English (and also, you know, the book itself), but Jonathan did the translation of the presentation into Italian and then gave the presentation speaking as me. It was lovely. He did all the labor while I just sat and gazed at him adoringly. Easy peasy. The we all ate a lovely buffet that Daniele and Alice had put out for the occasion. Also, I had my hand kissed for the first non-facetious time ever in my life by an elderly European gentleman. It was pretty swoony, I have to say. Not everyone could get away with it.

But now I am ready to go back to being part of the furniture, which is how I like my life best. In furtherance of this, I have been taking long afternoon naps so as to preclude any future achievements that would end up in public receptions. I can't accomplish too much if I spend all my time drooling into my pillow. A clever tactic.

Besides which it is very hot. Very, very hot. Mimmo is a bit worried about the olives. It is too hot too soon for them. The trees have lots of baby olives the size and color of peas on the branches now, but if we don't get rain soon, he tells us that the baby olives could all drop off. This would break my heart.

And not just mine. The weather made for a bad harvest around here last year and put a real strain on the olive farmers. Olives have been cultivated on this land for at least two thousand years, but global climate change may be bringing it all crashing to an end -- not just the olives, but a whole way of life. None of us had anything that we can do about it personally and individually -- it is beyond our control. So I just watch the sky for signs of rain and hope.

We discovered a wasp nest up near the mailbox this morning. They are hideous-looking beasts, menacing black and almost as big as my thumb. 

"Oh, no," Jonathan said, "now we won't be able to get our mail!" 

Then we laughed and laughed.

 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!

 

Jonathan mentioned to Mimmo, our trusted gardener, the fur that we had seen by our front gate.

"Wolves?" Mimmo said, instantly. This was rather unnerving seeing as how we had really only been kind of joking about the wolves among ourselves and had not said anything at all about them to Mimmo or anyone else.

"They won't hurt you," he said, all twinkly-eyed. Then he shrugged, "Unless they're hungry."

Of course, he was just kidding. Probably.

 

We went down to the pub last night for a special seafood feast -- "Il Mare visto da Capriglia" -- "The Sea seen from Capriglia." We arrived a little after 8 p.m. -- a bit early for dinner here, but it's good to be a bit early on special nights. The old men were still finishing up their card game, but the tables for dinner were starting to fill up.

Jonathan and I looked at the menu, which seemed unorthodox -- five different appetizers to choose from, but only two first courses, one second course and one dessert. This is not usual. But we are used to being confused as to how things are supposed to work -- it is our comfort zone now. So we were looking at the menu, trying to decode it and decide on appetizers when the realization dawned: this is not the menu from which we would choose -- this is the list of the things that we will be served.

All of it. All eleven courses. As we say in Italy: "Madonna!"

It was delicious. Every mouthful of every course. I think my favorite was the sformato of pureed veggies in a passato of squid ink. I never in a million years would have ordered this. When it was put in front of me, I had great trepidation. But I am, apparently, a woman of reckless daring and courage. And, let's face it, I have put worse things in my mouth than squid ink. Hell, I was practically raised on gas station burritos. So I gave it a whirl. And I'm glad that I did. Daniele may have his faults for all I know, but he shakes a mean squid around the kitchen.

We ate until almost midnight and then strolled home content under the stars. Outside our gate, though, we were disturbed to see a huge amount of fur. Tufts of it all over the grass and stones of our drive, in profusion, brownish gray and thick. We have no idea how it got there, but tufts of fur in great profusion are never a good sign. Something untoward has clearly gone down at the very gates of our home.

We don't know what animal lost these tufts or in what manner this happened. I said to Jonathan that if I had to guess, I would have said that it looked like wolf fur to me, which would explain all the howling that we've heard echoing around the forested canyon walls behind the house for the last couple of days. But, of course, there are no wolves left in Italy, I said.

Au contraire! We looked on our friend the internet and discovered that there are wolves in Italy -- specifically in Tuscany, specifically in the Apuan Alps, which are the hills behind our house.

It turns out that we are smack in the big bad wolf hot spot of Europe. This makes our quiet nighttime stroll down to leave our garbage outside the gate every evening more daring than we had thought it was. Not to mention our midnight wanderings home from the pub, stuffed with eleven courses of seafood and smelling (no doubt) succulent. (And the aroma of squid ink is a penetrating one.) In my wildest imagination of the challenges we might face in moving to Italy, I must admit that being besieged by marauding wolves had never even crossed my mind.

One Sunday every month, my drawing teacher, Franco, hosts an open drawing session at one of the pubs down in Pietrasanta. He provides a model -- clothed because, even in Italy, a nude woman standing around in a restaurant would cause unnecessary comment -- and anyone can just go in and draw. Jonathan and I went last Sunday -- me to draw and drink wine, Jonathan to work on his laptop and drink coffee. My friends Elisabetta and Lorenzo from my regular art class were there along with a handful of other people whom I didn't know.

One of them heard Jonathan and I speaking English to each other and introduced herself to us. She is Canadian, but has lived in Pietrasanta for 20 years and knows Franco and had come to draw. We chatted a bit and then the drawing began. Claudia (one of our regular models from class) was posing at one end of the room where the drawing was going on. Franco was playing his usual soothing drawing music on his phone. The regular pub patrons were going about their business at the other end of the room. Very tranquil.

All of the sudden, the Canadian turned and screamed over her shoulder the foulest stream of Italian invective that I have ever heard in my life (which is saying something.) She was cursing at a man at the other end of the room who apparently (I hadn't notice it because I was concentrating so deeply -- artistically! -- on the exact shape of Claudia's nostrils) had been cursing into his own phone. This had offended the Canadian.

Now in an American bar, there would almost certainly have been an escalation at this point, with louder shouting in return, thrown drinks, and possibly small-arms fire. Elisabetta and I instinctively scooted our chairs closer together to huddle for safety. We are not used to this sort of behavior.

But instead, I witnessed something infinitely scarier. The man walked calmly over to the Canadian woman and said in a low voice (in Italian, of course), leaning over her shoulder as she sat across from me at the table, "You shouldn't talk that way to me -- I'm the Consigliere." Then he walked away. Silence fell.

"What's a Consigliere?" Elisabetta whispered to me.

"I don't know," I said. "You're Italian, not me."

The only Consigliere I know of is Tom Hagan and he left a decapitated racehorse head in a film producer's bed. This guy, if not exactly Tom Hagan, was at least horse-adjacent. Elisabetta and I scooted even closer and concentrated very hard on our drawings. I am betting that Claudia's nostrils have never before been rendered with such exacting precision.

Jonathan and I were happy to go back to lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea where the most heated discussions at our own beloved little pub involve the proper herbs for certain fish. (Some pull hard for sage -- others for tarragon, the Italian word for which is "dragoncello." I stay out of it.) I haven't seen either the Canadian or the Consigliere around town since then. Admittedly, having seen all of the "Godfather" movies (even the substandard third one), I haven't looked very hard for them.

Mostly, though, people in art class are benign and even friendly. (This is one of my drawings from class -- not Claudia.) Besides Elisabetta and Lorenzo, there is my friend Antonio, who is 88 and draws like Egon Schiele, and Mismas, who draws like himself, which is breathtaking even though he is mainly a sculptor, and who gives me encouraging smiles whenever I have made a particularly egregious hash of things. There's Vitzi, who tosses off stylish sketches while discussing how she is studying for her A-Levels. She's taking five, which seems like a lot to me. There are others, but these are my main friends. And then there's my best friend in class, Rocco, who is 21 and who translates for me when I don't understand what is going on (which is a lot of the time.) He taught me the word for "knee" the first time class I attended and "hail" (apropos of the actual weather) last Tuesday. This is what he was working on (I snatched it from his Instagram). When anyone tells him how great it is, he is self-deprecating and blushes.

Running a vacuum-cleaner-related errand in Massa earlier this week, we discovered a big supermarket that had ramen noodles, tortilla chips, and salsa -- none of which are available anywhere in Pietrasanta. I went slightly crazy and now my body salt content is approximately 97 percent. It's strange the things that you find you miss.

It has been a long time since I published a book -- eight years. And during all of that time, I have been writing. But that work has just been one failed attempt after another. I think that maybe this is one form of writer's block -- you write all the time, but you write shit.

But failure is part of art. You just have to trust it and breathe.

So it is strange to be in the depths of serious writer's block and at the same time have a book coming out. While googling myself (a key activity of the blocked writer) a couple of days ago, I discovered that my newest book is available for pre-order on Amazon. I was surprised to see this because 1.) I feel somewhat disconnected from this book, having done nothing with it, except for tedious but necessary tasks like checking references and making an index, in over a year now, and 2.) I keep expecting the publishers to realize that they have made a terrible mistake and that they must not release this book. I check my email with dread in my heart, but nothing from them so far. It is still some months until it is actually available, of course, and many things may go wrong between now and then.

In the meantime, I have four (4) novels here, sitting in files on my desktop, that are either stalled or failed. I am thinking of taking up knitting.

Today, in a shop in town, when the cashier told me to "have a good day," instead of answering "you, too" (as I had intended), I said "whatever you want." He was probably pretty surprised by that. I know that I was.

One of the features of abandoning your old, comfortable life and uprooting yourself to move to a new culture in a new place is that every day is an adventure. Every day holds surprises. Our surprise for tomorrow is going to be whether or not we have electricity. Exciting!

Handbills appeared all around the village a few days ago announcing that the power would be off from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. tomorrow in various locations. Our street -- Via della Fornace -- is listed with only the cryptic note "sn." We do not know what "sn" means.

Our first thought was that it stands for "senza numero," meaning "without number" -- some place along the street where there is no address (and this could be a lot of places on lovely Via della Fornace, which is largely what is called "unspoiled") would not have power, assuming that it ever did have power and that someone in the middle of what is basically nowhere would have a sudden desperate need for power. Given that even taxi drivers and Amazon trucks refuse to risk coming up to the wilderness that is Via della Fornace, this seemed nonsensical to us, but no more nonsensical than any other bureaucracy, in Italy or the US or anywhere else on earth.

Two elderly women who came across us as we were staring at the handbill on the street assured us that we would all have plenty of power -- giant heaps of it. They did not tell us what "sn" means, even though we asked, and gave the impression of being rather addled, although very kind.

Jonathan's friend in Milan, who has been a source of much demystification for us and to whom he texted a picture of the handbill, tells us that "sn" means "sinistra" -- the left side of the road. We absolutely trust her, but have no idea which side of the road is the "left."

We are going to park the car on the other side of our electrically controlled security gates tomorrow morning not later than 8:45, just in case we end up with no power (temperatures just above freezing predicted) and decide to flee somewhere warm and lighted. 

Nothing says "you're really living the adventure now" like the prospect of having to flee for warmth.

 

We are back in the US for a few days and I have some thoughts.

-- Customs and Immigration at JFK Airport is perhaps not the very most congenial place to get a good first impression of these Great United States. More of a shitstorm hellhole of bilge water. I once accidentally fell into an open sewer in Jakarta, Indonesia, during a cholera epidemic. (Long story.) A dead body was down there already. I looked back on that experience fondly while changing planes in JFK.

-- Signs here even in places like the International Arrivals area of major US airports are strictly English only. This is bizarre and contributes at least somewhat to the point above.

-- There is lots of space in the US. It is all over the place. There are hotel elevators in the US that are bigger than some hotel rooms in Italy.

-- Every single thing in the Walgreen's Drug Store in San Francisco is locked behind protective plastic to prevent shoplifting, including the toothpaste and toothbrushes. Apparently, this is common in big city drug stores all over the US. It speaks poorly of general standards of morality in the US, but quite well of general standards of dental hygiene.

-- Although the people we have encountered have been without exception kind and friendly, everyone seems very beaten down, just struggling to make it through the day. I blame the lack of good cheap wine, a culture that frowns on two-hour lunches every day followed by two-hour naps, and postindustrial neoliberal capitalism.

-- There is no food anywhere in Italy, under even the most extreme circumstances, that would be allowed to be as bad as the free breakfast at our hotel. Them's shootin' eggs.

-- On the other hand, you can buy things in the US that you can't (or at least we can't) in Italy -- like baby aspirin. But it is locked behind protective plastic.

 

It's December 1st and the rosemary is still flowering here in Capriglia-by-the-Sea. And there are also lovely red berries that we have never seen before ripening in some of the trees. We never would have eaten them, but Mimmo tells us that we should dive right in. They are corbezzoli, from the tree arbutus unedo, the "Strawberry Tree," which is the national tree of Italy. Unlike the strawberry grapes on the vines out back, however, the corbezzoli do not taste like strawberries -- more like mushy apples, I think -- although the texture is vaguely strawberry-ish, I guess. And they are a lovely strawberry red color.

But I can't be too bothered with mushy-apple berries because the lovely Mimmo, who now shares a deep olive-based bond of brotherhood with Jonathan (their discussions together of olive lore have become lengthy, detailed, and specific) kindly helped us get some more of our many, many persimmons down from our burgeoning tree, where they dangle by the score just out of reach. He cut one smallish branch off with an extension saw and we harvested what we could from the wreckage. 

"What we could" turned out to be 81 persimmons, all of which are becoming ripe simultaneously.

When we first, many weeks ago now, mentioned our bounty of incipient persimmons to Jonathan's family, his sister-in-law responded with very dire anti-persimmon warnings about people who have perished from eating them, developing fatal bezoars in their stomachs from the tannins. This seemed iffy to us, but we looked it up on the internet and, sure enough, a guy in China did once die from eating some gigantic quantity of unripe persimmons in a very short space of time. But you have to eat a crazy big amount of them. "Who would do such a thing?" we asked each other at the time.

Me. It turns out that the answer is me.

I comfort myself with the fact that at least I am waiting until they are ripe.

And I am back in art class after a couple of weeks away because we were traveling and then I had a cold. I am happy to report that despite my prolonged absence, I have retained my position as the most completely hopeless hack in class (relatively speaking -- you should see the masterpieces my classmates toss out in 10 minutes), although I have now moved up to being a completely hopeless hack using the sanguine conte pencils that have been a hallmark of great Italian drawing for almost a millennium. My language skills are somewhat improving, though. So there's that.

And, through it all, I continue to work away on my book. The page proofs have arrived and I am proofreading them while making the index. It is enthralling, believe me, and quite frankly puts the whole death-by-persimmon thing into a much better light.

 

This past Sunday, a few minutes before 8 a.m. our time, I was out in back of our house taking pictures of some big mushrooms I found out there. I heard some gunshots -- it is still hunting season and there are deer and game birds and even wild boar in the forests around here. I have seen four deer so far in our yard and Jonathan saw two pheasants one day. And we had some really delicious venison slow-roasted with chicory that Daniele cooked up down at the pub last week. People who eat meat cannot be squeamish about hunting. So I heard the gunshots and knew what they were. Hunters for deer or birds or boar.

At exactly that same moment, it was just before midnight in Colorado Springs and a gunman was opening fire in a crowded LGBTQ+ club -- Club Q -- in Colorado Springs. He killed five people -- Raymond Green Vance, Kelly Loving, Daniel Aston, Derrick Rump, Ashley Paugh -- before being subdued by Richard Fierro and other patrons. We heard about it Sunday afternoon here, first just garbled reports. We spent the rest of the day waiting for updates, refreshing our browsers, checking our social media. 

Each of these acts of gun terror -- and the United States has them constantly -- is horrific. And it shouldn't matter whether I know the victims personally or not. It shouldn't matter that this one happened in the place where I lived for 26 years. It shouldn't matter that every browser refresh comes with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that one of the names on these nightmare lists will be someone I know. They are all -- every act of murder -- heinous. 

But dreading to see the name of someone you care about on one of those awful lists nevertheless just makes everything so much worse.

On Tuesday, Jonathan and I had our first meeting with the immigration lawyer who is helping me with the process of getting Italian citizenship. "Why did you leave the US?" she asked me. So I told her the story of Club Q. 

She almost couldn't believe it because such things are incomprehensible here. They should be incomprehensible everywhere. But sadly they are not.

It was all lies!

We had so many financial worries about blowing up our lives in the US and moving to a villa on a hillside in Tuscany! The big question looming over everything was how we would ever be able to afford to live this life. We thought very carefully about our budget, trying to imagine what we would need to spend money on and what we would have to abandon -- what pleasures we would just have to learn to live without. The propaganda everywhere in America, interwoven with every thought of European life, was that a life of beauty, of olive groves, art lessons, cobbled streets, views of the sea, tagliatelle ai funghi, red tile roofs and wine and roses blooming in November -- all of that would cost a pretty penny and leave us, sooner or later, destitute and regretting our profligate grasshopper ways. Better to work until you die -- it's the American way. But it was all lies!

Here is a very boring post about prices:

Our internet service costs almost exactly one-tenth of what it did in the US. Our cell phone bill is a little less than $15 a month (and we have the Deluxe Plan). Gas costs about $7 a gallon, but the tiny cars are incredibly fuel-efficient. The rent for our car (insurance included) is less than just the cost of just our car insurance back in Colorado. Trash and recycling pick-up is free. A bottle of wine costs about $2 -- or you can go super-expensive and spend $10. An entire basket filled with really fresh and delicious fruit and veg (spinach, eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, onions, peppers, grapes, plums, oranges) usually runs about $4. Yes -- only about $4 for all of it. We pay for loaves of bread at the bakery -- still warm from the oven -- with pocket change. We don't eat much meat, but a week's worth -- chicken, sausages, fish, prosciutto -- usually runs us about $10-15. Espresso is a dollar a cup. When we go down to the pub in our village for a glass of wine before dinner, we get a half-liter of the house wine and a bottle of fizzy water and are given free snacks -- sometimes so many that we are too full for dinner later. Total cost is $5. The rent on the rustic farm house (trusted gardener included) is less than we could have rented out our house for in Colorado Springs.

The whole idea that life must be a grim treadmill of unceasing labor just to stave off destitution is a lie that capitalism uses to scare us into submission. It's all lies.

And I think it is related that the big thing we have noticed is the lack of anger around here. That violence always bubbling under the surface in the US just doesn't exist here. I think it's because there is no feeling of dog-eat-dog in this world. The dogs eat homemade lasagna with fresh pasta and a glass of the house red just like everyone else.