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.

 

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."

 

This morning we were buying some veg when a massive tour group -- like 50 people -- stopped in to view the store. The store comfortably holds maybe six people -- eight is a crowd. So it was a teeny bit crowded when 50 tourists piled in to watch Jonathan and I choose a red pepper.

Barbara and Sara say this happens all the time. The members of the tour groups take lots of pictures, but never buy anything. They think fresh fruit and veg being on sale is quaint. I do so hope that I looked quaint. I did my best.

Barbara and Sara also gave us another giant load of lemons, so we are making limoncello and lemon marmalade this afternoon.

The rain has cleared off for a bit and the poppies are knocking our eyes out. I ran across a quote from Goethe yesterday -- one that my friend Bill Davis had sent to me when I was living in the South Pacific: "No one walks under palm trees unpunished." I suspect that poppy fields are the same and, therefore, spend an inordinate amount of time trying to propitiate the angry gods. 

 

It has been raining so much here that our roof has bloomed. We can look out our bedroom window onto the top of the front porch roof and see tiny pink wildflowers opening in the intermittent sun.

Also, because of the rain, part of the hillside in Capezzano Monte collapsed down into the ravine, taking a big section of the Via Canaldoro with it. Fortunately, no houses were in the way and no one got hurt, but the people who live above that section of road -- including three of our pub friends -- have no way of getting in and out of their houses except by hiking. 

The commune is working now to put in a temporary bridge so that they will be able at least to move their cars down to a parking place below the landslide. Then the workers will take the bridge away while they repair the road. But at least then when the residents hike out of their homes, they will have their cars waiting for them instead of just being stranded on the side of a very steep and obviously unstable mountainside. The new road construction is expected to take at least a year -- maybe two.

But no one can say that the spirit of the hill folk is in any way dimmed by these troubles. On May Day, Jonathan and I went down to the pub for an aperativo and were sitting talking in the late afternoon tranquility to Nonno and Geppolino when a big van pulled up and a dozen of our friends piled out -- Valerio and Semina and Il Presidente and others -- and everyone on the terrace greeted them with cheers. Then they all got drinks.

They speak a dialect up here in the hills so that even Jonathan, whose Italian is very fluent, can often not understand what is being said. I certainly don't. So we have gotten used to sussing out situations by body language and reasonable conjecture. We figure out what is going on, often, just based on the vibes.

"They've been up to something," I said to Jonathan about the guys getting out of the van. "They have the swagger of conquering heroes -- like they have been through some great trial together and have emerged victorious."

"Yeah," Jonathan said. "It's like they have won a grand battle."

Drinking. It turns out that they had been drinking at a secret bar in Viareggio all day. It is a May Day tradition started 50 years ago by Nonno. They pool their money for a van and a driver who takes them to a secret location at 8 a.m. and they drink all day long.

They had been at it for 11 hours and were still standing when they decided to return to the pub for another drink so that they would be on home turf for the end game. So the can-do spirit and steadfastness in the face of great challenges is alive and well in these hills.

Our new grandbaby is thriving and even though it is not yet the date that he was originally supposed to be due, he now weighs more than his father did when he was born. Jonathan and I have been shopping for baby clothes at the Super Bimbo store Lido di Camaiore. If they sold "Super Bimbo" t-shirts, I would buy one. Instead, we got a romper that says "Bello come Babbo" -- "Handsome like Daddy" -- on the front.

And we have been given even more lemons, so I am at it again with the marmalade. I am thinking of using it as a marinade for roast pork. Because no one can eat this much toast.

Our Italian teacher told us about the best place around here to get cannoli -- a tiny pastry shop by the sea in Viareggio where they fill the cannoli while you wait. So we went yesterday and got four and ate two (one each) for breakfast and two for lunch. Then I had a nap. Then I had some toast with marmalade for the vitamin C. Because I'm healthy like that.

 

The sea is milk blue tonight. A storm is moving in. But for the moment, the air is perfectly still and it is perfectly quiet. Even the birds, who have been so joyous lately, are silent so that the only sound at all is, very faintly, the shushing sound of the sea breaking on the coast. Every night now, in these fading days of winter, the sunset bleeds into the sky and the sea and breaks our hearts and I think to myself, "Never! Never has there been a more beautiful sunset!" And every night it's the same, but different. And Jonathan and I call out to each other, "Look at the sky! Look at the sky!"

The mountainside here is covered in blooming flowers. Not to be outdone, the wet books in our house from the flood in the cantina have also opened like blossoms in the spring.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I read in the news yesterday that there is a "heat dome" over southern Europe. I had not known until I read it that we are officially in a crisis -- the news does not, however, come exactly as a shock. It was 84 degrees at 4:10 a.m. in our bedroom this morning, where Jonathan and I lay side-by-side gently sweating into our sheets and waiting for it to be morning so that we can go down to the beach.

Our beach club is very tranquil and sedate in the mornings -- mostly just old people like us reading their newspapers or taking a stroll along the strand. Every now and then there is a parent or grandparent with a baby still asleep in their arms. Paolo smiles and greets us by name while the sleepy teenagers who work at the cafe clear up the remaining evidence of the previous night's festivities. (It is only in the evenings when the Riviera beach parties really get hoppin'.) Jonathan sits at the cafe and keeps me up-to-date on the developments in the love triangle among three of the teenaged cafe workers. 

These mornings even the sea seems sleepy -- like glass, clear and olive green. Every now and then a pale little ghost fish flicks by, hiding in the light refracted on the bottom sand. I wade out and stand waist deep in the cool water staring off at the watercolor horizon, washing away the sticky feeling of a hot and sleepless night. This morning, I saw a jellyfish, also ghost white but with a deep blue-violet edge around its cap, waving along just under the surface of the water. At that exact moment, I felt refreshed enough to head back to our umbrellone on the sand.

Back at the house, it is fresh fig and lavender season. We have made fig jam twice -- once with lemon and once with amaretto. But now it is too hot for jam making and we just eat the fresh figs whole and cold from the fridge.

And there are bundles of lavender hanging upside down, drying, all over the house. When it is dry, I will make lavender sachets with it to put in all the clothes drawers to keep away the moths. And when the winter comes, every time I pull out a sweater, there will be a little aromatic burst of summer and I will long once again for the heat. ("I won't," Jonathan says.)

Nonno's birthday party was last Friday night. We all chipped in and bought him a helicopter flight over these mountains that he has loved so much and that he used to hike in as a young man, but now cannot reach. At our house, almost at the top of the mountains, we saw the bright red helicopter fly over us late Sunday afternoon. We knew it was Nonno because it buzzed the terrace of the pub twice and we could hear the cheering.

"He seemed as happy as a bambino," Alice said, having gone with him to the helipad to see him onto the flight. "And now he will have a new story to tell." We will go down to see him sometime in the next couple of days and tell him that we saw him and he will tell us the story of it and I will be happy.

That is quite a statement, given the general situation. I'm starting to feel about ice the way Harrison Ford did in "The Mosquito Coast." The Italian word for jellyfish, by the way, is "medusa." (If nothing else, my vocabulary is expanding.)

 

Summer has burst open. Today at the fruit and veg store, the first figs were there and the first wild blueberries. We also bought cherries and peaches and apricots. The first borlotti of the season were there, so we bought some of those, too, as well as asparagus, peppers, leeks, zucchini, cabbage and lettuce. All of this cost us about thirty dollars.

The hydrangeas at home have turned delicate pinks and purples and blues. And the main street street in town, Via Mazzini, has been decorated for summer with hanging umbrellas along the whole two block stretch of it. I sent a picture of it to my brother and he texted back: "Nobody prepares for rain like the Italians. By which, of course, I mean, 'so beautifully, so poetically, in such a visually stunning way.'"

Having waited a full month, we went yesterday to check on Jonathan's driver's license, as we had been directed to do. They told us to come back in July. The little grapes on our vines are starting to plump up and are now the size of peas. Our olives grove is filled with bright red poppies in the tall grass.

Quite often, people ask us why we haven't travelled around more from here. The problem is finding a time when it is not heartbreaking to leave lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea. At the moment, we are awash in poppies. The olive trees have begun to bloom. The cherry tree is filled with cherries and the persimmon tree is loaded with baby persimmons. The birds have lost their minds with joy for it all.

 

Today for the first time in weeks, Jonathan and I are having a quiet day at home, just the two of us. The sky looks stormy in between moments of chiaroscuro sunlight, but the rain is holding off.

I am spending the day researching international movers. The political news from the US is so frightening and the Magats seem so violent and deranged and bent on the destruction of everything that we fear complete chaos there by the time the fall election arrives. So we are going this summer to begin the process of shipping to Italy the things that we left in storage so long ago in Colorado Springs.

But, of course, we are leaving behind Aiden and Tris, who are all I really worry about in the US. But they don't want to come here with us -- at least not now. So I comfort myself by believing that I am building a safe haven for them here, if they ever need it.

In the meantime, we have been hosting guests -- five groups so far in the past seven weeks, staying anywhere from two days to two weeks. And we ourselves went last weekend to visit a friend near Milan. We went to Lake Como, where I had never been before, and even more excitingly, to a lovely pastry shop in Monza where we walked in and ordered "one of everything." Then we ate them all over the course of the next two days. That is the sort of thing I wouldn't have dreamed of doing when I was younger and more sensible. 

But I am older now and more rash and much more aware of the brevity of life and of the certainty that many, many chances will never come again.

We have started going to our beach club now, the Bagno Internazionale, even though the season doesn't really swing into gear until the beginning of June. There is just enough activity that some beach chairs are out, but not enough to scare away the sandpipers and the feeling of fathomless aquatic serenity.

I am in limbo, waiting to hear something good from some publisher about my book. I have been waiting for what seems like a very long time. Jonathan gave a talk in Italian at MUSA about Artificial Intelligence. The boys at the pub have moved outside to the terrace on sunny afternoons, but are still drinking red wine, not having made the jump to summer prosecco just yet. 

I have discovered absinthe-flavored candy for sale at the store where Jonathan buys his coffee beans and am now a lost soul. 

Flush with the sugar high from all the pastries, I made an obviously foolhardy decision to try to mail a present to a friend in the United States. The extraordinarily dour woman at the shipping counter -- ensconced behind about a mile of yellow crime scene tape covered with signs saying "Keep Out" -- demanded to know what we were shipping and then told us to fuck off. It's nice to know that in this world of dizzying changes and rapid-fire transitions, that some things never change. We can always count on no success of any kind regarding the mail.

Mimmo came across and dispatched (I assume -- and hope -- with great rapidity, although I was fortunately not there in person) two very large snakes living in the grass near our front gate. The wisteria is over for the season, but the poppies glow like pocket sunsets in the grass everywhere.

After four days of sunshine, a storm is blowing in tonight. Already we can't see the sea.

The boys were fractious and discontented down at the pub -- displeased at the changes that have happened down in town, displeased at the useless shops and restaurants that displaced the artists. The fascist government, in their war against the local foliage, have trimmed back the formerly lofty and gracious gracious trees that lined the Via Apua, killing (they say inadvertently) many of them. Valerio served us some snacks of a strange vegetable and when the boys asked where it was from, he said, "Via Apua." We all laughed ruefully. Nonno and Mirio sat next to each other and I watched their faces, so similar, while we talked and knew that we won't have them much longer.

We have given up hope of Jonathan's driver's license ever coming from the office in Lucca and today began the process all over again at what is apparently a friendlier and more relaxed office in Massa. The people working in it, when we went by today, were indeed friendly and relaxed. But everyone is friendly and relaxed at the beginning -- it is the bait that keeps us optimistically biting on the bureaucratic hook.

We have made limoncello from Sara's lemons now and I continue to work on the pictures for my tarot deck. The flowers are a riot on the hillside. We swim up the Via Capriglia in them.

Yesterday was just a normal day. These are the hardest to write about because it is hard to describe a "nothing special" that is at the same time so happy.

The loudest sound here these days is birdsong. Sometimes there are church bells mixed in and behind that, almost imperceptible, is the shushing sound of the sea. The spring flowers are starting to bloom. I saw the first poppy of the year on the roadside down near town.

We have been going to town to buy groceries every day this week since the refrigerator died. We went on Tuesday to the UniEuro in Massa and bought the smallest fridge they sell to hold us over until a new big fridge arrives. The nice man at the UniEuro loading dock didn't bat an eye when we rolled up with our clown car expecting to drive a refrigerator home in it. 

"Oh, no problem," he said, cheerfully. And sure enough, by putting down the back seat and sliding the front seats up so far that Jonathan was driving with his knees up under his chin, we were able to close the hatchback with zero millimeters to spare.

So yesterday we bought some chicken for our dinner at the butcher shop (founded in 1907) where three generations of the Lane family work and where we are advised about our meat by Susanna or Babbo, who knows what's what when it comes to meat. Then I bought a new purse for 25 euros in the weekly Thursday market at the Piazza dello Statuto because my old purse finally gave up the ghost.

Then we zipped over to the Coop, which is just outside town and sells things like shampoo and paper napkins that are not available in the charming but tiny stores where we do most of our shopping. The real joy of the Coop, however, is not the access to shampoo and paper napkins, but the regular arrival of the bollini every six months or so. The bollini are little stickers that you get with each purchase. Then when you've collected enough bollini, you can trade them in for prizes.

Our first bollini-fest had Pyrex for prizes. We went nuts getting bollini enough for Pyrex crostata pans and Pyrex mixing bowls and Pyrex measuring cups -- things that are not actually for sale anywhere around here that we know of. The next bollini-fest was for sporting goods, which was not as exciting, but we did get some quick-dry towels. Currently, we are nearing the end of a bollini-fest for bed linens. We've already managed to nab a complete set of sheets and pillowcases for a single bed and are now working on the "matrimoniale" size.

We are supposed to get one sticker for every 15 euros that we spend, but we have noticed that the cashiers exercise great leeway here and that if we say "please" when they ask if we are collecting the bollini, we tend to get more bollini than we are supposed to. We have sometimes gotten as much as twice the number we are owed. Seeing what heights of politeness I can reach with my limited Italian and what largesse of bollini this elicits is one of my great entertainments.

In the afternoon, Jonathan had zoom meetings and I chatted with Aiden for a while about the state of the world and his life. The state of the world seems very bleak, but my son has such a good heart and is so thoughtful and kind and brave that I can't help but feel that everything will turn out OK in the end.

Then, while the sunset was turning the sky and the sea into melted roses and gold, we walked down to the pub to see Renata, who is just back from over a month in Poland visiting her family. She and I talked together for a while, standing behind the bar, about how hard it can be to live far away from the people you love.

Nights like these are my favorites. There was no one there except for Renata, seven of the beasts, and us. We share wine around the table, pouring each other glasses from the communally purchased bottle, and eat the "snacks," which really constitute a full meal -- starting off last night with a large meat and cheese board with baskets of bread and followed up by meatloaf and mashed potatoes, served family style -- Salvatore dishing it out last night -- and then after the fist serving, everyone just helping themselves, all of us seated around the big marble table -- the "tavolo di marmo." 

How the economics of all this free food works is beyond me. We pay for the Dreams & Poetry wine that we drink at 10 euros a bottle, but unless Daniele and Alice are making it themselves in the bathtub at home, there is no way that they turn a profit on these perfect nights.

We told them all the story of our broken refrigerator and about how now we have a giant bag of formerly frozen peas that we have to eat right away. The discussion of what to do with all those peas -- like any discussion of food -- was exceptionally lively. "We should have brought them here for us all to eat," Jonathan said. And it's true.

Jonathan had another meeting at 8:00, so we began to leave at 7:30. "He could go and you could stay here," Renata said to me. "Oh, no," I said, "because I am a very good little wife and while he is working, I am cooking." The boys all thought this was quite funny and wanted to know which dishes I cook well. "Nothing," I said and they laughed. "I don't cook anything well, either," Nonno said. And while we were laughing at that, Guglielmo filled my wine glass again on the sly.

But Jonathan made it to his meeting with seconds to spare and I cooked the chicken while he talked. So that is a typical day here except that every day is a little different.