Semina (whose real name is Francesco) likes to hunt and is good at it and usually very successful and known around here as the go-to person if you need any sort of wild game, but especially wild boar, which is his specialty.

A couple of days ago, a chef at a high-end traditional restaurant in town asked if Semina could get him some boars' heads for some sort of ancestral Tuscan delicacy he was planning. So Semina went out and was very lucky, actually getting three boars, very fat from having spent the holidays gorging themselves on the last of the fallen chestnuts.

The chef only wanted the heads, so Semina severed those and put them all together in a bag, but then had to figure out what to do with all the rest of the boar meat. He kept some for himself and some undoubtedly went to Daniele at the pub to be roasted with red wine and wild herbs.

But Semina also knows three Albanian brothers who are sharing a house up here in the hills and could use a little neighborly generosity, so he cut off a couple of nice fat pork haunches and put them in a bag for the brothers as a little New Year's gift and then headed out to make his meat deliveries.

He stopped at the house of the three Albanian brothers first and dropped off their bag of boar meat, for which they were quite grateful, and then continued on towards the restaurant in town. He was only halfway down the mountain when his cellphone rang and it was the eldest of the Albanian brothers.

"Semina," he said, sounding serious and a little scared. "Are you sending us a message? Is this a threat? We don't understand what we have done."

Semina opened the bag of meat still on the floorboard of his car and saw that it had the haunches in it. He had accidentally given the three Albanian brothers three severed boars' heads in a bag.

When he told us this story last night in the pub, Jonathan laughed and laughed and laughed. He is still laughing this morning.

As we were leaving, Semina said to us, "Now remember -- if you don't let me help you move, then we are no longer friends."

So sometime at the beginning of February, we will have a moving party and invite our friends from the pub to help us carry boxes of books to the new house and then eat lasagna and drink wine together all afternoon.

 

The wolves have been howling at night lately. It echoes around the forest and the ravine behind the house and, when we walk out at night, we are careful, peering into the darkness and intent, listening to every sound. The dark comes very early now. Somehow, it all makes Christmas seem so much more real.

The Christmas fairs seem sparkly in the dusky winter light. In Pietrasanta, there are stalls selling special cheeses wrapped in straw and special sausages. There are stalls with local wine and new olive oil and different types of honey -- chestnut and linden and acacia and "a thousand flowers." There are stalls with serving implements carved from swirly olive wood and ones with delicate lacy shawls and sweaters crocheted with wool from local sheep and one with handmade soap from local olive oil. There is a stall with fifty different types of herbal teas, including one called "butterfly." Everything seems to twinkle a little bit.

But despite all this, the holiday season doesn't seem actually commercial. Instead, everyone we know is busy exchanging homemade baked goods and homemade wreaths and homemade jams and jellies and pickles. Jonathan and I are bringing around jars of our lemon-ginger marmalade and loaves of Jonathan's fresh-baked bread.

The commune here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea has put up a creche in the little park that commemorates the fallen war dead. There are sheep that have been made by pinning cardboard sheep faces onto hay bales. They give off a very distinct "Little Prince -- please will you draw me a sheep?" vibe and every time we go by them, I feel warm in my heart.

I have reached the stage of my life where divesting myself of everything I own has enormous appeal. There is just something about having to physically lift up all of your possessions yourself that makes your treasures seem so much less precious. In ten and a half months, we will leave our hidden paradise here in the woods for a different paradise in a different place -- right in heart of bustling downtown Capriglia-by-the-Sea (pop. 255 people, counting us). And we will once again have to lift up all our shit.

In preparation for this, I have been very slowly ridding myself of books that I paid $30K to transport all the way across eight time zones, but now -- who was I kidding? -- will never read again. There is a Little Free Library in the big grocery store just outside town and every time we go there I bring two books to donate. My books are in English, but there is a very international community here and the books almost always have been taken by someone by the next time we go in. It's a slow process, but an oddly satisfying one.

Yesterday when Jonathan was putting out the trash, he found a book that had been left for us in our mailbox. It was from our neighbor Fabio. He left a note saying that he had come across the book in the grocery store LFL and took it for me because it seemed like the sort of thing I would be interested in. Indeed, it was -- so much so that I bought it in 2002 when I lived in the South Pacific and carried it back to the US and kept it for over two decades and shipped it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to Italy ($30K...) before I put it in the grocery store LFL last week.

It is nice to have thoughtful and caring friends who think about me when they come across books I would like. Apparently, I am keeping this one.

We have had another meeting with the owners of the belfry house. And, although we don't yet have a rental contract, we have a verbal agreement that one of these days we will make a written agreement to eventually sign a contract to rent the house. We are very excited about this because it means we will be renting an empty house and will, therefore, have room for all our stuff -- our stuff that I am currently busy donating to the LFL at the grocery store.

The belfry house is lovely -- maybe even slightly larger than this one, but without all the outbuildings and grounds. So no more grape arbor or olive grove with poppies blooming in it or chestnut trees turning golden in the fall and dropping their spiky nut bombs for us to make vanilla-rum chestnut butter with. We are planning to go crazy this fall brining olives and making enough corbezzoli jam to last us for the duration.

But the new house has enough M.C. Escher stairways and topsy-turvy layout to make us feel that now familiar and, frankly, beloved sensation of complete disorientation. We have been inside the belfry house twice now and still can't figure out where all the rooms are. (Jonathan is better at it than I am, but he has a Ph.D. in non-Euclidian higher-dimensional geometry and I feel that gives him an advantage.)

 

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.

 

Jonathan and I have (at last!) won a prize in one of the numerous raffles we have entered in support of various organizations and charities over the past two and a half years. We won second prize (a two-liter jug of German beer) in the pre-Christmas raffle at the pub. I suspect that these raffles are fixed, given the never-failing appropriateness of the winners. It is always suspiciously the exact person who should win who does win -- as if by magic.

So Jonathan and I may not seem to be the right people to win a giant flask of beer given that Jonathan doesn't really drink at all and I much prefer wine to beer. But we were the right people, in fact, because we did exactly what should have been done with the beer, which was to ask that it be put somewhere to get cool and then go down on a quiet winter evening, when the crowds and the noise had subsided, when only about a dozen of the regular habitues were there -- four playing cards at a table in the corner and the rest sitting together and the big table near the wood-burning stove, keeping warm and talking -- to open the flask and share it all around. These are my favorite nights. The big news of the day was that Nonno had convinced Daniele and Alice to re-arrange the shelves with jams and pickles so that similar items were grouped together for easier sale. We admired it orderliness while we drank the beer.

Then today, we went to the big grocery store on the edge of town and our groceries were free. We didn't exactly understand why -- something about points expiring on our membership card. We didn't know that we earned points or that they translated into free groceries, but, in any case, we didn't have to pay for our laundry detergent and breakfast yogurt. Then I asked about the bollini (we are collecting them to win a big nonstick frying pan), but the cashier explained that we didn't get bollini today because of the points expiring on the membership card. "Oh," I said, not having any clue what was going on. "But, here," she said, "have them anyway" and gave us twice as many as we actually would have gotten if everything had been as usual.

On the drive home, we figured out the whole chain of events (in the moment we had no idea) leading to free groceries and double bollini. "Well," I said Jonathan, "that was nice of her." "Yes," he said, "it's sort of like Italy is a continuous bewildering Christmas -- we have no idea what is going on or how or why or what we should do, but people just give us gifts anyway."

So maybe the raffles aren't rigged after all. Maybe we just live in a land of abundant gifts.

 

One of the nicest and most surprising things about living in our hidden little world in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea is how much music there is here -- not music to make the musicians famous or music to sell merch or music to impress a sea of social media followers. But music for the joy of making music, for the love of it -- music among friends to make the winter days and nights more lively and more beautiful. In the past two weeks, Jonathan and I have marched in a parade through Capezzano Monte (pop. 355) following the Filarmonica as they played to unveil a new mural in town, gone to listen to our neighbor Fabio play in his blues band at the little cafe near the Lucca Gate (first video below) and driven to Pruno (pop. 90) -- far back in the hills above Stazzema, deep along winding roads to an ancient stone town with cobbled streets -- to hear Avi and Adele, our friends from the pub, play a concert in the tiny 13th century church of San Nicolo on a rainy, windswept night (second video below).

But there is also the casual music of everyday happiness. Below is a snip of the usual lunchtime pandemonium at the pub as it existed last Friday during lunch, the regular exuberance (Avi playing again -- this time on the wildly out-of-tune piano, which sounds so weirdly beautiful that I hope it never gets tuned.) I would say that this sort of commotion is nothing special -- meaning nothing out of the ordinary -- but that would be wrong because, of course, it is special and I am very aware that this will someday come to an end.

Some other updates:

Property is bondage: We have begun the process of bringing boxes of our stuff from the storage unit in Lucca to our house and unpacking it. This is tricky because the house was already full and there is no space to further absorb our belongings.

And, although opening box after box of our books is like greeting very dear old friends after a long and lonely absence, I somehow wonder if maybe we were better off when we had nothing.

The Netherworld: We went to visit Jonathan's son in Holland, where he is in school, and to visit the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which -- to tell by the pungent aroma coming off many, many of the other visitors -- is a favorite haunt of stoned people. Possibly this is not specific to the museum, though. We also went to a big Asian market and stocked up with ramen to bring back to Italy. It's funny the things you miss. Let's not judge.

Remembering What is Truly Important (Food): I took my language test for Italian citizenship last Thursday and now we're waiting for the results. Could go either way. Among the dozen people taking the test, I was by far the newest arrival in Italy, having arrived only two years ago. The next newest has been here five years -- most of the others have been here between 10 and 15 years. One woman has been here 26 years. So I may have some grave doubts about how I did, but in another 24 years, I think I will have a decent shot. 

In any case, when we finally arrived back home after my extremely trying morning, we found that Mimmo had very sweetly managed to get a bunch of ripe persimmons down from our tall persimmon tree and left them for us on the porch.

Personality Defects: We have made tiny little bottles of our olive oil to give to friends, but (being hyper-aware of our own novice olive-oil-making status) we are too shy to actually give them to anyone.

Dead Geniuses: The Campanile down by the Duomo in Pietrasanta, which is always locked up tight, was unexpectedly open for viewing one day and we stumbled across it and were able to go in, although not up (which is probably just as well). Michelangelo designed it when he was living and working here and it is famous to us all -- the spiral staircase reproduced on postcards and paintings and refrigerator magnets -- although most of us had never seen it in person.

Episode IV -- A New Hope: Walking up the drive last week, I caught sight out of the corner of my eye of what I at first thought was the daytime moon. It turned out to be a wasp nest as big as a beachball high up in one of our trees. The bad news is the wasps. The good news is that it now gives Jonathan and I plenty of opportunities to look at each other and say "That's no moon" and "I have a bad feeling about this."

Lights: Everyone is now decorating for Christmas. It is all very magnificent down in Pietrasanta. But my heart belongs forever to the two and a half strings of lights over the road up here in Capriglia. What we lack in flash, we make up for in convivial drunkenness and good humor.

 

Every day more chestnut leaves fall and our view of the sea becomes more clear. Today, the water is wild and gray with furious white breakers foaming far out past the edge of the pier at Marina di Pietrasanta. The offshore islands have all disappeared into the fog.

This morning, we brought two teensy bottles of our olive oil down to Barbara and Sara, who promised to try it and to let us know their honest opinion. (They won't -- they will tell us it is wonderful no matter what, because to tell someone that their olive oil is good is to tell them that you are friends.) 

This is just the latest in the big interlocking circles of generosity that go on around here -- we gave the painters corbezzoli jam and they gave us ancient grain flour. Fabio and Luciano give us figs and we give them marmalade. We are involved in exchanges of chestnuts and books and persimmons, lemons and limoncello and liqueurs and dried lavender, potted plants and pickled kumquats, Italian gelato and Swiss chocolate and Polish vodka, math tutoring and holiday wreaths and honey and tomato sauce and wildflowers.

So I feel sad for people who are stuck living in a dog-eat-dog world of unfettered capitalism and corporate greed and the profit motive and I-got-mine-Jack-so-fuck-you. They never know the wonderful surprise of finding flowers from a friend tied together with string and left on the garden wall.

Yesterday, on a whim, Jonathan and I decided to go see if the gelato store at the beach was still open. The beach clubs are all closed now and the striped umbrellas and beach chairs have all been put away for the winter. The sand is empty. But, miraculously, the gelato store was open even though no one was in it and the owner was sitting on a chair out front under the awning watching the white geese in the park quack at each other and the misty rain fall. We chatted with him a bit and he told us that today would be their last day of the season and then they would close up until next spring. "So come by tomorrow," he said, "and get something to keep in your freezer."

So today we went down and bought two big tubs of gelato to put in our freezer and eat this winter while we dream of hot sand and cool ocean water and sunshine. And then his wife (we don't know their names -- yet) said to us, "Would another container fit in your freezer?" And they gave us as a gift another giant container of gelato and a bunch of cookies -- the kind that I always associate with gelato on the Riviera. The white geese came up almost right into the store while this was going on, honking and looking around. There are no tourist crowds these days to shoo them away.

These are the six flavors of gelato we got:

1. Mango (mango), 2. Frutti di Bosco (blackberry, raspberry and blueberry, mixed), 3. Caramello Saltato (salted caramel), 4. Cioccolato (chocolate), 5. Pompelmo e Campari (grapefruit and Campari), and 6. Limone, Salvia e Menta (lemon, sage and mint). They did not have my favorite Cinnamon Apple today, but that gives me something to look forward to next summer. We brought them home and took all the ice cubes out of the freezer so that we could fit the containers in. 

Sometimes, it seems like Jonathan and I have behaved in a very rash and foolhardy manner by moving to Italy on a whim like we did, instead of acting sensibly, with forethought and prudence. And so we keep expecting one day to get our comeuppance. We keep expecting to have to pay the price for our recklessness. So far, though, for at least today, the comeuppance seems to mostly have taken the form of free ice cream and cookies. I've had worse comeuppances, quite frankly.

 

Thursday night, the Italian National Soccer Team played against Spain in the European Cup. I got a series of four texts from Daniele that morning:

"Catherina buongiorno"

"This evening we are making a spaghettata to watch the game."

"All together"

"If you would like to join us, we are happy."

(I am translating this to the best of my limited ability from Italian. "Spaghettata" is beyond the scope of Google Translate, but is also pretty self-explanatory.)

It is nice to be part of "all of us together."

It was a lovely night out on the terrace of the pub and Daniele is a genius with sauces, especially when he is just cooking for friends and lets his imagination go. He made a light glaze with lobster and parsley that looked like nothing on the plate, but exploded with a dozen layers of flavor in our mouths.

Italy lost the game 0-1 because one of the Italian players accidentally kicked the ball into our own goal. I felt just terrible for the guy. I mean, I have fucked up plenty in my life (and in far more serious situations), but never with an entire nation watching me.

Semina (whose real name is Francesco and who was wearing a t-shirt that said "This is business -- nothing personal" and had a picture of Marlon Brando on it) said that if the Spaniards were polite, they would follow suit and kick a ball into their own net. But they didn't and so now we know.

We all drank beer because Daniele told us we should when watching soccer and because the beer was free. But it amazes me that anyone in Italy drinks beer voluntarily when the beer is so bad and the wine is so good. But the price was right.

I think about how much my dad would have loved all this -- sitting all morning in the sun at the beach and reading while little kids dig holes in the sand with their tiny spades and then going in the evening to sit on the terrace of the pub and have a glass of wine with the old men and talk about the day's events.

We are only a few weeks away from Nonno's 91st birthday, but he doesn't think he will have a party this year, unlike last year's giant blowout for his 90th. It would be too sad with Mirio still so sick. I haven't seen Mirio in many weeks now and my heart sinks whenever I hear the ambulance siren coming up the hill from town below. And Renata is still not back from Poland.

Other than that, we have been very homebound. Jonathan threw out his back on Tuesday and, despite taking some pills from the doctor, is walking around all hunched over and groaning. And on Monday, I managed to break my right baby toe at the beach by gracefully slamming into the only hard object (the edge of a walkway) on the entire expanse of soft sand and cool blue water. So I hobble around with my foot all wrapped up like I've begun to explore a future in mummification.

In spite of all this, we are happy. The baby olives and baby grapes are doing well, the Lemon Bar has decorated itself with actual lemons lately, the beach club is fully open as are the hydrangeas, we have nowhere particular to go.

I have always loved beach towns, with their atmosphere of sun tan lotion and ice cream and indolence. Now that the summer weather has arrived, we have been going to our Beach Club to loll around and be healed of all our ills -- physical, emotional, spiritual, etc. -- by the sunshine and the lunch. This plan is working better than you might have thought. By September, I will probably be practically perfect in every way. Something to look forward to.

Having decided to move our belongings from Colorado Springs to Pietrasanta (the complexities of getting it all the way to Capriglia are completely beyond us), we have unleashed upon ourselves a whole fresh document hell. The customs people, for instance, want a complete itemized list of everything we are bringing with valuations and, if possible, receipts. The receipts for a lifetime of treasures. The drawing of a sunflower that Tris made in second grade and that hung on the wall in our kitchen for almost two decades? I have no receipt and no rational valuation. Zero dollars? Priceless.

More lemons have come our way -- it seems that all of Tuscany is inundated at this time of year. Fabio and Luciana, our neighbors, gave us a big bag and Barbara and Sara gave us even more. I made lavender-lemon marmalade and now we have begun the process of making Moroccan Salt-Cured Lemons. I have never tasted Moroccan Salt-Cured Lemons and have no idea what we will do with them once they are ready, but it is comforting to know that we will never die of scurvy.

 

A lot has been going on this week -- most of it citrus-based. Barbara and Sara gave us another 20 pounds of citrus fruit -- kumquats and lemons. We have made two batches so far of sweet-pickled kumquats, which are zippy enough to make your eyes water. We will not be dying of scurvy any time soon, but we may very well be done in by the homemade limoncello, which I have realized is only a very slightly upscale version of the PGA Punch (pure grain alcohol mixed with grape Kool-Aid) that was the drink of choice for all the kids during my high school days in the fabulously instructive public school system of Fort Smith, Arkansas. For instance, did you know that a combination of white vinegar and baking soda will remove both the color and the smell of grape-flavored vomit from the interior of a car? The things we learned!

I thought we were going to get the chance to bribe a public official last week. (Finally!) In his drivers-license-induced despair, Jonathan wailed to Madelena, "Is there nothing I can do?"

"Well," Madelena said, "there is one thing, but I can't say it over the phone. I will tell it to you in person." 

I got very excited by this and was quite looking forward to seeing the finesse with which the bribe would be presented. Would it be couched as a "special fee"? A "gift"? "A little something for her trouble"? We got lots of cash out of the ATM and went, rather giddy with suppressed naughtiness, to see her. 

It turned out, though, that she was merely advising us to try another office in a smaller town where they play more fast and loose with regulations. Quite a letdown. It will take us months to spend all this cash.

And, after several weeks of trying to contact our beach club, as we were instructed, to pick out our spot for the summer -- including two trips to the club itself, which seemed to be not only closed, but actually closed down and out of business -- we finally connected with our new best friend, Paolo, who has put us in Spot #10 for June, July, and August. Before and after that, it is apparently a riotous free-for-all, although Paolo says he will be happy to bring us chairs wherever we manage to land. 

Our neighbors in Spots #9 and #11 are also there for the whole season, so I guess we will be making some new friends.

After a week of living in sunshine and wildflowers, it is so misty this morning that we can't see even the hills right behind the house. I like knowing that we are living inside clouds.

We are in a generosity spiral with Barbara and Sara at the Frutta D'Oro. After they were so kind to me about being on my own while Jonathan was away in the US and also gifted me a giant bunch of yellow mimosas, Jonathan brought them back some Vermont maple syrup from his trip. They reciprocated with a large jar of honey from their own hives and then an 11-pound bag of lemons from the tree in Sara's yard -- "So sweet that you can just eat them," Sara said.

So we made lemon marmalade with ginger and Cointreau and gave them two jars of it and two loaves of our own fresh-baked bread. Heaven only knows where this will end. Probably pie.

Sunday we went to see Fabio play at a little osteria high up in the hills above Seravezza. The staff there all wear t-shirts that say "Moriremo ma non di sete" -- "We will die -- but not from thirst." I laughed and laughed at this and the owners, Silvio and Daniela, let me take their picture and then gave us some free homemade liqueurs -- pale green tasting of pistachio and pale orange tasting of melon.

Jonathan still has no driver's license, but the Polizia dello Stato in Forte dei Marmi say that my Permesso di Soggiorno (long-term stay visa) is ready to be picked up -- a mere four months after my last one expired. We are going there to get it tomorrow morning. I will believe it when I see it.