Our hearts are broken now because Renata is gone. She and Stefano drove away Monday morning leaving nothing but silence and too much emptiness in her place.

In the end, she allowed a going-away party at the regular Sunday night Giro di Pizza. It was very moving and she gave a little speech saying that we are a family. Alice organized a present for her and we all went in together -- a lovely necklace with a heart charm that is the key to unlock the necklace. She and Stefano seemed sweet together and loving and I thought about how hard it will be for him in Poland, where he doesn't know the language, etc. It is a situation I can empathize with. But it helps to be deeply in love with the person you are married to.

I cried a lot, of course. Ugo was very kind. "Ah," he said, "artists always feel things so deeply." In all my years of being a big crybaby, it is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.

Other people cried, too -- including Nonno. Renata hugged him at the end and spoke softly to him and then he left very quickly and Valerio, seeing it all, hurried out after Nonno to check on him and see that he would be okay.

There is some talk now about going to visit her -- all of us together on the train with a big hamper of Italian food for the journey. Maybe next summer.

 

The horrors of the US political scene continue to be sickening and we feel helpless to ward off the disaster.

So we work on strengthening our community and reaching out to our friends. We continue to do what work we can to have a positive impact on the culture. It's all we can do.

It seems worthwhile to live in our small way, closer to the land, closer to the traditional. sustainable ways, to listen again while the old men in the pub tell us their stories of how it used to be around here, in the days when everyone had a few olives trees and took the olives to the communal press in November and came away with their oil for the year and everyone had a few grapevines and made wine and cordials in the summer and stored the bottles in cool cellars and cantinas, and everyone had a few goats ("capre" is Italian for "goats" and so "Capriglia" is "place of the goats") that they used for wool to spin and meat and milk for cheese.

The goats are all gone now. Wolves were successfully re-introduced to the hills here after nearly going extinct and if there's one thing a re-introduced wolf loves, it's a nice goat sandwich. Or, I guess, a nice goat panino. Everyone eats well in Italy.

But the olives and the wine are still going strong. When Jonathan and I rented this place online sight-unseen from Colorado, we spent hours on Google Street View trying to find a picture of our house and get a look at it and the surrounding neighborhood. (This turned out to be impossible because there is an error on Google Maps and our particular part of the street doesn't appear -- doesn't even seem to exist. We are hidden from even Big Tech here.) We saw what we thought might be olive trees around in Capriglia, though, and Jonathan said, "Wouldn't it be great if we could make our own olive oil?" I remember how excited he was at the idea.

It turned out that there were indeed olive trees on our property -- a small grove of about two dozen trees. But we heard that the olive presses required a minimum of 200 kgs to take your olives for pressing and that is far beyond our scale. So we brine some ripe olives in jars on the living room shelves and buy our olive oil at the supermarket.

But now we are much more local than we were then and rules that applied to us two years ago don't apply to us now. Sitting in the pub last week, Claudio told us about a little family-run olive press (called a "frantoio") here in Capriglia, right on Via Capriglia, where they will take as little as 20 kgs of olives. It is a holdover from the days of the few family olive trees, the few grape vines, the few goats -- when horses plodding in a circle turned the massive stone wheels to crush the olives because there was no electricity up in these hills yet. Claudio remembers being put on the back of the horse to ride it around its circle when he was a little boy -- a living merry-go-round.

"Where exactly is this frantoio?" we asked.

"There's a sign on the road," Claudio said. "You'll see it."

In the US, this would have been a big sign saying "OLIVE PRESS HERE" and an arrow, possibly involving neon or blinking lights. But here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea, the sign turned out to be about 1-inch high (albeit in red letters) -- added free-hand to the regular house number plaque that we all have. We finally did see it, but only after we had already been to the press and knew where it was. Jonathan met Claudio when he was on his bicycle searching for the frantoio and Claudio took Jonathan in and introduced him around. Some of our friends from the pub were there hanging around.

So we spent the weekend picking 20 kgs of olives from our trees -- we couldn't have gotten many more -- and took them to the frantoio on Tuesday where the daughter of the Signora inspected them very carefully by running her hands through them, turning them over and over, and then carefully smelling her hands. We were quite nervous during this process, fearing that we had somehow done something wrong. Then she asked us when they were picked and about the terroir -- where exactly they were picked -- and was pleased when we told her they came from the top of Via Capriglia -- only a few hundred meters away. We don't want any faraway olives from God-only-knows-where mixing in with our oil up here. But we passed inspection and everyone was very kind and jovial and happy to see us and happy to let me take pictures. The whole place smelled sweet and green, like olive oil and sunshine and late summer fields.

We went this morning to pick up our oil -- 2.7 liters of dark green unfiltered extra-virgin cold-pressed organic oil. The lovely daughter even topped up our bottle with a little extra. Total cost: 4.5 euros (about 5 bucks.) It was all so beautiful -- the guys standing around talking about olives and other things, the aroma of the oil, the big stone grinding wheels, the sunshine, the feeling that we were part of something that has been going on for centuries and centuries, small and local and communal. It was so lovely that I didn't even miss the goats.

So Jonathan is baking bread and tonight for dinner we are going to have brushchette with homemade bread and our own olive oil and garlic and tomatoes and basil. We plan to gorge ourselves.

And we are also making salt-cured olives, which people swear is the best way to have them. It apparently takes at least a month. After our adventures with the salt-cured lemons, we are wary, but still game.

After the incessant rains of September and October, we discovered mold growing on the wall behind the bed in our bedroom and so we have had to move out of there and into the guest room while the painters are here getting rid of the mold and re-painting the wall. The guest room bed is smaller than our regular bed and, because of the loft directly above it, the ceiling over it is lower. But for a little while, I find that I am quite liking our new sleeping arrangement -- Jonathan and I snuggled up close together in a little hideaway. It seems like nothing bad from the outside can reach us here. I know that is an illusion, but curled against him in our cozy little corner, I feel safe -- for at least one more day.

Renata is leaving soon -- she has sold her car and gotten a new job in Poland near her father. But she won't tell anyone exactly when she is leaving or let us plan a going-away party because her heart is breaking. She and Nonno sit together in the evenings and tease each other. His heart is breaking, too.

We have made labels for our bottles of oil.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

Our dear Mirio passed away Monday night. The funeral was Wednesday in the tiny church of S. Carlo here in Capriglia. Jonathan and I sat on the back row between Nonno and Ugo.

And so now Nonno is alone. The church was full up to standing room only and many people also waited outside and Nonno was kissed by many, many people whose names I don't know and who are not part of my little world. And then afterwards, we went to the pub to raise a glass to Mirio and Lucia sat next to Nonno and talked with him about many things other than death. Guglielmo was there and Geppolino and Almo, Valerio, Claudio, Ilario, and others. But that doesn't change anything. When you've had a brother for 88 years and you've been so close through so much, like Nonno and Mirio had been, to lose that brother is now to be always a little bit alone. 

There were three years difference in age between Nonno and Mirio -- just like there are between Aiden and Tris. And for all of the many mistakes that I have made as a parent, one thing I got right was giving them each other and their friendship, their brotherhood.

And so at the end of the funeral, as the flower-covered casket that held Mirio's body came back down the aisle of the church to go back into the hearse and then off to the crematorium, Nonno -- who had even cracked a joke or two before the service started and who had whispered to me that he rated the preist's eulogy only "so-so" -- reached out as the casket passed him and touched it with the final brief caress of a big brother to the younger brother he had always tried to take care of -- the younger brother who had known him longer than any other person in the world.

 And so for all the love that I am so glad that my sons have for each other, that one moment of Nonno reaching out to gently touch the final remains of his brother and then to be without him from then on was a picture of the future that my sons are fated to have. Someday, one of them will lose the other.

And I have a brother that I love, too. Someday one of us will be left without anyone else in the world who remembers our childhood. Our future is not infinite and so we pay a steep price for love.

Renata has returned. She came back from Poland on Monday and we saw her Tuesday when we all sat together in mourning and then again at the funeral and after it. It was a subdued reunion, under the circumstances, but we are happy to have her back again, especially Nonno, who needs her now.

Without Mirio to play, the boys at the pub are having a hard time consistently finding four players for cards. Almo, who was trained as a sculptor by Mirio, plays -- as he always did. He went down to town and bought the newspaper for Nonno. It had a story about Mirio's passing in it and Almo brought it back for Nonno and found the right page for him, the one with the story, and then I saw that Almo's eyes had gotten misty and he drank his glass of wine with great attention for a while.

Our world here is very fragile. Somehow I feel like we have managed to arrive only at the very end of something. Last winter seems like it was a hundred years ago.

Nonno has spent the last week in the hospital, although they say he can come home today. When we asked what was wrong, we got answers with vague medical terms that don't really translate. Valerio looked downhearted and just said, "Well, he is ninety years old, you know." Mirio, who is himself just out of the hospital, seems to have suddenly aged many years. We doubt they have told him the truth about either his own or his brother's condition, but I think he knows anyway. He tries to keep our spirits up, though. "The wine in the hospital was terrible," he said to us, twinkling. "It tasted just like water."

This is a picture of Nonno and Hugo, when they fell asleep in their chairs one afternoon last autumn while watching TV. When the old men are no more at the pub, it will be a very different place. Bar Igea, the bar down in town that I used to go to forty years ago, the place where the sculptors and marble workers used to go in their dusty clothes and battered shoes to have a glass of wine with their friends and where the old men sat all day in the shade of an ancient spreading tree and played checkers, is now a chic cocktail bar called The Black Cat that is only open at night. The big old tree was cut down to make more room for parking in the piazza. I have never been in there in its new incarnation.

There are half a dozen For Sale signs on houses on the lovely Via Capriglia now. Some of the houses have olive groves, all have majestic views of the sea. They are beautiful stone houses going cheap because people don't want to live like this anymore.

Before sunset, Jonathan and I often walk down to the edge of town. There's a low stone wall there where the hillside drops away in a steep cliff and we can see Pietrasanta like a little toy village down below us and then out past it to the sea. From there, we can see the piers at Viareggio and at Marina di Pietrasanta sticking out into the water. Depending on the weather, we can also see the islands of Elba, Corsica, Gorgona, and Capraia. The sea can be as many shades of blue and green and gray as there are, depending on its mood, and can sparkle or froth or be burnished like iridescent metal. Sometimes, by a weird optical illusion, the clouds seem much closer to us than the plain of the coast down below and it feels like we are hanging in the air. We have abandoned all hope of ever photographing the varied loveliness of the sunsets.

In the summertime, we can see the ferris wheel on the beach at Viareggio, just where two hundred years ago, Lord Byron, Trelawney, and Leigh Hunt cremated the drowned body of Percy Bysshe Shelley, without even waiting for his wife Mary to get there. The legend says that his heart didn't burn and they gave it to Mary in a box. I imagine it was small comfort.

Leo passed away last night. The grief at the pub is all-encompassing. We will go to his funeral mass tomorrow at the Duomo down in town. 
 

The important thing is not to panic.

We have arrived, at long last, in Pietrasanta. Our last days at "home" are a blur -- the final packing, the final garbage run (goodbye, futon!) , the final cleaning -- all made more challenging by the roofers showing up unexpectedly on Monday morning to begin removing all the layers of old roof that had piled up over the decades -- layers which delighted the local fauna, no doubt, but displeased the house inspector. So our last days of leave-taking had a soundtrack of splintering wood and crowbars. Metaphorically appropriate, but hard on the nerves.

Our last night was spent sleeping on the floor. Never before in all my years at the house has the floor ever seemed so unyieldingly solid. No structural problems there!

I sobbed as we left, of course -- partly for the place itself, which I loved, but mostly for the time in my life that it represented, a time when I was a mother with my beloved little boys at home and a professor who spent long hours talking about Ideas with generations of students who cared about them. When I was turning in the rental car at the Colorado Springs airport, the booth attendant asked me, "Heading home?" -- which seems like a simple "yes/no" question. I told him some lie because the real answer would have been too emotionally difficult to explain: "I don't know."

And so it began -- lines, cramped seats, cramped legs, execrable airplane food, the peculiar stink of airplane bathrooms, and our second mostly sleepless night in a row while the tiny icon of an airplane on the seatback screens inched its way across a map of the ocean.

And then, in the early afternoon, we finally touched down in Milan.

I had worried a bit about Customs (so much luggage!) and about Immigration Control (no extended-stay visa!), which just shows how long it's been since I was in Italy. Not a word was said to either of us -- just another middle-aged tourist couple off a plane-ful of them. We were blithely released into the afternoon sun, where our rental car waited.

We only got lost twice on the drive to Pietrasanta, which is pretty good -- especially since it was Thursday and we hadn't really slept since Monday night. Jonathan drove and I promised things to God. This is our customary division of labor.

Pietrasanta has changed, of course, in the last forty years. It is still lovely, but now it is filled with art galleries and restaurants in the places where the marble workshops and bronze foundries and stores selling chisels and power grinders used to be. We went to the place that used to be my regular bar, the Bar Igea -- always filled in those days with artists, sometimes still wearing their blue overalls sprinkled with marble dust or gesso or blood -- but it is now an upscale "Cocktail Lounge" open only at night. The important thing, in moments like this, is not to panic.

Our new best friend Lorenzo, an old punk who runs the hotel where we are staying until our house is ready for us on Monday, tells us that there are still many working artists here, just that they have been pushed out of the very center of town. And, indeed, I saw two men at lunch on Friday with the telltale pencils and ruined shoes of people who have spent the morning working in the studio.

Later, we drove up the mountainside for a peek at our village, even though we couldn't go to our house. And by "mountainside," I mean "sheer cliff with dozens of narrow switchbacks pretending to be a road." I had not remembered it as being quite so death-defying, which only confirms that I was 20-years-old and therefore clearly thought I was immortal when I lived here before. Jonathan drove our little standard-transmission car all the way up in first gear and did not tell me (while I was saying "Ooo! Look at the sea! Jonathan, look at the sea!") how close we came to stalling out a couple of times on practically vertical switchback turns. This would have been disastrous as the car has no real emergency brake, thus raising the possibility of us spending that always tense moment between "stopped" and "first gear" rolling precipitously backwards down a very steep roadway before plunging to our deaths over the side of the cliff. Of all the times not to panic, this is probably the most important.

But the village seemed magical, as things do when one has risked death to see them, and the sea was very blue (with what may or may not have been Corsica just visible in the distance) and the fig trees were heavy with green figs. It was so quiet that we found ourselves whispering.

Our first night, we had pizza and wine at a table in the street. Jonathan is speaking Italian like a pro. I am speaking Italian like someone who speaks only Spanish -- and only a little of that and only badly. We are, so far, very dazed and very happy.

The listing for our house went live this morning. I have only cried twice. Maybe three times.

Jonathan and I are now sitting outside at the Dogtooth Café while strange people judge the suitability of our Eden for their own purposes. In a while, we will go up into the mountains and stare at the sky. But for the moment, I have to be somewhere with cellphone coverage so that I can approve appointments through the appointments app. It is all hideous.

We did the last things this morning at dawn -- putting down the edging in the garden, weeding the front flower beds. Our little house is ready now, as best it can be, to make its way in the world without us.

I wonder whether all the years of joy we had in it -- all the bedtime stories and sudden delight at morning glories and cups of tea in the evenings and the hidden messages we wrote under the kitchen tile we put down and the long, slow summer afternoons when we did nothing much but we did it together -- will all of that have somehow soaked into the house so that the people who go into the house will sense it there? Will 26 years of love make itself felt? Will the ghosts of our hearts haunt the place even when we're gone? 

My new best friends the painting crew are here. I am in the only room of the house that is not being painted while they go through a thousand rolls of blue masking tape in all the other rooms.

This is the 10th stage of the process of revolutionizing our lives out of 12 stages total. I made a list.

One: The Wild Romantic Imagination Stage. I think it was cold. I think it was even snowing. Or maybe it was just another bleak winter day when Jonathan and I hatched our plan. I don't remember exactly how it came about other than that it started as an inchoate longing to go somewhere new together.

Two: The Doing Things Online Stage. This is an easy and fun stage. It is easy and fun to surf the net looking at rental properties on hillsides in Tuscany, for example. Or to search for the menus of restaurants that would be near you and decide what you would eat if you were actually there at the moment. Or to drive around on Google Street View ogling the produce outside the "Frutte e Verdure" or the bread in the window of the "Galleria del Pane". It is so easy and fun that, in an excited dither, suddenly (over the course of one full month) we had rented a rustic farmhouse with trusted gardener on an actual hillside in Tuscany.

Three: The Sorting Through Decades of Our Stuff With a Hard and Critical Eye Stage. Visit 1 out of 99 to the ARC donation station.

Four: The Precious Relics Stage -- Part One (also Crying Stage -- Part One). The tiny baby shoes! The homemade birthday cards! The little bag of extracted wisdom teeth! (Well, maybe not the teeth...)

Five: The Making Friends With Skilled Craftspeople Stage. Oh, the parade of people who actually know what they are doing (aka, not us)! Plumbers, electricians, landscapers, contractors, floor refinishers -- we have come to know and love you, been through challenges together (trucks that wouldn't start, damp, spiders, kidney stones, attack dogs) and learned each others' secrets. Our time together has been ... special.

Six: The Standing Together in the Epoxy Aisle of Home Depot Trying Very Hard to Concentrate On How Much We Actually Love Each Other Stage. Nuff said.

Seven: The Finally Packing It All Up Into Storage Stage. Followed very quickly (and inevitably) by the Oops! I Need That Again One More Time substage.

Eight: The Farewell Tour Stage. Coffee and crying with dear friends. Mostly crying. My friends are understanding and tolerant. And also -- fortunately -- waterproof.

Nine: The Precious Relics Stage -- Part Two. Is it possible to pack up and carry away with me enough objects so that I can hold on forever to those years when the boys were growing up here and I had them with me every day? No. (More crying.)

Ten: The Everything Gets Painted Beige Stage. And our life here is erased.

So that is where we are now. There are still two stages and 21 days left to go.

Eleven: The Having Strangers Sit In Judgement Of The Place That Has Been Our Eden Stage. We will try to be out of the house whenever it is being shown by the real estate agent. Obviously.

Twelve: The Walking Away Stage. Actually, driving away in a rental car that we will return at the airport while, almost certainly, crying. And then it will be a whole new world -- the dreams of a bleak winter day made real.

I am feeling chastised by my tea bags.

The latest one says, "The unknown is where all outcomes are possible; enter it with grace." Inside my head, the tea bag says this in an exasperated voice, more like: "For god's sake, try to enter it with some fucking grace, unlike your usual pathetic MO." So here, on the precipice of this big life transition into the unknown, I am trying to muster some fucking grace.

This mostly involves keeping the plants watered and eating things other than tortilla chips. Sometimes. Last week I ate some raspberry sorbet, which I feel is a more graceful thing to eat than queso dip straight out of the jar with a spoon. 

I realize that the tea bag is not meant to be censorious and that my reading of it is entirely about my own longstanding feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy. But the demands of the moment do not exactly make adequacy easy to achieve.

The contractors are here working on the basement all week and my finished manuscript is due at the publishers on Friday. I am in the footnotes/bibliography/permissions phase and have been for several days now. It never occurred to me that The Chicago Manual of Style would ever come to play such a large part of my emotional life. But here we are.

I have typed the sentence "I am in footnote hell" into a few emails. Scarily, this had led the data-mining algorithm that rules our lives to switch all the ads I get on YouTube. They used to be dominated by ads for Vrbo vacation homes. Now they are almost all suicide prevention/counseling/antidepressant ads. This, I think, is going too far. While figuring out how to get permission to reprint text from a now-defunct one-off 1937 magazine is tedious, I'm not going to kill myself over it. Not while I still have all these tortilla chips to eat.

 

On a sudden whim this afternoon, we booked our non-refundable, one-way airline tickets to Milan. In nine weeks, we will fly out of the airport in Colorado Springs, where I have flown out so many times. And in nine weeks and one day, we will land in Milan. I am already anticipating the tears in my heart when I close the door to this house for the last time.

But also I am anticipating arriving in Italy and beginning a whole new life there, Jonathan and I together. Jonathan's friend Jennryn said to him the other day, "Ah, soon you will be sitting there with a glass of wine and a fistful of prosciutto!" We laughed and now hold that image as a beacon in our heads while we take camping gear and cookware to donate to the ARC in heavy boxes and bags.

And so I lead a schizophrenic life -- half of me trying to savor every last feeling and sound and smell and image from this world where I have lived so long and half of me lost in daydreams and visions of a new life far away. I can't wait to leave; I don't want to say good-bye.

And so without ever planning to do so today, we have bought our tickets. When torn or in doubt, I have always chosen to act rashly. I have no regrets.

Yesterday was it -- the last day ever of my teaching career. The last reading assignment was two chapters from Magali Sarfatti Larson's Behind the Postmodern Façade and the very last line of reading that we discussed was Robert Venturi's quote about valuing the "the difficult unity of inclusion over the easy unity of exclusion" and how inclusion may indeed be more difficult, but it is also so much more beautiful.

The class is a group of really lovely students and they had made a card for me and we took a picture together and several of them spoke to me afterwards in really heartfelt ways and I, naturally, cried hard.

But now that part of my life is over. This morning, I am sitting home drinking coffee while they are beginning their final exam. I have grading still to do, of course, and the last scraps of bureaucracy. But the thing that has been one of the centers of my life for three decades -- talking with undergraduates about ideas and issues -- is over with now. I have no idea what my new reality will be.

It will certainly involve power tools, though. The contractor came in the afternoon to look at the hole in the basement wall created when Jonathan fell through the window-well two years ago. His comments on seeing it can be summarized mostly as, "Oh, my god." He is sending an estimate for the work today or tomorrow. The work itself probably won't be completed until June.

Jonathan and I shared a split of The Widow last night (in commemoration of the teaching, not the contractor) and ate some treats from our favorite bakery. And today, as I sit surrounded by boxes and empty walls, I am acutely conscious of the fact that it is time for class and yet somehow I am not in class.

 

 I am sitting in my office right now. The northern light from my big window is lovely and serene. There are no books on the shelves in here anymore. There are no pictures of the children around. Almost everything has been taken down from the corkboard so that there is nothing left except ghost shadows left from so many years of being faded by the sun. No one else is around and it is so quiet that I can hear the clock ticking. I am waiting for time to go to class.

The feeling of waiting is particularly pronounced in this moment, but it is there -- more or less -- all the time now. Our friend the electrician did not show yesterday to prepare us for our inspection exam. There was a scheduling snafu and now he is coming next week instead. We are waiting.

We have almost completely sorted through the books and clothes; we don't go to the storage unit every day anymore. The other things in the house can't go yet because we are still living here, still using them. I did get a wild notion last Tuesday (brought on by having attended the Chair's Meeting last Monday) that we could go ahead and store some of our less necessary furniture, so I took away a little table we had in the bathroom. Then I came back and wandered around forlornly for a while holding my hairbrush in my hand and realizing that I had nowhere to put it down.

I made a bunch of origami swans to put on my office shelves because the emptiness seemed so sad.

 

This past week was the first week of the last class that I will ever teach at Colorado College. On Monday, I cried twice -- once in class and once later in the day. I will admit that I am an easy crier, but it usually takes more than handing out a syllabus to turn on the sprinklers.

On Tuesday, I wrote on the white board with what I thought was a white board marker.

On Wednesday, it actually snowed underneath the covid-induced tent where class is held. Flakes blew in sideways while I was dividing the class into discussion groups for Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. All of the groups decided to go elsewhere to discuss. Shockingly.

On Thursday, nothing much happened. We had class prophylactically on Zoom, but the sun unexpectedly appeared, the temperature climbed, and -- against all weather predictions to the contrary -- it was the warmest day of the week. I finally abandoned all hope of ever being prepared for upcoming weather and decided to just utterly surrender myself to the caprices of the weather gods and the certainties of wool socks.

On Friday, I discovered that the thing I wrote on the white board on Tuesday is now permanently inscribed. Oops. I do wish that it had at least been something profound, but it was, alas, not.

I have a song stuck in my head. It is "Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War" by Paul Simon. Here it is:

I would never suggest that Jonathan and I have been through a war -- the comparison would be obscene and grotesque.

But the part about seeing mannequins in a store window bringing "tears to their emigrant eyes" is a sentiment that I can understand. Both Jonathan and I have, for different reasons and at different times, been emigrants and found ourselves very far away from anything familiar. And I know how it can suddenly hit you when you catch a glimpse of something seemingly trivial that reminds you of your life "before." It can make you lose your head, if only for a moment. (I once [very, very briefly] took up with a bunch of Mormon missionaries because I was feeling lonesome and they had American accents. The less said about that, the better, really.)

We are in absolutely no sense refugees. We are choosing to go, consciously searching for "the deep forbidden music we've been longing for." I have always emigrated by choice and in incredibly comfortable and privileged circumstances. But I have still been surprised into tears by the most unexpected things -- a voice, a song, a Snickers bar. You would not think that a package of Twinkies could ever be viewed so tenderly, ever be seen as so precious. But even the most rambunctious and gleeful emigrants may -- in some hidden part of their hearts -- be looking for home.

Last week we had the excitement of signing rental agreements and de-coding Italian bureaucracy. This week we are back to the more mundane reality of cardboard boxes. I said good-bye yesterday to two different friends whom I will most likely never see again. And I, who cries copiously even at long-distance commercials, was completely dry-eyed. I don't think the reality has hit me yet. I will probably break down sobbing in the middle of some Italian grocery store six months from now at the sight of Gatorade. God help me if I run across Kentucky Fried Chicken.