We are still in the process of moving, although this is so embarrassing to admit that whenever anyone asks me if we have finished yet, I say, "Almost!" I have been saying that for a week now.

Putting out the (increasingly copious) trash at the rustic farmhouse a couple of days ago, I saw a young man standing in the middle of the road scrolling his phone while a little white dog on a long leash snifted at Fabio and Luciana's wall. I spoke to the dog, naturally ("Hai trovato qualcosa di interessante?") and then to the young man ("Buona sera. Come si chiama il cane?") The young man looked very startled and said, "Oh! Errr! Ummm... I don't speak Italian." And so I said to him in English, "I asked what your dog is named." And we chatted together for a bit. He is visiting from London and his dog is named Whiskey -- meaning that both of the dogs whose names I know in Capriglia are named Whiskey. At the end of our chat, he complemented me and said that I speak excellent English. I don't want to brag, but this is absolutely true.

I turned to go back in and realized that our electronic security gate had closed behind me while I was talking to dogs in the street and I was now locked out of our property.

"Oh, shit," I said, demonstrating that my mastery of the English vernacular extends even to the most colloquial and profane. "I'm locked out." 

"Ah," said the young man. "You can probably climb over it." And with that, he and Whiskey took off. It's a tall fence and he could see as well as I could that he didn't want to get involved.

But I did manage to climb over it, even though it is much taller than my head and even though I am 63 years old. I tell you this because I am prouder of this achievement than I am even of fooling ungallant English sops into thinking that I am Italian.

But really, I am hardened now to these sorts of trials and tribulations by having faced down, just this week alone, both an American insurance company and also my dire mortal enemy -- the Italian Post Office.

The battle with the Post Office involved me spending two entire days (10 hours each) sitting on the belfry house terrace overlooking our mailbox from a hidden position and then suddenly pouncing out on the mailman, taking him by surprise just as he was planning to leave a notice saying that he couldn't make the delivery because no one was at home. I mean, he still sent an email notification later saying that, but at least now he can't look me directly in the eye. And I did get the delivery the next day.

So I won that one. The American insurance company, tragically, is still up in the air. They are so evil, the insurance companies, that -- on the FIFTH international long-distance telephone call -- I did something that I have never done before in my life: I cursed at a service worker. The curse I used was "bullshit."

I'm not saying that I have never cussed anyone out before, but I think (as best I can remember) that that sort of thing has always before been reserved for boyfriends. (As one of my colleagues at Colorado College once said, apropos of a faculty meeting that went especially awry, "'Motherfucker' can actually be a term of endearment.")

So this morning, I went to have blood tests ordered by my doctor, who is upping the strength of my blood pressure medication. I am not joking.

But the big news these days is that Daniele is a finalist in the Tordelli D'oro Competition. Tordelli are a filled pasta, sort of like ravioli, a delicacy of this region, that Daniele serves with a zippy and aromatic meat sauce. He goes next week and all of the finalists will make tordelli for the judges at a public event in Bologna. We would go and cheer him on, but tickets are 60 euros each and it is a school day for Jonathan. But Daniele says if he wins, we will all eat free tordelli that night. "Aw, c'mon," Manuela says to him, "even if you don't win, we will all eat free tordelli that night!"

 

Some updates:

Wildlife: The wild boar in our woods has been going, well, wild. Last night. for the first time, we heard him rustling around out in the garden up close to the house and this morning there were new trenches uprooted all in between the grape vines. We have not, thank god, had any face-to-face interaction with him.* But we were visited by the biggest grasshopper that I have ever seen in my life. I realize, of course, that this is not the same.

* (Jonathan says he is disappointed by this, but I didn't notice him rushing down into the dark and noisy woods last night.) 

Festive Season: This weekend is the Festa di San Martino. Jonathan and I went into town this morning to the special holiday mercato and celebrated by buying sweet baked goods and killer booze. I am on a diet (to try to make up for my rather debauched summer) where I am trying not to eat any sugar or to drink any alcohol at home. So that's going well.

Yesterday, we inaugurated the official winter season with a big Bollito at the pub. Daniele made a gorgeous tortellini al brodo and we all ate and ate and drank much wine and then finished off with Punch Livornese, which is hot rum with espresso floating on top of it. This is for when you want to feel absolutely shitfaced and simultaneously totally wired. Festive season, indeed.

Italian Language: Now that AI runs our lives -- whether we want it or not -- whenever my Italian teacher sends me homework to do between my lessons, Gmail offers to translate it for me. Very considerate, but not likely to improve my language skills.

Persimmons: Mimmo has figured out how to get the persimmons down from the tree out back and, knowing that I love them, has very sweetly made a project of getting as many as he can for me. On Thursday, he got 21. I have them all sitting around in the kitchen getting ripe, which they will do either one-by-one (best case scenario) or all at once (most likely scenario).

Law School: Jonathan has become the sweet grandpa of his year in law school. The other students, who are mostly younger than our youngest child, all use the informal pronouns with him and treat him with great affection. He is on the group chat with them, where they mostly seem to discuss the parties that they have every weekend night and not a small number of other nights as well. I think we should start going to the parties, showing up with a bit platter of deviled eggs and suggesting we all play charades.

 

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.

 

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.

 

While we were in the US, I took the opportunity to be finger-printed (again) and request my criminal record (again) from the FBI, who have not yet discovered any crimes I've committed. I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that my various misdeeds have all been so trifling as to be beneath the notice of any authorities, but it does come in handy now.

So with my clean record in hand and an Apostile for my long-form birth certificate, I now have a three month window to apply for Italian citizenship. After three months have passed, they figure I might have had enough time to begin a new life of major crimes and I would have to get new fingerprints and a new copy of my record. Having waited this long, though, I really can't see myself being bothered to begin any hard-core criminal activities now. At 62-years-old, it just strikes me as exhausting.

My one stumbling block is the language test, so I have signed up to take it on December 5th and am now kicking my studying into high gear by hanging around more with the boys down at the pub. Last night we discussed our various attempts at making alcohol at home.* Jonathan and I once failed miserably in our attempt to make honeysuckle-infused vodka, turning out some glaucous beige shit that smelled of dirty feet and rotting cabbage. But Nonno tells us that he has had great success making liqueurs with both plums and figs. It is good to have a diet rich in fruits and vegetables. When people tease him about being old, he says that he will outlive us all. I hope so.

We sit inside now that the weather has turned colder and talk about this and that while the card players play at the table in the corner and Renata gives us a platter of sliced meat and cheese and bread because Daniele and Alice have stayed home now that the tourist season is over, so there is no great pasta bowl of one of Daniele's fantastic dishes to appear out of the kitchen tonight. Jonathan and I walk home holding hands and we can see all the islands very clearly out in the sea and all the boats heading into the harbor at La Spezia. The air is very clear and cold. We are glad when we get home that the heat has come on inside.

*If the language test is food-and-booze-related, I'm a shoo-in. Otherwise, I'm toast.

 

Jonathan blew back home on the Mistral winds Saturday and we had one lovely evening before we woke up Sunday morning to a suspicious (and tragically familiar) chill in the air. We spent Sunday going back and forth to the furnace controls in the basement laundry room and then running around feeling all the radiators and saying, "Nope -- still nothing." 

The wind was blowing so hard that we lost a bit of the roof over the place where we park the car and we actually had to tie one of our windows shut with string. On Monday, the furnace repairman showed up about 5 p.m. and replaced the thermostat which (fingers crossed!) was the ultimate culprit.

The heat did come on and is now working away trying to once again warm up an old stone house that had gotten very deep down chilly.

"Gosh," I said to Jonathan at one point, "it's actually warmer inside the refrigerator now than it is outside in the kitchen."

Then later I said, "Like really warmer."

Then later, "OK, so I just opened the refrigerator door and an actual blast of hot air came out."

So now we have everything from the refrigerator sitting out on the kitchen table while we try to figure out what the fuck is going on. The panel at the back of the inside compartment that usually feels cold is now hot to the touch. There are some instructions with no words, but only pictures and numbers, on the inside of the freezer door. These do not help at all.

But the good news is that there are violets and tiny white daisies and purple crocuses blooming all over the yard. Barbara and Sara, who run our veg store, gave me a giant bunch of mimosa flowers before Jonathan left and also gave me their telephone number and told me not to hesitate to call them if I needed anything at all. Jonathan brought them back a bottle of fancy Vermont maple syrup and now they are giving us some honey from their own hives.

And I continue to plug away learning Italian. I have a lesson once a week with Cristina, but also have a grammar book that I read on my own and some flash cards that I bought at Title Wave Books when I was in Alaska last June. The flash cards have vocabulary words on them, but also sentences that I have to memorize: "Doctor Rivetti, it's a pleasure to meet you." -- "Dottor Rivetti, e' un piacere conoscerla." "I'll take the pants, the shirt and the sunglasses." -- "Prendo i pantaloni, la camicia, e gli occhiali da sole."

Tomorrow, I have an appointment to have a pap smear, which I will almost certainly have to endure without Jonathan there to translate.

Me to doctor: Dottor Rivetti, e' un piacere conoscerla.

Doctor to me: Prendo i pantaloni, la camicia, e gli occhiali da sole.