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!"

 

We will have no olive harvest this year. All up and down the coast, the crop has been devastated. There was the blazing summer heat with no water and then the rains so hard that they were almost floods. And then the flies arrived to lay eggs in the green olives so that now every single olive in our grove has a worm hole in it where the fly larvae have been.

Valerio says his whole crop is gone, but he thinks there may be a few groves somewhere around that, because the wild terrain makes so many micro-climates, might have been less hard hit. Gilda says her grove has some surviving olives -- not all are lost -- but everyone else sits silently on the terrace of the pub and looks at their shoes when the subject of the harvest comes up. Times are hard.

But Alice brings Celeste to work with her these days and she is a sweet baby who doesn't cry much, but sleeps in her stroller under a mosquito net in the shade or looks around her with dark curious eyes to see what everyone is doing.

"She is growing," Alice says and we are all happy to hear this.

I have been away from lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea for a while, but I'm back now. After a long, hot August working almost every night in the pub and then sleeping as late as we could in the cool mornings with all the windows open and all the sheets pushed off the bed onto the floor, we left to go to the US and visit our new baby grandchild.

We have decided not to rate him with regard to beauty ("the most beautiful baby ever") because my own two tiny sons were, of course, breathtakingly gorgeous. But we have agreed that this child is definitely "top five." He is laughing now. Baby laughter is my favorite sound in the world.

But the US seems like a scary, angry place now -- a place where everyone is on the edge. With Putin's lapdog sitting in the White House, it is looking more and more likely that there will be a war here in Europe, but it is still not as frightening as daily, violent life in the US.

When we got back, I left again almost immediately to go to England to see Fiona, who had a health scare a couple of weeks ago during which I bought a plane ticket. But she had recovered by the time the visit actually happened. (Which is, after all, the best outcome.)

While I was gone, some of the ladies from the village came over to show Jonathan how to find the wild porcini mushrooms in our woods. They waited for him on the terrace while he was inside putting on his boots. When he came out, Gilda said to him, "So, we're here to teach you how to hunt porcini mushrooms?"

"Yes," Jonathan said.

"Well, we might start with this one," she said and pointed to a giant one growing straight out of the mossy wall of the terrace, smack in plain sight. "Shouldn't be too hard around here, apparently."

It's good to give your neighbors a source of amusement. Makes you more part of the community.

Nonno's birthday was at the end of July. We had a big lunch that lasted many hours at a long table behind the pub. There was seafood risotto and acciughe e gamberi fritti and lots of wine and singing. Late in the afternoon, I wandered inside and found Elena singing to Nonno.

But Daniele and Alice weren't there because they were at the hospital where Alice was in active labor. About five o'clock, the word came that the baby was born. Irene and Lucia Mora sprang into action putting up a giant pink bow and teddy bear on the front of the pub to announce the good news to all of Capriglia. Or, actually, they sprang into action directing Valerio -- "Up, higher, a little to the left, no, to the right, lower" -- who was perched up in the big sycamore tree actually hanging the bow and displaying superhuman levels of patience. 

"A pretty good birthday present for you," I said to Nonno.

"My birthday wish for the baby," he said, "is that she has a life as long and healthy and happy as mine has been."

Other updates:

Wheels: Now that Jonathan has a valid Italian driver's license, we have finally bought a car -- it is tiny and red and gently pre-owned. The people we bought it from also live here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea, renting a house from our friends Fabio and Luciana. We still don't actually have possession of the car yet, of course. That will come eventually. I hope it doesn't take two years to get, like the driver's license did. (There is a part of the movie of Under the Tuscan Sun where the heroine impulsively buys a house in Tuscany in only one day. Whenever I think about that, I laugh and laugh.)

Flora and Fauna: In the past week, overcome by the gorgeous abundance of the summer produce, I have made apricot jam, fig jam, cherry preserves, and zucchini relish. It's a sickness. And Milo went on a family trip to the mountains and brought us back some of the trout he caught. We cooked them with fresh ginger and garam masala and they were lovely.

 

Jonathan and I went in to Firenze Saturday evening to see Yo-Yo Ma play some Bach cello suites. It was one of the most profound artistic experiences of my life.

There was nothing on the stage -- just a chair. And he himself didn't do any talking -- just walked out carrying his cello and sat down and started to play.

And it was like being hit by a tidal wave of purest beauty -- an intensely physical sensation, sitting still there in my auditorium seat, of love. I felt it -- all in a rush -- in every part of my body, but most especially in my heart. Jonathan cried.

It's a strange thing to be allowed to watch a man sit on a stage in the light and commune directly with his gods. It seems like that should be an entirely private affair, such an intimate moment -- something that we should not look upon with unshielded eyes.

But I think the thing that great artists have is that they can touch their gods and they can also give you the feeling that you are, for the space of that moment, touching them, too. It was like he was giving each one of us, personally, the gift of transcendence. And now my heart is changed forever.

"I always thought you were a little bit crazy to cry in front of that Botticelli Madonna in the Uffizi," Jonathan said later on the way home. "But now I understand."

 

Today marks 1000 days that we have lived in Italy. When we first came here to our rustic farmhouse in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea, we knew no one and understood almost nothing. We were so dazed (by the move) and so dazzled (by the beauty) that it took us a while to get our bearings. We are still getting them, still dazzled.

But we know people now and understand, if not the post office, at least how the grocery store works. We know our butcher and our greengrocers and the people at our olive press and our flour mill. We know our neighbors and their families. We know the old men down at the pub who sit under the shade tree and drink wine and gossip all day. We know Alice and Daniele and are happily waiting for their baby to arrive. We know the baby's name.

Yesterday, Jonathan ran into the owner of the lovely house next to the belfry that we hope to rent for the next ten years. He says that they are happy to rent to us -- so all is well there. We still don't know what the rent will be, but we have our fingers crossed.

We also spoke to our immigration attorney yesterday and she says everything is good to go for my citizenship application even though only one of my state-level non-criminal records has come so far. She is going to check in person today to make sure that is true and get back to us.

The poppies are blooming in our olive groves now and the olive trees themselves are covered in flower buds that are just about to open. The chestnut trees are starting to bloom. The cherry tree is alive with joyous songbirds eating all the cherries. I have an Italian lesson later this morning. Jonathan is busy right now baking bread.

 

The final step  in my application for Italian citizenship is providing proof that I have not committed any (heinous) crimes in the US. I have already submitted proof of that on the national level, but I am now in the midst of trying to prove it for every state where I've ever lived. There have been a lot of them. And given the bureaucratic difficulty that I'm having getting proof of my blamelessness, I cannot even imagine how complicated the process would be if I had, in fact, committed crimes. The mind reels.

The people in Colorado say they sent the completed forms to my brother's house in Washington, but they never arrived and there is no record of them anywhere in the postal system. So we had to start all over again with that and have our fingers crossed that the second time is the charm. The people in Arkansas did send the forms to my brother, but neglected to include the dreaded Apostille, without which the Italian government will not accept the forms as legitimate. We called the office in Arkansas (long-distance overseas phone rates, btw) and they said at first that we hadn't requested the Apostille and then transferred our call to a supervisor who didn't answer the phone. We called back and got a different person who admitted that we had, indeed, requested the Apostille and that they would mail one out to my brother, but not any time soon. We should not hold our breaths.

And when I say that "we" called, what I mean is "Jonathan." Jonathan called. The secret to a happy marriage is to find a partner who will call government offices -- repeatedly -- on your behalf when you yourself Just Can't Any More.

To reward ourselves for wading through so many automated voice mail menus, we then went to the flour mill. This was Jonathan's idea -- that we should start buying our flour straight from the mill, of which there are a few around here, small family mills stone-grinding wheat, but also corn, chickpeas, chestnuts, rice. One of them is housed in an old abbey.

So we went yesterday afternoon to the Angeli mill just outside Pietrasanta and had a lovely chat with the miller (who looked familiar to me) about different types of flours with different amounts of protein and gluten in them. Then he measured out our flour from a big sack into a small bag for us.

"Do you live around here?" he said.

"Yes, in Capriglia."

"Ah, there's such a lovely view from up there."

"Yes -- and we eat well, too, at the pub."

He laughed and his face lit up. "Yes," he said. "You eat well with Daniele cooking. Give him my salutations."

And so maybe I have seen him at the pub and that is why I recognized him. We will know his name soon. Jonathan baked bread from the flour and it was great, so we are going back next week for more. Mark my words: It is just a matter of time before Jonathan "Wouldn't It Be Cool To Make Our Own Olive Oil" Poritz has us growing our own wheat out in the backyard and then taking it ourselves down to our friend at the mill.

 Aiden and Meghan's baby has arrived -- a month early and very small, but breathing on his own and in general being a champ. He didn't cry when he was born, but, as Aiden said, "took it straight." 

They are all still in the hospital, hoping to be able to go home in not too many more days. I offered, of course, to fly there immediately, but for now the three of them are happy just being their own new little family. And Aiden is sending lots of pictures, none of which I am allowed to post anywhere public. So here is a picture of him instead.

I remember a thousand moments of his baby- and childhood -- a thousand moments that he doesn't remember now, but that I will never forget. He was my little boy and now he has a little boy of his own. Time passes and we all grow up. But there is a tiny part of me that lives forever in his childhood.

Today, I officially filed the final paperwork to request Italian citizenship. Four minutes after submitting it, I realized that there was a mistake on it and my birthday was listed in the place where Jonathan's should have gone.

Our lawyer is going to call the Questura in Lucca tomorrow and see if she can correct it that way. In the meantime, we are holding off on the champagne.

The kids in Capriglia hang out in the evenings at the Bellevedere -- a low stone wall at the edge of town with a sweeping view of the coast below us and the sea beyond that. Sometimes, they write messages to each other on the wall itself -- graffiti of love and longing and heartbreak and bitterness. For many months, we followed the notes documenting the on-again-off-again relationship between Fabio and Laura. It was tempestuous.

But now someone has taken the the messaging to the next level and actually spray-painted the street: "La nostra storia che non finisce mai di finire." -- "Our story that never ends." I feel that this also beautifully expresses the essence of my story with the bureaucratic machinery of the Italian government.

The wild boar has continued his nightly rampages in our olive grove. Various illegal solutions have been proposed by our friends at the pub who assure us that we can bribe the police to look the other way. The bribe is wild boar meat.

Apropos of that, we were invited to a hog slaughtering (which was absolutely meant as an act of kindness and inclusion, although it may not seem that way at first glance.) At least, we think we were invited to a hog slaughtering. Our translation skills can still be sometimes rather shaky in new situations with new vocabulary. We are often unsure if what we think we heard is at all what was intended. When we first arrived in Italy, for example, I thought that I was being invited to a lesbian orgy, but it turned out to be a breast self-exam clinic. In my defense, the pictures on the invitation were ambiguous.

The lovely Renata is back for a very brief visit. We saw her last night and will see her tonight again at the Sunday night Giro di Pizza at the pub. Because of her, everyone smiles and laughs a lot more. It is like a piece of early spring sunshine has arrived. 

 

Here in the last dregs of winter, we are celebrating Carnevale with dancing and drinking and masquerades and parading through the streets. The upshot of this is that the car and the house and the pockets of my winter coat all have little sprinklings of confetti in them.

We went to the big parade in Viareggio two Saturdays ago and to the little one in Pietrasanta last Sunday and to Ireland in between, first stopping in Pisa to see a Hokusai show at the Palazzo Blu, which is a museum now, but once was the house where Byron lived by the river. My favorite piece was a painting on silk called "Tiger in a Bamboo Grove Looking at the Full Moon." I would like to live my life in such a way that my biography could also be called "Tiger in a Bamboo Grove Looking at the Full Moon."

Ireland was windy and wild and romantic, if you can still feel romance after eating so much fried fish and chips. We went briefly insane at Aillwee and bought kilo after kilo of Irish cheese that we have now in the refrigerator.

I almost had a nervous breakdown driving the microscopic almost-but-not-quite-as-wide-as-one-car roads that were nevertheless two way streets among the encroaching hedgerows in Western Ireland on our way to the Cliffs of Moher and then on to Galway. I has assumed the driving-on-the-left-side-of-the-road skills that I picked up living for a year in the Cook Islands 20 years ago would come back to me. It is always entertaining to discover that you have assumed incorrectly while driving at high speeds through a mirror-image roundabout.

But we survived the hedgerows and the baked beans for breakfast and the incipient scurvy and the pints of Guinness and the wind that made me buy a hat and ended the serviceable life of our umbrella. Besides cheese and hats, we bought books in English and Irish seaweed snacks. We listened to traditional Irish music in a traditional Irish pub and also even managed to see a second Hokusai show in a museum in Dublin.

Our Moldovan cab driver on the way back to the airport our last day in Dublin, having lived for a while in Italy himself, exchanged emails with us so that he could send us info about making our own grappa (we had given a rousingly vivid description of our life here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea). Yesterday, we got this email from him:

Hello Jonathan and Jonathan's wife :),

I hope you had an easy flight back to the Italian community and the big family!

Above all, I want to mention the moment that touched me the most. After you got into the car, you both exchanged a glance and smiled at each other with such deep respect and love. In that instant, I saw that you were truly united and happy as one. I’m so glad I witnessed that.

I hope that one day, when I reach your age, I will experience such a moment with my own wife.
Thank you for the inspiration! 

To this letter, I am attaching the books we discussed about self-distilled spirits.

We are having very romantic winter weather these days -- rough seas and skies like the inside of an oyster shell. But even though the wind is clear and cold and often fierce, hellebore and white daffodils are nevertheless blooming in sheltered little corners all over our garden.

Jonathan is slowly on the mend from his operation and can speak and eat regular food now, but still no word from the doctor about the biopsy results, so we worry. Next weekend is the Festa di San Biagio -- the patron saint of Pietrasanta and also of throats. So there is a Luna Park set up in a usually vacant field at the edge of town and next Monday there will be a Blessing of the Throats in the Duomo. Jonathan snorts dismissively, but I think this is too good an opportunity to pass up and intend to take him and his throat down to town to be blessed. This will doubtless involve some amount of trickery on my part. Or possibly crying.

And we are still working away on our video podcast project -- the second episode dropped today and we already have the third ready to go. Jonathan knows that this is all just procrastination because I am supposed to be working on a new book. So putting together a 50-episode video podcast series to keep from writing one paragraph seems quite reasonable.

We had lunch at the pub on Sunday, sitting at the Tavolo di Marmo with Ugo and Nonno and Alice's mother, Marzia. The secret of Alice's pregnancy is out now and everyone is so happy. Daniele is gently jovial and Alice is serene and beautiful. Marzia is busy encouraging Alice to eat more, while Alice glows happily.

One thing I miss about winter in Colorado Springs is the way the sky turns orange at night in the snow. But I look down on the jeweled plain below us and I am not too sad.

 

It is cold here tonight in Capriglia -- not below freezing, but almost. Nonno was wearing a blue cap knit for him by his mother 40 years ago. We ate pizza together and drank wine and, the whole time, I was aware of his blue knit cap and how I hope that some day long after I am gone, something that I made for them keeps my children warm on a winter night.

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 Trofeo del Leone is happening this week and we went Tuesday evening to watch a couple of the games and eat grilled sausage sandwiches and hang out in the cool night air with our friends. There was a horse and a pony for pony rides and much excitement because the soccer field here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea is less than half-sized (the steepness of the mountain slope making big flat places nonexistent up here) and so the players kept inadvertently kicking the ball into the spectators or even into the people who were not really watching the game, but were instead standing chatting to their friends or quietly guzzling inexpensive prosecco out of plastic cups until they were blind-sided by an incoming soccer ball to the head.

The teams themselves were made up of players of varying ages and abilities and although Daniele was the coach of one of the teams and although the teams had names like "The Drinking Monkeys," I didn't know any of the good players. It is possible that there is a connection between being able to run around with agility on a soccer field and not spending all day drinking in the pub. That might explain why the good players were unknown to me. Just a thought.

There were children and lemonade and laughter and bright stars slowly making their way across the summer night sky. But there was also the moment of silence at the beginning of each game when we bowed our heads and remembered Leonardo. And at one point, I noticed Geppolino, Leonardo's increasingly frail father, standing by himself looking lost, all alone in the crowd.

Today it is raining and the forecast is for rain most days all next week. Jonathan and I went down for one last ice cream at the beach yesterday afternoon. I have put the comforters back onto our bed. Summer seems to be over.