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.

 

The exceptionally cool and rainy May followed by the last few days of glorious summer warmth has led to two unexpected pieces of magic.

The first is that there were wild porcini mushrooms at the greengrocers this morning. These are not usually in season until the fall, but the seasons are all cattywampus and so the mushrooms have been coaxed into appearing months ahead of schedule. I just finished making some rosemary-infused olive oil (we have masses of rosemary in our garden) and we will sauté the porcini in it and eat them with some of Jonathan's homemade bread. 

And the second piece of magic brought about by the rainy May is that we have an exceptionally abundant number of fireflies this year so that when we are walking in the dark through our olive groves or even along the road from the pub to our house, the air sparkles and shimmers all around us. It is easy to believe that fairies live in the summertime woods.

(photo by Tsuneaki Hiramatsu)

About every six months, the big grocery store outside town has a promotion where you get little stamps -- called "bollini" -- with your purchases -- one stamp for every 15 euros you spend. Then you can redeem the stamps for prizes. We are currently saving up to get a Bosch multi-tool for 45 bollini.

The cashiers give out the stamps and clearly have some leeway in this. We have found that if we are polite and friendly, we are often rewarded with an extra stamp or two. And almost all the cashiers will round up if you are within 3 or 4 euros of the next amount to get another stamp. It is fun and friendly.

But there is one cashier who is never fun and friendly no matter what the circumstances. In fact, he is often actively hostile -- slamming your bag of potato chips down on the conveyor belt with particular ferocity, for example. We don't go to him no matter how short his line is. And it is often very short.

But yesterday, Jonathan ran down on his bike to get a couple of bottles of vodka for the limoncello we are making. It was a very slow time of day (post-lunch nap time) and the mean guy was the only cashier working. The total for the vodka came to 29 euros and change -- less than one euro short of the 30 needed to get two bollini. Any other cashier would have rounded up, but the mean guy gave Jonathan just one, which was technically correct. "Technically correct," of course, is the worst kind of correct and, moreover, seems to violate the entire spirit of Italy. It's practically unpatriotic.

But, fine. Whatever.

Jonathan came home with the vodka and the one stamp and I pasted it onto our little stamp sheet.

A couple of hours later, we were together in the kitchen making the limoncello. 

"What's that?" Jonathan said, pointing at the floor.

There were two bollini sitting all by themselves in the middle of the floor. Jonathan doesn't believe it, but I am convinced that this house gave us two bollini to make up for the mean guy having been so, well, mean.

The house is enchanted.

 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.

 

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.

 

Just past our beach club is a little smoothie bar set in a grove of beachside trees and/or Wonderland. It is called either the Lemon Bar or the Lola Juice Bar -- nothing in this place is certain.

I have never been someone who writes sitting in cafes, but I have never been in a cafe under the trees with crystal chandeliers before. So I am giving it a go.

 

Here is a completely factual and objective description of the events of yesterday afternoon exactly as they happened:

1. I was sitting on a chair in the living room shelling fresh peas.

2. A pea escaped and rolled under my chair.

3. I saw it go under.

4. I immediately lumbered down to the floor to retrieve it, but it was not there.

5. It is a bare tile floor and there is no other nearby furniture under which a pea could hide.

6. I had a clear view in all directions and there was certainly no pea. I looked all around very carefully. No pea.

7. Anywhere.

8. Instead, there was this fifty-centime piece sitting right where the pea should have been.

9. Earlier in the day, Jonathan and I had been talking about money -- specifically, how to get some more of it.

10. Obviously, the pea had changed itself into the coin.

11. There is no other explanation.

12. This house is enchanted.

(13. p.s. I know what you're thinking, but we ate the rest of the peas.)

When we first moved to Italy, Jonathan and I were overwhelmed with the beauty of it. Every day, we marveled. Every day, we ate up the world around us in delight. Every day it seemed as though we had at last somehow -- magically -- found our way through that tiny door into the enchanted garden beyond.

Naturally, we worried. We worried that somehow we would over time become insensate -- numb through familiarity to the constantly unfolding loveliness around us. We worried that we would lose the ability to see it, to marvel at it, when our eyes were accustomed to it.

A different thing has happened, though. As we have adjusted to living here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea, with its sweeping views of the sea and the clouds and the green of the olive groves and the hillsides covered with wildflowers, we seem to find more beauty, not less. We notice things all the time that have been there, but that we were perhaps too dazzled to see before now. 

I have walked past this planter, for example, on the main street in Pietrasanta easily a hundred times now, but I only noticed it a few days ago -- the beautiful terracotta fruits and vegetables at the base of it. It is a lovely planter, sitting quietly on the wall, waiting to be seen by someone paying attention. And all of Pietrasanta is like this -- tiny treasures everywhere once you notice them.

We have not lost our sense of wonder, after all. The more accustomed to our world here that we become, the more magic that we find.

Today would have been my father's 90th birthday. I miss him very much.

And, because he was always more interested in giving presents than in receiving them, he seems to have sent me a gift from the great beyond. The camellia tree outside the kitchen door, in the midst of the bitter winds and the cold, has produced one early bloom. It emerged on the tree and then blew down to land at my feet.

"Ah," my friend Fiona says. "It must be camillia paulus paulus." Because my father's name was Paul. 

This house is enchanted.

 

Today I discovered that these little purple crocuses have begun to bloom all over outside our house. It is February and there should not be crocuses, but there are. 

And tonight at sunset, the sea was just this color, purple and luminous, and the sky was just this aching orange gold.  

Every night at sunset, Jonathan and I call out to each other "Look at the sky! Look at the sky!" from different rooms of the house. We have given up trying to photograph it.

As a birthday present, Jonathan gave me a lovely trip to Siena. We stayed in a beautiful hotel near the Campo and had one of the best dinners of my life in a tiny, elegant restaurant tucked away on a side street. The best thing, though, was a surprise to us both -- they are restoring the Lorenzetti frescoes from 1338-9 of the "Allegory of Good and Bad Government" in the Palazzo Publico and we were allowed to go up on the scaffold where they are working and see it up close.

Now, you may think that seeing a 700-year-old fresco about the allegorical effects of good and bad government would be a rather dry, cerebral, academic experience. I certainly would have thought that before I was up there.

Before we were allowed up, the guide -- and, in fact, everyone we talked to -- warned up repeatedly to be careful (which was understandable) because we might step backwards and fall because of the extreme emotion we would feel (which was not).

"Well," I thought to myself, "Italians are probably brought up on 700-year-old government allegory frescoes and will naturally react with an intensity of feeling that will elude an American heathen such as myself."

I cried.

I was so overwhelmed that the only thing that kept me from stepping backwards and falling to, if not my death, then at least a very serious injury indeed, was my overwhelming urge to get even closer to these magical paintings.

And we were already pretty damn close -- maybe four feet away. Certainly closer than Lorenzetti ever would have imagined that anyone other than himself would ever be again. The things that he painted there were made knowing full well that they would be invisible from the ground so very many feet down below.

But he had -- for no other reason than love -- made this tender, breathing little world up there. A tiny bird the size of my thumb in a birdcage in a window. The frills and laces on the shoes in a shoe shop. A dragon fly pattern woven into a lady's dress. The expressions on the face of two men -- not to mention the one on their horse's -- so vivid, so full of life, painted for no one's pleasure but his own.

Jonathan used to work with a woman at CSU-P who was constantly telling the students to "fake it 'til you make it." It drove Jonathan nuts. What about living authentically, instead of being a fake? What about being who you really are and owning that and taking pride in it? What about doing your best rather than merely pretending to? What about putting real effort into your endeavors, not to make a big show but because the striving itself is valuable to you? Because the striving itself is ... noble? Even if no one ever sees it.

And so Lorenzetti's bird in its birdcage was the very opposite of "fake it 'til you make it" -- made not for show, but in secret, a hidden treasure that only he would ever know about. And, because of that, its power is such that people are overcome to the point of stepping backwards off of scaffolds. Fake art doesn't do that, I don't think.

 

More compelling evidence has emerged that our rustic farmhouse here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea (population 255 people, I have recently discovered) is definitely enchanted.

This is the story: Our floors here are red tile bricks -- beautiful, but rustic and surprisingly tough on socks, slowly wearing them away if you walk around in sock feet all day, as I do. As a consequence, several pairs of my socks now have holes in their soles. I thought to myself yesterday morning, "I really do need to get some new socks."

It has gotten colder here lately and I have begun wearing my coat. I've probably worn it eight or ten times recently, but yesterday afternoon as I was putting it on to go to the Capezzano Monte Philharmonic Annual Christmas Concert (a very charming and slightly surreal experience), I noticed that the side pocket of my coat was buttoned closed and was also lumpy. This is not usual. "Hmmm -- what could it be?"

Socks.

It was a pair of socks.

New socks -- black with purple toes -- that I have never seen before in my life. Besides which, who puts socks in their winter coat pocket? Not me.

So the evidence continues to roll in -- the rustic farmhouse is enchanted. It gave me a convenient bench from which to view the sea when I wanted it and it gave me a covered shed filled with firewood when I wanted it and now it has given me socks, the thing that I really most desired.

Thank god I've never been one of those people who wished they had a dragon.

 

It is, I think, impossible to describe the beauty of our pub, The Society for Mutual Aid, on a late autumn afternoon when nothing much in particular is going on -- the old men there, who have known each other forever, and their dogs; Alice having a long conversation about marmalade with one of the regulars; the light from the overhead bulbs illuminating everything inside while the sun, red as blood, drops into the sea unobserved outside. The World Cup is on the TV in the corner, but Italy is not playing so no one cares. Three goals were scored while we were there this evening and caused not so much as a murmur -- the marmalade conversation was more heated. Hams hang from the rafters. Daniele is installing another stove. We are given free snacks with our wine -- antipasto or pate and always bread and olive oil.

At night, from up here the lights on the plain glitter like jewels flung out on black velvet and sometimes I ache from the beauty of it and I don't believe that any of this is quite real except for Jonathan breathing next to me in our bed at night and then stirring in his sleep.

We have been away for a week -- first in Venice and then in Portugal -- seeing loved ones. And the point of seeing loved ones, of course, is to see them and not necessarily the background scenery, which is properly inconsequential.

But.

Having said that, if you are in fact seeing loved ones, you might just as well see them standing in front of crashing waves on the Portuguese shoreline or sitting next to the filigreed palaces of Venice.

Going on a boat through the Grand Canal one night, with the moon almost full and the lights glittering on the water and fleeting glimpses inside gold and red and crystal-chandeliered rooms, holding Jonathan's hand in the sway of lapping waves, Venice seemed like a fairyland -- like we had finally found our way through that small hidden door usually kept locked with a golden key.

It is impossible to photograph this (at least for me) because a flat image of darkness with specks of yellow light, though accurate, is not truthful. There are things that are never like the pictures of themselves. The pictures are only markers to help us remember what we saw with other eyes than merely the ones in our heads.

And so the best picture of our nighttime boat ride through the Grand Canal that I could think of is James Abbott McNeill Whistler's painting, Nocturne in Black and Gold -- The Falling Rocket, which is currently held in the Detroit Institute of Arts. Because I am apparently still in middle school, naturally this reminds me of "The Detroit Rule" for food, which is that putting any place name in front of it makes everything sound more delicious -- "Tuscan Sun-dried Tomatoes," "Viennese Pastry," "Maine Lobsters" -- with one exception.

 The view of the sea from Capriglia last night. There may be words for this, but I don't have them.

I think this house is under an enchantment.

It's not just the topsy-turvy layout, the wandering moss-covered stairways vanishing down into the woods that make it feel like a dreamscape Wonderland. There are also the spring flowers blooming in the fall and the magical appearance of things we need just when we need them -- a lovely marble bench that suddenly materialized under the elm tree one day when I thought "I wish there was a place to sit here," for instance. I swear it wasn't there a minute before. And new outbuildings show up constantly -- the most recent one was magically stocked with firewood. Autumn is coming on.

But things disappear, too. We have lost a room. Here is a picture of it. I recognize everything about it as unequivocally our house -- even the bowl on the table in the picture is here now, sitting in the cantina. But the room itself, with the built-in shelves over the radiator, does not exist. Or at least we can't find it.

The islands out at sea appear and disappear on a regular basis. Perhaps it is an atmospheric phenomenon. But then again, perhaps not.

The chestnuts are falling with a soft tocking sound on the stone walkways. We have made marrons glaces twice and are now beginning to search for more uses of our bounty. The olives are coming along nicely. I haven't figured out yet how to get to the ripening persimmons. I dropped a clothespin underneath the clothesline yesterday and it fell so far down the mountainside that there is no possibility of retrieving it.

The sea is so luminous at sunset that it makes us gasp.