Jonathan has been gone all week visiting his parents in New Jersey. I have been here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea living in the winter wind and the air that is washed clear and the sea that glows like a pale blue pearl.

I am supposedly working on some of the pre-publication tasks for Armadillo Massacre Number Three. People are surprised that it takes so long to bring a book out, but I feel like I have so much to do and so little time to do it. There was a big zoom meeting last Friday night of all of the authors in our "season" -- Fall 2027 -- with the publisher. 

Now we are busy grouping up to make book tours together -- arranging readings, signings, panel discussions. I am in both the North Carolina group and the Colorado group. There are lots of dates to coordinate and bookstores. etc. to contact. And, of course, we are reading each other's manuscripts, so I have like 10 books to read in the next few weeks.

But there is also paperwork -- my very favorite thing. Multiple questionnaires to fil out with questions that require actual thought: "Who is your ideal reader?" "What is the number one reason booksellers should stock your book?"

I have no idea. With the world both literally and figuratively on fire, I don't know why anyone would do anything rational and calm.

I got an email this morning from a friend in the US who wrote: "Things are heavy. I'm weary of marching, signing petitions and screaming into the void. Yet we must carry on. ... I'm not sure my nervous system was meant for this."

We also feel that way, even here. During my Italian lesson yesterday, we spent half of our time discussing whether the demented orange madman will start World War III over Greenland. It's all so unbelievably insane. And yet, I fill out my little forms and send my little emails. I take showers and brush my teeth and still make the bed every morning and continue to eat kale -- just as if I think the world will wake up from this nightmare one fine morning. Maybe it will.

 

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.

 

Jonathan has been gone for a week -- first to Switzerland to see his kids and then to New Jersey to see his parents. I stayed here because my permesso di soggiorno still has not arrived, shockingly enough. (Neither has Jonathan's driver's license, for those of you innocent enough to have believed that something promised for November would be ready no later than February.) And so I can't leave the country. Or at least I can't come back in if I do.

The first day that I woke up without Jonathan, the house felt lonely and empty and a little cold to me. "Ah," I thought to myself. "Everything is so bleak in the absence of my darling Jonathan that I actually feel cold from it. It is not the house that is cold -- it is my heart!"

It was the house.

It turns out that the furnace was malfunctioning and for those three days while the naughty gods waited waited for the truth of the situation to dawn on me, it got colder and colder in the house. Rain poured down outside and the Mistral blew through, searingly cold. Eventually I did come to the realization that this was more than emotional cold and figured it all out and everything is fixed now. But for the space of those days, it seemed like the house and the world outside it were all just a reflection of how much I missed him.

Also, this is a photo of what it looks like around here when we do laundry while it rains. Glamorous. They don't show you this side of things in all those romantic movies set in Italy.

The winds have blown themselves out now, leaving behind colder temperatures, a sweeping crystalline view out over the sea, and a small amount of property damage. Mimmo came to work on the damage and after he left, I discovered that he had picked some persimmons for us and left them on the porch.

We are living now in wind. It has been blowing for three days -- so hard that we lost a big tree out back and a dozen fence posts. In one night, the big persimmon tree was stripped clean of all its lovely red and orange leaves and now scores of persimmons hang there on the bare branches, getting ripe, just out of reach, taunting me.

We got a literal windfall of corbezzoli berries, though, so I have been making giant pots of gritty jam. It was either that or step in all the sticky red berries whenever we walk out back, ending up afterwards tracking red splotches around behind us like a couple of very untidy serial killers.

There were a few very small and very unexpected sweet potatoes for sale in the fruit and veg store the other day. They were labelled "Patate Americane." This led me to attempt to bake Jonathan's favorite pie, Sweet Potato Pecan. The important ingredients for this are: sweet potatoes, pecans, dark corn syrup, brown sugar, eggs, and pumpkin pie spice. The ingredients from that list that are regularly available in Italy: eggs. For the rest, I just had to wing it. We are eating it anyway.

Last Sunday, we went to Capezzano Monte for the celebration of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. There was a mass with music by the Capezzano Monte Filarmonica in the church, then a little band concert in the park, and then a big fried-chicken lunch in the school house/community center, where we sat at long tables and talked (as is almost always the case in Italy) about food. Our friend Claudio from the pub was the head chef. It was like a lost episode of The Andy Griffith Show, only with wine. Lots and lots of wine.

We have more time to go to things like this lately  because two days ago, I finished the first draft of my new novel. Now it needs to sit and marinate while I clear my head of it. That way I can come back to it later with clear eyes.

Tomorrow we are going to the Merenda Allongata (Elongated Snack) at the pub to usher in the holiday season. It lasts from 4:00 to 8:00 p.m. and features much wild boar, including Daniele's homemade, secret-recipe wild boar sausage. We had planned to sort of diet and get in better shape before the holiday season kicked in, but it seems to have snuck up on us very quickly and we missed our chance. So now when we say we are "rolling in" to the holiday season, we mean it literally. I have no regrets.

One year ago today, Jonathan and I arrived in Italy, exhausted, wild-eyed, and crazed with emotions that I didn't even have words for. Of course, I also didn't have the words for "rental car," "reservation," and "parking lot."

We had hatched a plan, Jonathan and I, to buy a bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, and some cheese and to immediately head up to our then-unseen house for a little impromptu picnic outside the gates (we didn't move in until the 5th because the house was being cleaned for us after the departure of the previous tenants.) But we never ended up doing that because of being exhausted, wild-eyed, etc. etc.

So tonight we have a vaguely heretical bottle of Veuve Clicquot, a loaf of bread that Jonathan is baking right now, and a cheese that we bought yesterday at the once-a-week market from our friendly cheese-seller who has the best cheese that we've found.

Then we will go down to the pub to bring Renata some of the green fig and Cointreau jam I made yesterday. It tastes great, but looks like snot. (The Italian word for snot, incidentally, is "moccio" -- oh, the vast swathes of useful vocabulary I have picked up in the past year!)

When we were buying figs yesterday at the Frutta D'Oro, we told Barbara about our Italian anniversary. "It seems like you arrived just recently and also long ago both at the same time," she said. This is how it feels for me, too.

The rain finally came last Monday night -- drenching, torrential, windblown -- taking the godawful heat and the roof of our parking area with it. Temperatures are supposed to go back up again starting tomorrow, but we have taken advantage of the respite to use the oven, which we had been avoiding during the sweltering dog days. Jonathan, as I said, is baking bread and I have a roast marinating and another batch of snot simmering. Wandering around our grounds to survey the storm damage, I discovered that our apple tree is covered with big red beauties.

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.

The Mistral returned yesterday with ferocious winds and dazzling views of the sea. We should have predicted this because the last of our February guests left yesterday amid grey skies and mists. For two weeks, we've been apologizing for the rather indifferent weather and saying, "Oh, but you should see it on a good day!" So today the sea is sapphire blue and we can see the individual portholes on the ships heading towards the harbor at La Spezia. I feel like Jonathan and I are also in a ship, cozy and sunlit, sailing in a sea of Mistral wind.

Two days ago, down at the pub, I was talking to Alice about my new book coming out. We will have a reading there in June to celebrate its appearance. I said that Capriglia is a wonderful place to write -- always tranquil, always calm. "Yes," she said, deadpan, "just like in The Shining."

A couple of night ago, I dreamed that a giant tidal wave came and crashed over me. I survived by holding onto the handle of the door of my house. But I wasn't afraid or worried because I knew that my children were safe inside the house. I was surprised to find that I could breathe under water. 

I miss my boys.

 

The Mistral continues to blow here and we continue to hang our laundry out in it. Our theory is that the wind will somehow work magic. This despite the fact that there were even a few flakes of swirling snow this morning.

The sea is whipped up so that it is luminous and milky, but France is very clear on the horizon and we can see St. Tropez from our front yard. It's breathtaking, but impossible to photograph in all its glory. We even dug out the telephoto lens (carefully packed and carried all this way for just such an occasion) and tried our best with that, but it is still so much better with the naked eye. We tell each other that you have to live here to see such things. Then we hurry back inside out of the cold and the wind.

We are very cozy inside, like hibernating bears.

I wondered how it would feel to be back in the US for our first visit since moving to Italy. I wondered if I would be overwhelmed with nostalgia, sink into the comfort of understanding everything being said around me and of knowing how everything works. I wondered if I would feel regret.

Um, no.

America seems gritty and frenetic and angry. There are many consumer goods and I was glad to be able to buy them, but people eat their lunches too fast -- it is not good for the digestion. And afternoon naps are frowned on for everyone over the age of four -- no wonder there is so much rampant crankiness. And the political scene is a chaotic dystopian morass that would be bizarrely fascinating, in a freakish circus sideshow sort of way, were it not in the global center ring, threatening to take the rest of the world's economy down the drain with it. That cretins such as the American Republicans (who by rights should be relegated to carefully controlled institutional settings out of the way of decent people) should have such global power makes their clown act no longer funny. It is horrifying.

But.

It was lovely to see the people I love. One cannot make an old friend over night. And to be with my boys, however fleetingly, is a piece of heaven.

One of my relatives asked me what I miss about America. I miss the people I love. I miss the boys being little and asleep, tucked into their beds at night in the quiet of our house and me as I was then, in those late evening hours of serenity. But all of that is gone and moving away to Italy had nothing to do with its loss.

So we did the slog of 23 hours of travel and arrived at last back to our little house  on the hillside just in time to see the sun setting blood red into the sea. The wind was very fierce last night -- these are the winter winds of the Mistral.

But the famous Tuscan sun is out this morning, drying all of our travel laundry. The winds blew the air so clear that right now from our windows we can see the snow on the mountain tops of Les Alpes-Maritimes across the Ligurian Sea in France.