The heat continues to be post-apocalyptic. Right now, I am sitting still and gently sweating in the coolest place in the house that I can find. The only sounds are the katydids screaming and a distant ambulance coming closer and closer on its way up the hill to tiny Capriglia. Jonathan -- whose body heat radiates in a way that makes him the perfect husband in, say, February -- is too hot to touch.

And yet, the social life in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea is in full swing. Last night, we went to see Turnadot at the Puccini Festival in Torre del Lago. It was a lovely production and we were gifted tickets by our landlords, whose three children sang in the chorus. They were adorable.

But for all that, it is clear that anyone who complains about the immorality, etc., of rap/rock music has never been to the opera.

And then tonight is a big Capriglia community dinner in the tiny park next to our miniature soccer field up here. Jonathan has been accepted in amongst the group of ladies of a certain age who run everything in Capriglia (except for whatever happens at the pub). He is their mascot, the only man allowed in with the women. They have a WhatsApp groups chat called Capriglia Insieme ("Capriglia Together") but that we call Capriglia Unbound. He has been getting at least a hundred texts a day in the lead-up to tonight's big dinner. His phone is constantly buzzing so that if anyone else (like, for example, me) needs to get in touch with him, the message invariably gets lost in the shuffle. Since the beasts at the pub are mostly male, we had been wondering where all the women get together. Now we know.

Speaking of the pub, tomorrow is the big joint birthday party for Nonno (93) and Celeste (1). It will last all day and most of the night. We are busy hydrating today in preparation.

 

Nonno got to come to the pub for lunch on Sunday. Everyone pitched in to hire an ambulance to bring him from the rest home in Seravezza. Elena and her parents cooked a big feast of special food from Cape Verde for everyone sitting out under the shade tree on the terrace. There was much singing. Elena played the guitar and Elena's mother, Elida, danced around with baby Celeste. Nonno stayed until almost 5:00 in the afternoon. It was almost like the old days.

Here during the shortest days of the year, I mostly want to hide under the covers on our bed and watch Christmas-themed food videos on YouTube and then make the things and eat them. This has led to many trips to stores all over town searching for things like molasses -- which is impossible to find, despite very diligent nostalgia-and-hunger-induced effort.

So we go down to the pub and eat Daniele's pears roasted in red wine and then wander home while the wolves howl in an amazing chorus and I hurry to get safe inside our house and Jonathan lingers outside, hoping for a glimpse of one. So far, I am relieved to say, he has been unsuccessful. But the wolves are so numerous (and so convivial) that they woke me up before dawn yesterday with a rousing symphony of howling.

The winner of the raffle of the giant bottle of wine at the pub has not been determined yet. We bought our ticket (#17) last Easter, which was the first time the raffle was supposed to have been held, and have held onto it for these many months through many further announcements that the raffle was going to be happening any day now. But things do not rush forward and it may be many months still before the winner is known.

Still no word on my Italian citizenship, btw.

Likewise, we are supposed to be signing the lease and paying the rent and getting the keys to our new house in ten days' time, but there is no movement on that front and we are glad that we gave ourselves a whopping four months of overlap, while we still have this house, to actually make the move. We will doubtless need every bit of the time.

But I am in no particular rush, just savoring these last weeks living with Jonathan in this misty, hidden dreamworld where we can feel, especially on foggy days or in the mornings before the mist rises back into the sky, that we have somehow managed to travel back in time to the days before televisions and cell phones and traffic jams, when a person's whole world could be just one tiny village in the hills of Tuscany and the people and things found there would be enough for a full and complete life.

We went to hear our friends sing in the local choir concert last night. Because there are so few people up here, the choir makes up ten percent of the total population of the village. I like to think of them practicing together in the evenings, as they have done for decades now, from the time before there was anything else to do on a long winter night. I sent a clip last night to Jonathan's sons and Gabe replied, "No wonder it's easy for people to believe in the divine."

 

 

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."

 

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.