The winter flowers are out on the hillside now -- pale green hellebore and white daffodils. The holiday festivities are almost over now, although we still have the Befana celebrations on Twelfth Night.

We went to New Year's Eve dinner here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea where a big celebration had been organized at the empty school house. This was the first time that this had happened and there was a story in the local paper about it saying that the "old people" in Capriglia were gathering together to do this. Jonathan and I had been part of the planning of the event from the very beginning and were unaware that we are explicitly among the number of "old people" up here until we read about it in the paper. It was literally news to us.  But, honestly, we fit right in and weren't even the youngest people there -- although not by much.

The cuisine of Italy has just this past month been recognized by UNESCO as an important part of world cultural heritage (the first country to have its cuisine named by UNESCO) and the local grandmas who cooked the meal were absolutely proving it. 

So we ate until midnight and then watched the fireworks twinkling down on the coast below us. From up here, it looked like fireflies in the summer woods.

Mimmo gave us a precious bottle of local olive oil -- the supply this year is very limited because of the bad harvest. This year's vintage is being called Palle Verdi -- "Green Balls" -- which is slightly obscene in English, but not in Italian, where the slang for testicles is "scatole" -- "boxes" -- not "balls." So there's a piece of useful and important cultural knowledge that you can keep on hand for your next trip to Italy.

We are not in our new house yet, but -- much like the raffle drawing for the giant wine bottle at the pub or, for that matter, my Italian citizenship -- we have high hopes that it will happen very soon.

In the meantime, I am keeping myself busy by trying to come up with ideas to promote Armadillo Massacre Number Three. This week I made bookplate stickers that have my recipe for fried catfish on them. Fried catfish are an important part of the book -- an explicit ingredient of Heaven. I realized, when thinking about this, that it took me a whole 60,000-word book to say basically the same thing that Henry David Thoreau said in just one sentence: "Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads."

 

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.

The ice cream store at the beach has permanently closed. It had been there for 90 years, but over the winter the family who ran it decided they were done and so it sits empty now. I had become addicted to the Apple-Cinnamon gelato and doubt that I will ever taste its like again. Fortunately, in an act of what now appears to be great prescience (but wasn't really), I gorged myself on it last summer. Everyone says that there are plenty of other gelaterie around, and that is true. But it is also true that there will never be another one like that.

Even though we are in mourning, Jonathan and I are helping out every weekend at the pub, doing the bills and waiting for Alice's baby to be born. When that happens, we will work every night for a while. We do this surrounded by our friends who could be sitting out on the cool terrace, but decided to come in to be with us so that we won't be lonely. It is sweltering inside, but they are kind and lovely friends. They speak to us in Italian while we are adding numbers in our heads in English, making it impossible for me to either speak or add correctly and demonstrating beyond any doubt, because he can do both simultaneously, that Jonathan is a goddamn genius.

At the house, both the olives and the grapes are coming along nicely despite the heat. The olives are the size of small peas now. The grapes are a little bigger. Jonathan and I live very sedately in front of the fans, drinking ice water and not doing much else. In the mornings, we often go to the beach. Little kids build sand castles with buckets or play with beach balls at the edge of the surf. 

I have reached the stage of my life where divesting myself of everything I own has enormous appeal. There is just something about having to physically lift up all of your possessions yourself that makes your treasures seem so much less precious. In ten and a half months, we will leave our hidden paradise here in the woods for a different paradise in a different place -- right in heart of bustling downtown Capriglia-by-the-Sea (pop. 255 people, counting us). And we will once again have to lift up all our shit.

In preparation for this, I have been very slowly ridding myself of books that I paid $30K to transport all the way across eight time zones, but now -- who was I kidding? -- will never read again. There is a Little Free Library in the big grocery store just outside town and every time we go there I bring two books to donate. My books are in English, but there is a very international community here and the books almost always have been taken by someone by the next time we go in. It's a slow process, but an oddly satisfying one.

Yesterday when Jonathan was putting out the trash, he found a book that had been left for us in our mailbox. It was from our neighbor Fabio. He left a note saying that he had come across the book in the grocery store LFL and took it for me because it seemed like the sort of thing I would be interested in. Indeed, it was -- so much so that I bought it in 2002 when I lived in the South Pacific and carried it back to the US and kept it for over two decades and shipped it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to Italy ($30K...) before I put it in the grocery store LFL last week.

It is nice to have thoughtful and caring friends who think about me when they come across books I would like. Apparently, I am keeping this one.

We have had another meeting with the owners of the belfry house. And, although we don't yet have a rental contract, we have a verbal agreement that one of these days we will make a written agreement to eventually sign a contract to rent the house. We are very excited about this because it means we will be renting an empty house and will, therefore, have room for all our stuff -- our stuff that I am currently busy donating to the LFL at the grocery store.

The belfry house is lovely -- maybe even slightly larger than this one, but without all the outbuildings and grounds. So no more grape arbor or olive grove with poppies blooming in it or chestnut trees turning golden in the fall and dropping their spiky nut bombs for us to make vanilla-rum chestnut butter with. We are planning to go crazy this fall brining olives and making enough corbezzoli jam to last us for the duration.

But the new house has enough M.C. Escher stairways and topsy-turvy layout to make us feel that now familiar and, frankly, beloved sensation of complete disorientation. We have been inside the belfry house twice now and still can't figure out where all the rooms are. (Jonathan is better at it than I am, but he has a Ph.D. in non-Euclidian higher-dimensional geometry and I feel that gives him an advantage.)

 

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.

 

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 olives are really coming into their own now and Mimmo has sent a text saying he won't be able to be around much these days because of the harvest. I myself was out this morning gathering a small batch of ripe olives from our own trees to brine here at the house. I would have gotten more, but I walked face first into a big spider web, danced around a bit like a lunatic out there in the middle of the olive grove, and immediately after that decided that we probably have enough olives for now.

The autumn wildflowers are blooming all over the hillside and we are being deluged with the corbezzoli. Jonathan and I have made a pact between ourselves to never buy commercially produced jam again. Even so, we will never eat all that we have already made.*

We went yesterday to a food and wine festival in Pisa. We bought tickets (10 euros each) to go to a Cheese and Honey Tasting run by the National Organization of Cheese Tasters, the representative of which was jovial, but also gravely serious when it comes to matters of tasting cheese. We sat in a room for an hour with 30 other people paying very close attention to cheese -- sniffing it in the approved manner (one piece in each nostril) and tasting it very solemnly and deliberately while the cheese guy discoursed knowledgably about the attributes we should be noticing and the festival photographer wandered around taking pictures of people putting cheese up their noses.

We were given four different spoons to taste four very different types of honey and then pair them with the cheeses. The honey came from a place called the Queen of Nuts and if they had had a t-shirt, I would have bought it.

We wandered around the festival and bought three types of pasta, two types of pasta sauce, two jars of Tuscan soup, honey vinegar, melon liquor, honey-and-orange-flower-infused gin, and a cake. The best part, though, was that for three euros, you could get a wine glass in a pouch to hang around your neck and then when you went up to one of the numerous wine stalls, they would give you a free taste in your glass.

We each got a glass because we thought they were funny, but we actually drank no wine because when we got back to lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea, we were going to the regular Sunday night Giro di Pizza at the pub and it isn't wise to begin drinking too early in the day if you are going to end your evening with the professionals.

We are in the midst of a slow-motion tragedy there. Our beloved Renata is moving back to Poland after 22 years in Italy. Her mother passed away and her father is now alone and needs her, so she is moving back in November. It will be a terrible loss for us all and they did not tell Nonno right away.

She spent the evening teasing and playing as usual, making Ugo's hair stand up like a shark fin on the top of his head and turning Nonno's baseball cap around backwards. But at one point, she noticed that Geppolino's shoes weren't tied because he has a hard time now bending down that far, so she tied them for him, very tenderly and sweetly, and I thought I might cry.

Of course, how Geppolino would get his shoes off again once he got home is anybody's guess.

*Here is the recipe for the Italian Polenta Cookies with Corbezzoli Jam Thumbprints:

1. Make the corbezzoli jam by getting a lot of corbezzoli berries out in the garden, washing them gently, putting them in a pot with about half their volume of sugar, and a big squirt of lemon juice. Heat until boiling, stir frequently, and cook down a bit until it seems jammy. The corbezzoli berries are naturally very sticky, so this shouldn't take long. Let it cool while you proceed with the cookie dough.

2. Make the cookie dough by first creaming together one cup butter, one half cup sugar, and two tablespoons honey. When it is light and fluffy, add in one egg, one teaspoon lemon zest, and half a teaspoon each vanilla and salt. Mix thoroughly. Then add two cups flour and a half cup polenta (or grits or cornmeal). Mix until just combined. Then cover the bowl and refrigerate for at least an hour. Entertain yourself during this hour possibly by brining some olives or drinking some wine.

3. Assemble the cookies by rolling the dough into little balls about the size of a jumbo/colossal olive. Press you thumb down into the middle of each ball to make it into a little cup. Fill each little dough cup with corbezzoli jam. Bake in an oven at 325 degrees for 13-14 minutes. Cool on wire racks.

4. The texture is supposed to be gritty like that, I swear. Also, tragically, I'm sorry to say that this will not use up very much of your jam.

 

The nets are out in the olive groves now, waiting for the harvest. They look like ghosts floating in the trees. We are all happy that there will be a good harvest this year after last year's disaster.

The autumn mists have moved in and, in between days of startling blue-skied beauty, we have wet red tile roofs (which are so much more vivid than the dusty red of summer) and mossy stones and storms sweeping across the sea.

The chestnuts are ripe now and I have made chestnut butter twice this week -- coffee, chocolate and cinnamon. And the corbezzoli berries are ripe -- much fatter than they were last year when we all gasped in the heat until late autumn and waited, anxiously, for rain. Our persimmon tree even has ripening persimmons in reach, just waiting for me.

So I have been playing at being a good farm wife -- brining olives and making chestnut butter and corbezzoli jam. And tonight we are having a fall vegetable lasagna -- a "lasagna bianca" with cream sauce instead of tomatoes. It has baked sweet potatoes and fresh sage mixed into the ricotta. And more sage with sausage and caramelized shallots. And, of course, porcini mushrooms sauteed in rosemary-infused olive oil. Then there are roasted carrots and butternut squash and mozzarella and well-aged parmesan. I wish I had a sprinkling of pine nuts to add, but I didn't think about that until just this minute.

Later, we will go down to the pub and have a glass of wine with the boys and then come home and eat lasagna together and then go to sleep curled against each other while it rains in the night.

 

It's rainy today, with clouds and mist huddled around the house blocking our view of anything other than the dripping chestnut trees and the moss-covered stones. There are no sounds.

Jonathan is baking bread. The first corbezzoli have started to fall, so soon we will make corbezzoli jam. And then it will be chestnut season again and we will make our famous (if only to us) butter-rum chestnut butter. I feel somehow that I should learn to knit.

Instead, I have made a caramel-apple pie and a batch of late plum jam. We have been gorging ourselves on wild porcini sauteed in rosemary-infused olive oil. We are cautiously hopeful about the upcoming olive harvest.

Last Friday night, we celebrated Oktoberfest at the pub, even though it was still September. In these precarious days, we feel we should not delay our fun.

And Avi's father passed away early Saturday morning. He was a musician, a violinist, and Avi was his only child. We went to the funeral and then home alone in the rain. It's hard to believe that only one month ago, we were so hot and so tired of the katydid song and so glad to go into the cool water at the beach.