Luciana reports that someone else is living in our old house now and, although she has seen them at a distance once or twice, she has not actually met them. I thought I would be sadder about leaving that house than it turns out that I am. My boys never lived there with me, so it is just a house, no matter how beautiful.

The other house was dominated by the woods and the gardens and terraces and by the house itself with its secrets and its magic. Here, the new house is dominated by the enveloping view of the sea and, most of all, by the sky. Jonathan and I call out to each other, again and again, from wherever we are in the house, "Look at the sky! Look at the sky!"

I am spending my days doing little things to prepare for my book launch -- trying to lay the groundwork for getting some publicity, building my "brand," which is what everyone must have these days, they say. Up until now, my brand has been "old lady farting around in Italy while eating too much and drinking wine," but that won't cut it anymore, they say. I have to actively engage with an enthusiastic reader base, they say. I must flog the merch, they say.

William Faulkner never had to prostrate himself to the malevolent gods of social media, I say.

You're no William Faulkner, they say.

 We usually end up stopping by our old house for some reason or other every day -- today it was to pick flowers and put out the paper recycling. But it is very quiet and still there now and the rooms echo when we walk through them. We live among our half-unpacked boxes at the casa campanile now.

I am in the throes of doing the advance publicity for Armadillo Massacre Number Three. In furtherance of that, today I was standing at the kitchen stove in full armadillo costume making a blackberry cobbler while Jonathan filmed me. I looked out the open kitchen window and the neighbor's gardener was standing in their yard staring at me.

"Buon gionro, signora," he said and nodded.

"Oh, buno giorno!" I said, all perky. And then we both went back to what we were doing. Tonight he will tell his wife what he saw at work today and she will perhaps accuse him of starting his drinking too early in the day.

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!"

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."

 

Last night, we got five and a half inches of rain between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. There was much lightning and thunder to rattle the windows, even some tiny hail. I have been outside to our garden, where things seem very damp, but otherwise undamaged, but not down to town or even into the village of Capriglia itself because Jonathan threw out his back last night making risotto and so couldn't even go to school today and is here now with a hot water bottle, drugged to the gills.

On the one hand, being taken down by merely stirring risotto is an unmistakable sign of our aging decrepitude. On the other hand, it was an excellent risotto.

Every day now, more of the chestnut leaves turn fluttering gold and then brown and then fall, leaving us with an ever more clear view of the sea. This is our secret. In the summertime, we are hidden away in our shady glen, invisible to all the world around us. 

But in winter, our view opens up and we sit exposed here on our promontory where we can see everything from Livorno down south to the headlands past La Spezia and even further to the north. It's like we are on the prow of an ancient sailing ship, far out at sea.

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.

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.)

 

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.

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.

Three mornings a week, Jonathan goes to town and takes classes for the Italian driver's license test while I stay home and write. If the weather is nice, he goes on his bike, but on rainy days, he takes the car. He says it makes him feel awkward to drive up to his driving lessons, but that's where we are now. He will take the written test in a couple of weeks and then he gets to begin his practice driving, which should be fun. The driving school has special practice cars with brakes on the passenger's side for the instructor to use as well as on the driver's side. My boys took driving lessons in cars like that back in Colorado. I remember Aiden having one session with a clearly spooked instructor who had spent one too many hours with teenagers learning how to merge onto a highway at high speed by doing it. "Well," Aiden said when I picked him up, "I was just a passenger in that car." I think about that man sometimes now and hope he is doing well.

Next week we will go to Viareggio to sign another one-year rental contract for this house. We came here thinking that it would only be for a few months. That was three years ago.

But the fourth year will be the last. We began last night to look on the on-line real estate sites for houses around here to buy. One of them was described as "rustic" and, from the pictures, was lacking a roof. I would have called that "very rustic." We never thought we would own a house again, but it looks like we were wrong. It wouldn't be the first time.

 

We've been having a week here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea. On Monday, we realized that we put my birthdate on the formal citizenship request in the place where Jonathan's should have gone. You already know about that. On Tuesday, the doctor told Jonathan that the strange lump under his arm is probably not cancerous, but that it should nevertheless be biopsied. On Wednesday, in the middle of the pouring rain, I went into the cantina and discovered that the floor was a centimeter deep in water. Sitting on the floor, soaking it all in, were multiple boxes of our books. Now, the books are all over the house, opening up like crinkled flowers as they dry out. On Thursday, I got seven mosquito bites on my right thigh and one on my left. These are the Southern Tiger Mosquitos -- brought north by climate change -- that leave big red welts that itch like fire for days and days.

On Friday, we found out that on the day almost a year ago when we sat in our attorney's office and I said, "Don't I need my criminal record from every state where I've lived?" and she said, "Oh, no -- only the FBI federal one." and I said, "Well, how nice! Tra-la-la-Tra-la-la-Rum-tum-tiddle-um-tum," we were very much mistaken. I am now in the process of trying to figure out how to get a money order for US$7 to the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, DC, and -- even more fun -- how to get the lovely Apostilles from all the states where I've lived. And of course, all week long, the political horrors coming out of the US continue to be godawful. I now personally know five people who have either already lost their jobs because of these monsters or are on the verge of losing them.

On Saturday, nothing too disastrous happened here at the house, although the cantina continues to be a flood zone (but we have moved all of our boxes out of there and they are -- once again -- piled all around the living room.) Jonathan and I went to the big Esselunga HyperMarket at Lido di Camaiore and bought a bunch of adorable mini-lemons and brought them home and candied them. We then invented a new dessert called Exploded Cannoli.

I don't want to seem immodest, but we are geniuses.

 

Unlike last week, when we were wrapped in tragedy, this week we've been beset by smaller disasters largely of our own making.

Jonathan read an article online touting the health-giving wonders of intermittent fasting. It was on the internet, so it must be true. On Mondays and Thursdays, we are only allowed to eat a quarter of our usual calories. Since our usual calories lately have included consuming entire bags of mini Snickers bars (thus the need for drastic action like fasting), you would think that eating only a quarter of them would be a cinch. But (in the spirit of taking ourselves firmly in hand) we are interpreting this as having one scrambled egg for lunch and a very small plain green salad for dinner. The rest of the week, you can eat normally (as long as your "normal" doesn't include entire bags of mini candy bars -- see above.) They say the first few times you do this are the worst and then it gets easier. All I have to say to that is, dear sweet Mary Mother of God, I certainly hope so.

So last night (a non-fasting night) we got very excited about trying out our lovely salt-cured lemons for the first time. We found a good sounding recipe on the internet (where, you will recall, everything you read is true) for salmon with salt-cured lemon, parsley, and olive pesto. It smelled great! 

It turned out that it smelled great because you can't smell salt. You can taste it, though. In fact, salt was ALL we could taste. So. Much. Salt. It was like we had made Dead Sea sauce. We scraped the pesto off the fish as best we could and tried to eat the remaining salmon because when you are going to be fasting the next day, you do not throw out your dinner -- no matter what. Last night's Festival of Salt is a testament to that. 

We are also reluctant to waste any food (although we may make an exception for the salt-cured lemons) because we are feeling rather poor lately. We got our first tax bill from the Italian government and it was slightly more than my entire take home pay for all of last year. Our friends in America keep saying that this must be a mistake, but it is not. It is this year's taxes, the advance payment for next year, and the Italian wealth tax to punish us for having squirrelled away all those American 401K nuts for the American winter of our old age. We should have just spent it all on hookers and blow when we had the chance.

But this is the price we pay now for living the life of grasshoppers who sing all summer. The good news is that our tax dollars support things like maintaining the terrifying-but-at-least-very-well-maintained vertiginous road up to our little mountainside haven, the pub where we eat and drink so cheaply (it is somewhat tax-supported because it is technically a social club for workers and pensioners), and the free national health care that we receive.

And we are certainly getting our money's worth with that. Jonathan went to the physiotherapist last week for his back. They massaged him and stretched him. It is sometimes hard for us to completely understand all of the unfamiliar medical terminology in Italian, but it seems that the national medical establishment has determined that Jonathan's problem is that he is both too tightly wound and too short. I said that I could have told him that. He has another appointment tomorrow. When this is all over, I expect he will look like Mike Teevee at the end of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

With Jonathan and I both less mobile because of our injuries, it takes us a long time to get the basic housework done. We hobble down to hang out our laundry in the back. We hobble from the car into the veg store and then hobble back to the car with our haul. (Fortunately, the veg store is so tiny that we can reach almost everything in it with just a few steps.) We hobble to the kitchen with our dirty dishes after meals. (Again though, fortunately, there aren't very many of them on two days each week.) Last night I was hobbling back to the house after putting our trash out at the street for pick-up this morning, when some animal very distinctly growled at me from inside the roof of the cantina as I went by. Given the way things have been going lately, this is probably no more than I should have expected. In any case, my rate of ambulatory speed suddenly increased quite dramatically. It was a miracle.

And, to complete the small disasters of the week, we are of course both angry and morose about the political situation in the US. But, to be fair, that one is not our fault.

 

Some updates:

Moroccan Salt-cured Lemons: Coming right along!

Jonathan's Driver's License: Still MIA.

Italian Post Office Efficiency: Birthday card mailed to the US in the beginning of March (March!) has not yet arrived.

Moving Document Hell: First completed batch sent off yesterday, awaiting further complications.

Snakes: A notable lack of mice and other rodents around the house. Local cats looking nervous.

Yesterday was just a normal day. These are the hardest to write about because it is hard to describe a "nothing special" that is at the same time so happy.

The loudest sound here these days is birdsong. Sometimes there are church bells mixed in and behind that, almost imperceptible, is the shushing sound of the sea. The spring flowers are starting to bloom. I saw the first poppy of the year on the roadside down near town.

We have been going to town to buy groceries every day this week since the refrigerator died. We went on Tuesday to the UniEuro in Massa and bought the smallest fridge they sell to hold us over until a new big fridge arrives. The nice man at the UniEuro loading dock didn't bat an eye when we rolled up with our clown car expecting to drive a refrigerator home in it. 

"Oh, no problem," he said, cheerfully. And sure enough, by putting down the back seat and sliding the front seats up so far that Jonathan was driving with his knees up under his chin, we were able to close the hatchback with zero millimeters to spare.

So yesterday we bought some chicken for our dinner at the butcher shop (founded in 1907) where three generations of the Lane family work and where we are advised about our meat by Susanna or Babbo, who knows what's what when it comes to meat. Then I bought a new purse for 25 euros in the weekly Thursday market at the Piazza dello Statuto because my old purse finally gave up the ghost.

Then we zipped over to the Coop, which is just outside town and sells things like shampoo and paper napkins that are not available in the charming but tiny stores where we do most of our shopping. The real joy of the Coop, however, is not the access to shampoo and paper napkins, but the regular arrival of the bollini every six months or so. The bollini are little stickers that you get with each purchase. Then when you've collected enough bollini, you can trade them in for prizes.

Our first bollini-fest had Pyrex for prizes. We went nuts getting bollini enough for Pyrex crostata pans and Pyrex mixing bowls and Pyrex measuring cups -- things that are not actually for sale anywhere around here that we know of. The next bollini-fest was for sporting goods, which was not as exciting, but we did get some quick-dry towels. Currently, we are nearing the end of a bollini-fest for bed linens. We've already managed to nab a complete set of sheets and pillowcases for a single bed and are now working on the "matrimoniale" size.

We are supposed to get one sticker for every 15 euros that we spend, but we have noticed that the cashiers exercise great leeway here and that if we say "please" when they ask if we are collecting the bollini, we tend to get more bollini than we are supposed to. We have sometimes gotten as much as twice the number we are owed. Seeing what heights of politeness I can reach with my limited Italian and what largesse of bollini this elicits is one of my great entertainments.

In the afternoon, Jonathan had zoom meetings and I chatted with Aiden for a while about the state of the world and his life. The state of the world seems very bleak, but my son has such a good heart and is so thoughtful and kind and brave that I can't help but feel that everything will turn out OK in the end.

Then, while the sunset was turning the sky and the sea into melted roses and gold, we walked down to the pub to see Renata, who is just back from over a month in Poland visiting her family. She and I talked together for a while, standing behind the bar, about how hard it can be to live far away from the people you love.

Nights like these are my favorites. There was no one there except for Renata, seven of the beasts, and us. We share wine around the table, pouring each other glasses from the communally purchased bottle, and eat the "snacks," which really constitute a full meal -- starting off last night with a large meat and cheese board with baskets of bread and followed up by meatloaf and mashed potatoes, served family style -- Salvatore dishing it out last night -- and then after the fist serving, everyone just helping themselves, all of us seated around the big marble table -- the "tavolo di marmo." 

How the economics of all this free food works is beyond me. We pay for the Dreams & Poetry wine that we drink at 10 euros a bottle, but unless Daniele and Alice are making it themselves in the bathtub at home, there is no way that they turn a profit on these perfect nights.

We told them all the story of our broken refrigerator and about how now we have a giant bag of formerly frozen peas that we have to eat right away. The discussion of what to do with all those peas -- like any discussion of food -- was exceptionally lively. "We should have brought them here for us all to eat," Jonathan said. And it's true.

Jonathan had another meeting at 8:00, so we began to leave at 7:30. "He could go and you could stay here," Renata said to me. "Oh, no," I said, "because I am a very good little wife and while he is working, I am cooking." The boys all thought this was quite funny and wanted to know which dishes I cook well. "Nothing," I said and they laughed. "I don't cook anything well, either," Nonno said. And while we were laughing at that, Guglielmo filled my wine glass again on the sly.

But Jonathan made it to his meeting with seconds to spare and I cooked the chicken while he talked. So that is a typical day here except that every day is a little different.

 

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.

 

It is a blustery day and from where I am sitting, if I turn my head I can see the waves breaking in frothy white rows at the beach.

We spent New Year's Eve at the pub -- a more melancholy evening than it was a year ago. A year ago, Mirio came to our table and joined us and welcomed us to the family of the regulars. That night we first met Almo and finally learned Renata's name and a man that we had never seen before -- or since -- grabbed Jonathan in the sort of passionate and loving embrace that betokens many, many bottles of wine.

But there has been much death and other sadness in this past year and, for all the food and wine and fireworks, the party was a subdued affair. Daniele and Allice were long gone before midnight came.

And now January is here. We have yet another rental car, but still no driver's license for Jonathan or visa for me. The police will supposedly do a surprise check to see if I actually live here, but since we don't know when they are coming, we don't have any way of making sure that we will be home when they do. But I guess one excuse is probably as good as another for them to get out of the office and enjoy a ride up the lovely Via Capriglia.

We went into Firenze on Wednesday to go to a van Gogh show and then to lunch and then the Palazzo Pitti.

But we spoke only Italian to each other at lunch to keep from interacting with the loud English-speaking tourists seated next to us. For now, it feels like all we need is just the two of us. We hibernate together up here in our aerie, watching the surf break and the lights glitter down below us on the plain. At night, especially, it seems like we are very high up in the air.

I have taken some pictures of some of the doors here at the house. It seemed seasonally appropriate.