View from my window right now.

 

I don't want to be dramatic, but damn, y'all. Our beach club opened last Monday and already we are seeing lots of jellyfish washed up on the sand. And they are not small, the jellyfish. They are honking big jellyfish.

Fabio says, "Oh, the little ones sting much worse." This is not comforting. 

So we go, Jonathan and I, to the beach and Jonathan studies for his next law school exam that is happening on Tuesday and I lie in the sun and believe that the warmth is healing all of my ills and purifying me. We take walks every now and then along the strand and watch the surfers, who are braver than we are, and look at the jellyfish that have been beached. The jellyfish used to not show up until August, when the water had gotten warm enough for them.

Global climate change has meant that the seas are getting warmer and more hospitable to jellyfish while being less hospitable to, for example, coral reefs, among other lovely and non-stinging things. Someday, we will tell our grandchildren about the old days when you could swim in the sea and it was cool and lovely and you didn't emerge from it covered in painful welts. They will look at the seething mass of ten billion jellyfish swarming the beaches of the Mediterranean and not believe us.

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 are still wrestling with the Arkansas state bureaucracy, trying to get my non-existent criminal record and the ever-elusive apostille. Who knew that petty government officials in Arkansas (ground zero for denigrating all education except Bible study) would have so much difficulty handling official documents?

Meanwhile, Jonathan is scheduled to take his on-road driving test in his now years-long quest for an Italian driver's license. Whenever we go anywhere, he practices driving according to the official regulations as mandated by law. This gets us honked at a lot and overtaken by cars behind us who figure it's probably worth risking death by passing us on a dangerously narrow and winding cliffside road rather than continuing to drive behind an obvious madman.

So to cheer ourselves up, we have made another trip to the flour mill and also one to the cannoli shop by the beach in Viareggio, where everything is beautiful.

And we went to meet the owners and see the house with the view of the church belfry that we hope to be able to rent. It is a gorgeous little house with starlings fluttering around it and a dazzling view of the sea from almost every window. From the top bedroom, you can, indeed, look directly over at the bell hanging in the bell tower. We are anxiously waiting now to see if they are willing to rent it to us and if we will be able to afford it. I am trying not to get my hopes too high. But, honestly, both of us were smitten and we may, once again, act rashly in pursuit of beauty.

 

The sea is milk blue tonight. A storm is moving in. But for the moment, the air is perfectly still and it is perfectly quiet. Even the birds, who have been so joyous lately, are silent so that the only sound at all is, very faintly, the shushing sound of the sea breaking on the coast. Every night now, in these fading days of winter, the sunset bleeds into the sky and the sea and breaks our hearts and I think to myself, "Never! Never has there been a more beautiful sunset!" And every night it's the same, but different. And Jonathan and I call out to each other, "Look at the sky! Look at the sky!"

The mountainside here is covered in blooming flowers. Not to be outdone, the wet books in our house from the flood in the cantina have also opened like blossoms in the spring.

 

I finally got the results back from my Italian Language Test for Citizenship and it seems, in contrast to all reasonable expectations, that I passed. So we have made an appointment with our immigration attorney and I am now beginning the formal process to become an Italian citizen. This would have shocked all my ancestors who fled from Italy for the bright dream of America, the land of milk and honey. They lived in a very different world.

So I am looking forward to the bureaucracy of the citizenship process. It should be epic, given the red tape we have encountered so far. Even as I write this, in fact, Jonathan is down in town in class taking driving lessons because, two years in to the process, we have been so soundly defeated by the red tape and bureaucracy of the Italian DMV that it finally seemed that the only option was to just start at the beginning. He is the oldest person in class and the only one, he says, who takes notes.

But to counter-balance the good news, a wild boar got into the garden last week and dug up a huge amount of ground in the olive grove. It is difficult to even photograph because the area is so big. Jonathan is sad that we apparently slept quite peacefully though all the excitement. Jonathan would like to see a wild boar in action. Jonathan is nuts.

But in other pork-related news, Monday and Tuesday were the festival for San Biagio. We went early Monday morning and stopped in to the Duomo to get Jonathan's throat blessed. Our friends at the pub assured us that it was happening all day long. But we were such eager little beavers that we arrived too early and wound up being there right at the beginning of the early morning mass. So we backed out as unobtrusively as possible and instead enjoyed all the booths for the fair. Roast pork sandwiches called "porchetta" are the big thing for the fair and it is never too early around here for roast pork. There were whole pigs laid out everywhere we turned. There were also plenty of roast pig heads arranged to appear so as to be calling out to passersby, proving that the porchetta sellers of Pietrasanta know how to have a good time.

We bought some wild-rose-infused oil and dried citrus slices from our friend Manuela at her booth and then a big bunch of yellow mimosa -- the first I've seen this year -- from a flower seller. Then we went to see the animals that were waiting for the Blessing of the Animals in the piazza by the Uffizi di Commune and the mimosa flowers made me very popular with the horses. 

Barbara assure us that, having missed the official activities at the church, I can bless Jonathan's throat myself up at the house as well as any priest could. Yesterday we blessed it with celebratory champagne because of my language exam results. But it was French champagne, so the blessing may not have taken. We will bless it again with the boys down at the pub with good, cheap local red wine. That will do the trick.

Sometimes, lately, the sea turns burnished orange at sunset and sometimes it is deep ink blue. Last night Jupiter and Venus and Mars were all lined up with the moon in a bright band across the sky and Jonathan and I stood out in the yard to look at them and at our shadows on the drive cast by the moonlight. "Let's always remember this moment," we said to each other.

We are having very romantic winter weather these days -- rough seas and skies like the inside of an oyster shell. But even though the wind is clear and cold and often fierce, hellebore and white daffodils are nevertheless blooming in sheltered little corners all over our garden.

Jonathan is slowly on the mend from his operation and can speak and eat regular food now, but still no word from the doctor about the biopsy results, so we worry. Next weekend is the Festa di San Biagio -- the patron saint of Pietrasanta and also of throats. So there is a Luna Park set up in a usually vacant field at the edge of town and next Monday there will be a Blessing of the Throats in the Duomo. Jonathan snorts dismissively, but I think this is too good an opportunity to pass up and intend to take him and his throat down to town to be blessed. This will doubtless involve some amount of trickery on my part. Or possibly crying.

And we are still working away on our video podcast project -- the second episode dropped today and we already have the third ready to go. Jonathan knows that this is all just procrastination because I am supposed to be working on a new book. So putting together a 50-episode video podcast series to keep from writing one paragraph seems quite reasonable.

We had lunch at the pub on Sunday, sitting at the Tavolo di Marmo with Ugo and Nonno and Alice's mother, Marzia. The secret of Alice's pregnancy is out now and everyone is so happy. Daniele is gently jovial and Alice is serene and beautiful. Marzia is busy encouraging Alice to eat more, while Alice glows happily.

One thing I miss about winter in Colorado Springs is the way the sky turns orange at night in the snow. But I look down on the jeweled plain below us and I am not too sad.

 

When we first moved here, I bought a little clock at the Ikea in Pisa for our bedroom. It has a clock, a timer, an alarm, and a thermometer. This is a picture of the thermometer at 4:00 a.m. this morning in our bedroom.

What I am saying here is that it is hot. Fucking hot.

We went down to the big Esselunga supermarket in Lido di Camaiore yesterday just to hang out for a while in the cold foods aisle. I'm thinking of bringing a folding chair with me next time and just setting up camp in front of the gelato.

Instead, for now, I have filled our bathtub with cold water and take a dip in it three, four, five, six times a day. Inside my head, I think of it as "the swimmin' hole."

The beach is lovely, of course, although the sand is burning hot by 10 a.m. and the jellyfish are a regular feature now. They are, apparently, a species called "barrel jellyfish" and all advices are that we should not worry about them -- their sting is hardly ever fatal. This information is not as comforting as I am sure it is intended to be.

The olives and the grapes are looking good, though. And we went to a concert that the Coro di Versilia held in an abandoned Roman-era marble quarry over in Capezzano Monte. In a tribute to our life at the pub here, they sang a song with the phrase: 

L'Aqua mi fa male, il vino mi fa cantare.

Water makes me sick, but wine makes me sing.

We consider it our theme and live by its message.

I read in the news yesterday that there is a "heat dome" over southern Europe. I had not known until I read it that we are officially in a crisis -- the news does not, however, come exactly as a shock. It was 84 degrees at 4:10 a.m. in our bedroom this morning, where Jonathan and I lay side-by-side gently sweating into our sheets and waiting for it to be morning so that we can go down to the beach.

Our beach club is very tranquil and sedate in the mornings -- mostly just old people like us reading their newspapers or taking a stroll along the strand. Every now and then there is a parent or grandparent with a baby still asleep in their arms. Paolo smiles and greets us by name while the sleepy teenagers who work at the cafe clear up the remaining evidence of the previous night's festivities. (It is only in the evenings when the Riviera beach parties really get hoppin'.) Jonathan sits at the cafe and keeps me up-to-date on the developments in the love triangle among three of the teenaged cafe workers. 

These mornings even the sea seems sleepy -- like glass, clear and olive green. Every now and then a pale little ghost fish flicks by, hiding in the light refracted on the bottom sand. I wade out and stand waist deep in the cool water staring off at the watercolor horizon, washing away the sticky feeling of a hot and sleepless night. This morning, I saw a jellyfish, also ghost white but with a deep blue-violet edge around its cap, waving along just under the surface of the water. At that exact moment, I felt refreshed enough to head back to our umbrellone on the sand.

Back at the house, it is fresh fig and lavender season. We have made fig jam twice -- once with lemon and once with amaretto. But now it is too hot for jam making and we just eat the fresh figs whole and cold from the fridge.

And there are bundles of lavender hanging upside down, drying, all over the house. When it is dry, I will make lavender sachets with it to put in all the clothes drawers to keep away the moths. And when the winter comes, every time I pull out a sweater, there will be a little aromatic burst of summer and I will long once again for the heat. ("I won't," Jonathan says.)

Nonno's birthday party was last Friday night. We all chipped in and bought him a helicopter flight over these mountains that he has loved so much and that he used to hike in as a young man, but now cannot reach. At our house, almost at the top of the mountains, we saw the bright red helicopter fly over us late Sunday afternoon. We knew it was Nonno because it buzzed the terrace of the pub twice and we could hear the cheering.

"He seemed as happy as a bambino," Alice said, having gone with him to the helipad to see him onto the flight. "And now he will have a new story to tell." We will go down to see him sometime in the next couple of days and tell him that we saw him and he will tell us the story of it and I will be happy.

That is quite a statement, given the general situation. I'm starting to feel about ice the way Harrison Ford did in "The Mosquito Coast." The Italian word for jellyfish, by the way, is "medusa." (If nothing else, my vocabulary is expanding.)

I have always loved beach towns, with their atmosphere of sun tan lotion and ice cream and indolence. Now that the summer weather has arrived, we have been going to our Beach Club to loll around and be healed of all our ills -- physical, emotional, spiritual, etc. -- by the sunshine and the lunch. This plan is working better than you might have thought. By September, I will probably be practically perfect in every way. Something to look forward to.

Having decided to move our belongings from Colorado Springs to Pietrasanta (the complexities of getting it all the way to Capriglia are completely beyond us), we have unleashed upon ourselves a whole fresh document hell. The customs people, for instance, want a complete itemized list of everything we are bringing with valuations and, if possible, receipts. The receipts for a lifetime of treasures. The drawing of a sunflower that Tris made in second grade and that hung on the wall in our kitchen for almost two decades? I have no receipt and no rational valuation. Zero dollars? Priceless.

More lemons have come our way -- it seems that all of Tuscany is inundated at this time of year. Fabio and Luciana, our neighbors, gave us a big bag and Barbara and Sara gave us even more. I made lavender-lemon marmalade and now we have begun the process of making Moroccan Salt-Cured Lemons. I have never tasted Moroccan Salt-Cured Lemons and have no idea what we will do with them once they are ready, but it is comforting to know that we will never die of scurvy.

 

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.

 

 

Now that winter has stripped all the leaves off of the chestnut trees around our house, the sea has once again become an overwhelming feature of our lives. We have a startling view of it from the windows in the living room where we lurk together all day long. Around sunset, particularly, it is sometimes hard to get things done.

And now that the tourist season is over, there is plenty of free parking available down at the beach, which is mostly deserted and has the feeling of a summer place that has been abandoned. The gelato store where I had the best gelato of my life back in 1984 is still there, but closed up now until spring.

It is all very beautiful and a little melancholy -- as winter beaches and sunsets always are. And we have started to talk just between the two of us about where we will go next. We have agreed to stay in our house in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea until April 2025. And we are very happy here. But this was never intended to be forever.

When we started the whole project of figuring out the rest of our lives, we had a dream list of places where we might want to visit or live for a while -- some that we had been to and some that we hadn't: The Marquesas, New Zealand, Iceland, Uruguay, British Columbia and others. We came to Italy first because Jonathan's citizenship and language skills made things easier here. But sometimes when I'm looking at the Mediterranean, my head is all filled with South Pacific memories of the turquoise lagoon at Rarotonga, lined with coconut palms and thickets of hibiscus, and I see my boys on horseback galloping through the gentle surf out by the reef. It's not that we don't love Italy, because we do. But there is a whole world out there -- other places and other seas.

So we are once again in the position of not knowing what will become of us. The future is very uncertain. In the meantime, I am trying to savor this place where I am now for this moment,