The Ikea instructions quite clearly promise that if Jonathan and I put this furniture together as a team, we will be happy and smiling. This is a goddamn lie.

Also, never in the entire history of human migration have two people gone so shambolically two hundred yards down the road. Yesterday, for example, we bought four salted caramel KitKats as a little treat for ourselves as a reward for working so hard. We immediately lost them somewhere in the house and now have no idea where they are. This is also true of our big mixing bowl, but somehow the salted caramel KitKat loss seems more tragic.

The movers came a week ago and delivered all of our furniture from the storage unit to the belfry house. Since then, Jonathan and I have been carrying box after box of heavy books every day from the rustic farmhouse to the belfry house. I am too old for this.

How did I end up with so much stuff? We got rid of so many possessions when we left Colorado -- so many trips to the ARC, so many donations to the library, so much furniture put out on the curb marked "free." So much left behind -- we came here with only two suitcases and two carry-on bags. And yet I've spent all week carrying boxes of books around. I don't understand how my stuff has once again metastasized in this unholy way. It's a complete mystery and I said as much to Andrea in the bookstore when I was shopping in there yesterday.

 

Eternal optimism is a beautiful hallmark of my character. In other words, I am a chump.

I have ordered a new bathing suit to be sent in the mail in preparation for the summer. I had to order it online to be shipped because the style of bathing suits around here -- every single one, no matter how grandmotherly and modest is the rest of the suit -- is to have only a thin string of dental floss going up your butt, leaving the rest uncovered. Now, I make no judgements about the amount of butt that other people choose to exhibit to the world. You go, girl. But if I were to wear such a suit, I would spend the whole time trying to pick that bit of string out of my butt crack. And I just don't think that would be attractive.

So I ordered this new bathing suit and crossed my fingers that my friends at the Post Office would somehow allow it to come to our house here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea -- perhaps in a moment of inattention. I am following its progress very closely. So far, it has gone to Milan, then to Rome, then back to Milan again. It is now at Milan Malpensa Airport (MXP) -- the international airport in Milan, as opposed to Milan Linate, which is for domestic flights -- waiting to fly out of Italy to god-only-knows where. One thing about our mail -- it certainly gets to see the world. I will update on its whereabouts when/if I get news.

We continue to search for houses to buy. We were offered one that is about halfway down the mountain at a very reasonable price. True, it has no bathroom, but -- on the bright side -- it is surrounded by dense forest which could possibly suffice. We also have a lead on one that is next to the church almost at the level of the belltower. Jonathan thinks that this is a mark against it, but I think it would be lovely to be able to see straight into the belfry and watch the hunchback ringing the bells. Not to mention how much we would probably learn about the habits of bats.

We are going to help out a bit at the pub this summer now that it is getting close to the time when Alice's baby is due. We will be in charge of adding up all the bills and doing the money on nights when it is very busy and crowded. This will now make the second time in my life when I have ended up working in a bar just because I was around all the time anyway. The first time was in North Carolina at The Cave and The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato is based on that. If I ever write another book about our time here (after the one that I'm currently writing about our first thousand days), I will call it Barflies in the Belfry.

 

Jonathan and I have (at last!) won a prize in one of the numerous raffles we have entered in support of various organizations and charities over the past two and a half years. We won second prize (a two-liter jug of German beer) in the pre-Christmas raffle at the pub. I suspect that these raffles are fixed, given the never-failing appropriateness of the winners. It is always suspiciously the exact person who should win who does win -- as if by magic.

So Jonathan and I may not seem to be the right people to win a giant flask of beer given that Jonathan doesn't really drink at all and I much prefer wine to beer. But we were the right people, in fact, because we did exactly what should have been done with the beer, which was to ask that it be put somewhere to get cool and then go down on a quiet winter evening, when the crowds and the noise had subsided, when only about a dozen of the regular habitues were there -- four playing cards at a table in the corner and the rest sitting together and the big table near the wood-burning stove, keeping warm and talking -- to open the flask and share it all around. These are my favorite nights. The big news of the day was that Nonno had convinced Daniele and Alice to re-arrange the shelves with jams and pickles so that similar items were grouped together for easier sale. We admired it orderliness while we drank the beer.

Then today, we went to the big grocery store on the edge of town and our groceries were free. We didn't exactly understand why -- something about points expiring on our membership card. We didn't know that we earned points or that they translated into free groceries, but, in any case, we didn't have to pay for our laundry detergent and breakfast yogurt. Then I asked about the bollini (we are collecting them to win a big nonstick frying pan), but the cashier explained that we didn't get bollini today because of the points expiring on the membership card. "Oh," I said, not having any clue what was going on. "But, here," she said, "have them anyway" and gave us twice as many as we actually would have gotten if everything had been as usual.

On the drive home, we figured out the whole chain of events (in the moment we had no idea) leading to free groceries and double bollini. "Well," I said Jonathan, "that was nice of her." "Yes," he said, "it's sort of like Italy is a continuous bewildering Christmas -- we have no idea what is going on or how or why or what we should do, but people just give us gifts anyway."

So maybe the raffles aren't rigged after all. Maybe we just live in a land of abundant gifts.

 

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.

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.