The light in my eyes woke me up an hour or so before dawn on Friday morning. It was the full moon shining through our bedroom window, but it looked strange somehow and it took me a minute or two to figure out that a lunar eclipse was happening. So I woke Jonathan up and we stood together at the window and watched the moon get thinner and thinner until, not long before dawn, it winked out entirely.

We were sluggish and, frankly, kind of cranky the rest of the day because of not getting enough sleep and also because of the heat and the humidity that made the air feel like a heavy wool blanket. But it was worth it to stand close to Jonathan at the window in the dark and watch the moon.

The Trofeo de Leone is going on this weekend in memory of our friend Leonardo, so we will go tonight and eat sausages and watch the soccer games and see our friends and think of him.

 

We are -- Jonathan and I -- now living in a world of pure enveloping heat. It is all day. It is all night.

Despite this, the summer social whirl is up and roaring -- albeit with some conversational limitations. Jonathan and I have had social engagements every day this past week and a little routine had emerged: I see someone I haven't seen in days/months/hours/ever and I say, "Oh, hello! How nice to see you! How are you?" and they say "I'm hot!" and I say "So am I" and then there is a little verbal lull because both of us are too hot, quite frankly, to think of anything entertaining to say. 

Not that I don't try. Just yesterday, I regaled some people from Dublin about my intense love of "Irish fucking butter." This was my conversational high point of the evening and it was all downhill from there, including a detailed discussion of the bike-shorts-to-heat-rash pipeline. Summer on the Riviera -- glamorous!

Also, we had a solar eclipse. And yet it brought no relief from the heat.

You would think that having the sun actually go out would perhaps drop the temp a degree of two. But no.

We are the damned.

 

Today is our last day at our beach club. We don't go in August when the price and the jellyfish are both at their biggest.

Instead, we stay up here in the hills where a secret summer life happens away from the notice of the tourists.

The joint birthday party for Nonno and Celeste lasted from noon to midnight last Sunday. We all got t-shirts and there was eating and drinking and singing al day long. It's cooler under the shade tree on the terrace of the pub and laughter drowns out the katydids screaming and the heat doesn't seem quite so post-apocalyptic when we are all together.

At the house, my tomatoes are flourishing in a way that has become oppressive -- an outcome to be expected as soon as we found out that Jonathan can no longer eat anything -- tomatoes especially -- with seeds. So I have been making sundried tomatoes to try to preserve part of our bounty for the seemingly mythical cold days of winter. We have plenty of tomatoes and, god knows, plenty of sun.

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

Renata is back for a short visit and we went with her and Alice and Celeste to visit Nonno at his house last Tuesday. He had a hospital bed in the living room and his niece Cristina there taking care of him. But yesterday he was moved to a Casa di Riposo in Lido di Camaiore where he can get professional nursing and physiotherapy. 

Valerio took him and got him all settled in, but half an hour after he left, Valerio's phone rang and it was Nonno saying, "There are only old people here!"

The physiotherapist says that Nonno is very motivated doing his exercises to try to get some mobility back in his legs. He wants to get back to his life and his friends at the pub. Jonathan and I are going to see him again tomorrow and taking Ugo with us.

We are in the final dregs of moving to the new house and may start sleeping there in a week or so. We still haven't found our drinking glasses or our duvet. I suspect we never will. But the boys' baby shoes made it and the Christmas tree ornaments and the drawing of a sunflower that Tris made when he was six and the easel my grandfather made for me when I was a little girl and he believed I would become an artist someday.

The wisteria vines out back all have big buds on them and the cherry tree is looking ready to burst into flower any day now. Jonathan saw a lizard yesterday -- the first so far this year. The fava beans are in season and we sit around in the pub shelling them all together. Summer is coming.

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.

 

The katydids started up their annual screaming this year precisely at dawn on July 1st. In the long lost innocence of my younger days, I was rather fond of katydids. I even used them in books I've written as a shorthand for sultry and romantic summer nights. Then I moved to Italy.

Three solid months of incessantly droning screams -- loud enough to drown out all the birdsong -- eventually wears on the nerves. And not just for me. I was sitting on the terrace of the pub one evening last summer when the katydids all simultaneously paused their cacophony for a moment. Everyone on the terrace spontaneously burst into cheers.

Then the katydids started up again.

But five days ago, I finally made my peace with them. After a particularly troublesome and difficult call with the "outside" world, I went onto the front porch of our house and was immediately enveloped in the overwhelming drone of the katydids. But now they seemed like some sort of giant sonic protective shield -- a big comfy blanket of sound. For some reason I can't explain, I felt safe -- like nothing bad could get to me as long as I was inside that sound.

The beach is the same way, with surf and the sound of children playing. And so is the pub, where we are now part of the secret society of workers. While the outside world descends further and further into the frightening chaos of fascism and we have to take breaks from reading the news for the sake of our mental well-being, in our protective sound bubble here, nothing can hurt us.

The heat is still here, lower temperatures always predicted for "tomorrow." I bought three gauzy summer sundresses for fifteen euros each at the market in an attempt to fool myself into believing that the daytime temperature had dropped by ten degrees. That didn't work, but the dresses are pretty anyway.

Daniele has been cooking everything he can out on the grill behind the pub, where it is a tiny bit cooler than in the sweltering kitchen. Since he has the hot coals going anyway, he has also been making roasted cherries in red wine. We bought three jars and are considering stocking up on some more. They are a rare treat and we don't know how long it may be before they come around again.

When I went outside two days ago, I startled a young red deer that was standing under our grape arbor eating the baby strawberry grapes. It flitted off to the far end of the garden and stood very still under the apple tree watching me for a long time until I turned my head and it vanished into the woods.

 

Lately, Jonathan and I wander around completely dazed in a haze of heat. We don't trust ourselves with heavy machinery or tricky crossword puzzles. At night, I keep the bathtub full of cool water and go in every now and then to take a quick dip to cool off. But the forecast is for rain early next week, so we cling to hope.

We think we have now submitted the final forms for my Italian citizenship application. This is the third time we have thought that. But now that Jonathan has at long last achieved a valid Italian driver's license, we believe that anything is possible. Who knows? Next week it might actually even rain.

 

The first deadly heat wave of the summer is here and all of Liguria is under temporary work restrictions barring outdoor labor or other heavy work between the hours of 11 a.m. and 4 p.m.

There was, nevertheless, a marathon held yesterday evening right here in town. It began at 7:30 p.m. down on the coast and the course came up the mountainside to Capriglia and then over to Capezzano Monte and then back down again. Despite the evening start, this seemed insane to me.

And also, apparently, to the runners. Some of them stopped in at the pub to have some snacks and cold wine sitting under the trees on the terrace. Mind you, this was DURING the race. They were having a good, if not very strenuous time, and were happy to let me take their picture. 

Jonathan and I were handling the bills. We have told Daniele and Alice that we will always work Saturday nights until their baby is born and then we will work every night as long as they need us.

The pub was slammed with people last night who had come up into the hills looking for a little cooler air and a bit of a breeze. One man, while he was paying, said to Daniele, pointing at us, "Who are they?"

"They're Americans," Daniele said. "So you can pay in either euros or dollars -- whichever you like."

"But what are they doing here?" the man said.

"Look, pal," Daniele said to him. "Up here, we are a community. Everyone helps out here."

 

The exceptionally cool and rainy May followed by the last few days of glorious summer warmth has led to two unexpected pieces of magic.

The first is that there were wild porcini mushrooms at the greengrocers this morning. These are not usually in season until the fall, but the seasons are all cattywampus and so the mushrooms have been coaxed into appearing months ahead of schedule. I just finished making some rosemary-infused olive oil (we have masses of rosemary in our garden) and we will sauté the porcini in it and eat them with some of Jonathan's homemade bread. 

And the second piece of magic brought about by the rainy May is that we have an exceptionally abundant number of fireflies this year so that when we are walking in the dark through our olive groves or even along the road from the pub to our house, the air sparkles and shimmers all around us. It is easy to believe that fairies live in the summertime woods.

(photo by Tsuneaki Hiramatsu)

 

Summer is here now. It arrived all of the sudden with great waves of poppies and mosquitos and wild blue skies. We sleep now with the windows wide open with the sounds of the owls hunting in the dark woods and the larks rioting in the cherry tree at dawn.

Today is the Festa della Republica and there is a community potluck picnic here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea. We are bringing brownies and deviled eggs, which are exotic foreign delicacies here. We hope.

Saturday night, we lent a hand for the first time at the pub, doing the bills, sitting at the end of a table and trying to keep our arithmetic straight while simultaneously eating and talking to Nonno and participating in the life of our little world with the chaos of Saturday night clamoring all around us.

I once watched a documentary about the MIT Blackjack Team, who won thousands and thousands of dollars counting cards in Las Vegas casinos. The trick was not learning to count cards -- the trick was managing to count cards in the midst of a Las Vegas casino with waitresses offering you drinks and shouting discount prices in your ear and dealers keeping up a constant patter and other players exclaiming over wins and losses and odds. To make the team, potential MIT players had to pass a final test of counting and playing while being distracted by screaming undergraduates.

I bring this up for a reason.

I will just say that the steaks at the pub are 25 euros per kilo and one of the ones ordered Saturday night weighed 1.7 kilos. You do the math.

Fortunately, Jonathan did the math. He does, after all, have a mathematics Ph.D. -- albeit in higher-dimensional geometry. But I think we were OK. We are going again Monday night. If we can be of any help to Daniele and Alice, we want to help. Pray for us.

Then Sunday morning, our beach club opened and we hit the sand. We are Umbrellone #9 this year -- at the back of last year's #10. Sometimes, when I'm having a bad day or a hard time with something, I think to myself, "I want to go home." Then I think, "But where is my home?" and I have some amount of confusion about that. But when I stand in the sea and look out at the far blue horizon, I feel that, wherever home is, I am there.

My new bathing suit arrived at last. It doesn't fit. The top is too small, which has never in my entire life before ever been a problem for me. By turning it upside down, though, with the neck clasp at my back and the back strap around my neck, I can get it to pretty much work -- enough, anyway, to be wearable. So I will be spending the better part of the summer wandering around the Italian coast with my clothes on upside down. It's like I've finally achieved my life's ambition to inhabit the reincarnated spirit of Little Edie Beale.

S-T-A-U-N-C-H.

 

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.

The Trofeo del Leone is happening this week and we went Tuesday evening to watch a couple of the games and eat grilled sausage sandwiches and hang out in the cool night air with our friends. There was a horse and a pony for pony rides and much excitement because the soccer field here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea is less than half-sized (the steepness of the mountain slope making big flat places nonexistent up here) and so the players kept inadvertently kicking the ball into the spectators or even into the people who were not really watching the game, but were instead standing chatting to their friends or quietly guzzling inexpensive prosecco out of plastic cups until they were blind-sided by an incoming soccer ball to the head.

The teams themselves were made up of players of varying ages and abilities and although Daniele was the coach of one of the teams and although the teams had names like "The Drinking Monkeys," I didn't know any of the good players. It is possible that there is a connection between being able to run around with agility on a soccer field and not spending all day drinking in the pub. That might explain why the good players were unknown to me. Just a thought.

There were children and lemonade and laughter and bright stars slowly making their way across the summer night sky. But there was also the moment of silence at the beginning of each game when we bowed our heads and remembered Leonardo. And at one point, I noticed Geppolino, Leonardo's increasingly frail father, standing by himself looking lost, all alone in the crowd.

Today it is raining and the forecast is for rain most days all next week. Jonathan and I went down for one last ice cream at the beach yesterday afternoon. I have put the comforters back onto our bed. Summer seems to be over.

The summer tourists all had to leave their rental houses yesterday. So today, even though it is still as hot as ever and sunny, the beach has an atmosphere of winter coming on. Only a few of us are left. We have been nodding at each other all summer and now we recognize each other -- not only as faces, but as members of the fraternity of permanence.

The sea is strangely flat and still and clear today. The cold water feels lovely after a sleepless, sticky night. I saw four dead meduse washed up on the sand. Their season is coming to an end, too.

We are in the last days of summer now. It is meltingly hot and the meagre charm of the katydid chirping has long ago worn thin.

Forty years ago, I ate a pistachio gelato at a little gelateria by the beach here and it was so perfect, so intensely creamy and flavorful and rich, that I have never really recovered from it, but remembered it -- through all the years and all the other ice creams -- as the pinnacle, the Platonic Ideal of gelato in comparison to which all merely earthly gelatos would, inevitably, fall short. It was no fault of their own -- such ice cream as I ate on that summer day in 1984 cannot exist in great quantities in our limited universe and to ask that there be two such pistachio gelati would be greedy. The gods have their limits, too.

But the same shop is still there. I recognized it immediately. So after months of going past without going in (out of fear of finding the old idols fallen in the dust and also laziness), on Tuesday -- here at the end of the summer season just when everything will soon close down -- we had an ice cream.

My god.

It was so good that I became an instant addict and spend all my mental energy now trying to figure out when I can have more, how I can have more, how much more I can have... Like any addict, I plot ways to justify needing (not just wanting, but actually needing) more of it and of tricking Jonathan into going for just one more hit.

I had Cinnamon Apple and Salted Caramel. Jonathan had Lemon Zest and Campari Grapefruit. I dream about the Cinnamon Apple at night.

In the meantime, between ice creams, I have been working on my series of paintings, "21 Views of my Groceries." 

We are in fig season now and stringhe season and apricot season, waiting for the first porcini mushrooms to arrive. Barbara and Sara gave us some very lovely gourds to photograph and more honey from their hives. The bees have been getting nectar from the lemon tree blossoms and you can taste it in the honey.

Our olives are looking good, but we don't know yet if the flies will come again this year and lay their eggs in them so that every olive is ruined by larvae. Mimmo is pessimistic, but sometimes that is just our way of placating the gods. They delight in overthrowing our expectations, so it is prudent to expect the worst. 

We are leaving for a short trip to the US week after next -- seeing the boys and supervising getting all of our old belongings into the container to be shipped to Italy. Tragically, we will be missing the soccer tournament that will be held at the pub in Leonardo's memory. The soccer itself is not all that exciting for me, but the announcement poster says that there will also be "jugglers, fire eaters, and singing animals."* I am very sorry to miss that, but Alice says that she will send me a video.

*It really says "singing and animals," but we have all agreed that singing animals would be even better.

 

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.)