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.

We have been here 13 months now. The days are getting shorter and the most certain sign of autumn in Tuscany has appeared: the geckos have moved indoors. The one in the living room yesterday was so large that I heard it before I saw it.  A smaller one spent all day Thursday on the bathroom sink, huddled up against the hot water tap for warmth.

Jonathan is in Mexico City for a conference. He stopped off in the US just long enough to change planes and contract the new Covid variant. So he has now has spent a lovely week trapped in a Mexican hotel room drinking coffee from those little hotel room coffee pods and coughing. We are hoping that he will be able to fly home tomorrow.

I have spent the week that he has been gone re-arranging the spice cupboard and missing him, It is very quiet in the house (other than the galloping sound of the living room gecko) and I don't feel like going out without him. In these past 13 months, we have spent almost every moment together, usually in the same room. That, not Tuscany per se, is what has made this place heaven.

 

An interview with me in Rev magazine went live today with this fabulous illustration by Natalie Foss. The part where I wax rhapsodic about public bathrooms was kept in. The part where I used the phrase "In a dog eat dog world you just end up with a bunch of chewed up dogs" did not. Probably just as well.

The article is here: https://www.lyft.com/rev/posts/how-weak-ties-build-strong-communities

I wondered how it would feel to be back in the US for our first visit since moving to Italy. I wondered if I would be overwhelmed with nostalgia, sink into the comfort of understanding everything being said around me and of knowing how everything works. I wondered if I would feel regret.

Um, no.

America seems gritty and frenetic and angry. There are many consumer goods and I was glad to be able to buy them, but people eat their lunches too fast -- it is not good for the digestion. And afternoon naps are frowned on for everyone over the age of four -- no wonder there is so much rampant crankiness. And the political scene is a chaotic dystopian morass that would be bizarrely fascinating, in a freakish circus sideshow sort of way, were it not in the global center ring, threatening to take the rest of the world's economy down the drain with it. That cretins such as the American Republicans (who by rights should be relegated to carefully controlled institutional settings out of the way of decent people) should have such global power makes their clown act no longer funny. It is horrifying.

But.

It was lovely to see the people I love. One cannot make an old friend over night. And to be with my boys, however fleetingly, is a piece of heaven.

One of my relatives asked me what I miss about America. I miss the people I love. I miss the boys being little and asleep, tucked into their beds at night in the quiet of our house and me as I was then, in those late evening hours of serenity. But all of that is gone and moving away to Italy had nothing to do with its loss.

So we did the slog of 23 hours of travel and arrived at last back to our little house  on the hillside just in time to see the sun setting blood red into the sea. The wind was very fierce last night -- these are the winter winds of the Mistral.

But the famous Tuscan sun is out this morning, drying all of our travel laundry. The winds blew the air so clear that right now from our windows we can see the snow on the mountain tops of Les Alpes-Maritimes across the Ligurian Sea in France.