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.

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.

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!"

 

The Italian word for "ticket" is "biglietto" and there are various kinds of biglietti for all sorts of purposes. 

When you buy bread at the bakery counter in the supermarket outside town, first you get a biglietto from the little machine and then when your biglietto number is called, you go to the counter and get your bread. When you go to the post office, you get a biglietto from a little machine and then when your biglietto number is called, you go to the counter and get told to fuck off because you can neither send nor receive the mail you want. It is very orderly.

When you get a coffee, sometimes you pay first and get a biglietto from the cashier that you then present to the barista, who makes you a coffee. Sometimes, however, you get the coffee first from the barista and pay later. There is no way to tell which method any particular place uses, but if you are desperate and deprived enough, you can figure it out eventually.

When you take the train from Pietrasanta, there are no actual humans who work in our miniscule and unimportant train station, so you buy your biglietto from a machine at the station. Then you are supposed to go to another machine out by the tracks and stick the end of your ticket in it to be "validated." On the train itself, sometimes a conductor comes through and checks everyone's ticket and sometimes they don't. When I went with Jonathan to Pisa two weeks ago to watch him give his presentation in his mock trail for International Law, I forgot to validate my ticket and the conductor did come through checking, but she didn't care about my lack of validation. "They never care about the validation," Jonathan said and it is true.

When you park your car on the street, there is usually a machine somewhere around fairly nearby where you buy a biglietto for a certain amount of time to leave on your dashboard. You have to estimate how long you are going to be parked and, given our leisurely pace of life, it is prudent to overestimate that. By a lot.

All the parking biglietto machines work a bit differently so that when you park someplace new, it is always a bit touch-and-go trying to figure out the new machine and get back to your car with your biglietto before the parking patrol comes by and gives you the other kind of parking ticket.

When you park at a big parking garage or an airport parking lot, you get a biglietto when you go in and then you have to remember to pay at a machine somewhere else before you try to leave in your car at the exit gate, where there are no human attendants, but only a little machine that takes your already paid biglietto and then, for some reason, gives it back to you -- a little souvenir of your stay. I wander around with all sorts of used biglietti in my coat pockets and the cup holder of the car, like confetti. I'm pretty much always ready for a parade.

Jonathan came back from his trip to the US on Friday. His plane was an hour late leaving Newark and we were worried that he would miss his connecting flight in Zuruch for Firenze.

"If I miss my connection to Firenze," he texted me, "I'm going to see if they will send me to Pisa instead." Pisa is much closer to home than Firenze is. He had tried to buy tickets to leave and return from Pisa when planning this trip, but there were no workable flights from there that fit his schedule.

But he made his connecting flight in the nick of time and I jumped immediately into the car to drive the hour and a half to Firenze to get him. I got there just as the flight from Zurich was supposed to be touching down. But the info board said the flight was going to be 20 minutes late. Then it changed to 40 minutes late. Then 60, which is quite a lot for a 90 minute flight that is already in the air, so I settled in to wait.

At last, Jonathan texted that they were on the ground, but not in Firenze. They were in Pisa.

They had been diverted because of fog. So since he was already in Pisa, we decided that he would take the train to Pietrasanta and I would drive back there as quickly as I could and pick him up at the train station there.

Only when I tried to pay my parking biglietto at the little machine, the machine didn't seem to want my money. I tried everything -- turning the biglietto upside down, putting it in backwards, entering my license plate number into the keypad, inserting my credit card anyway. Nothing worked. So I got in the car and tried exiting the parking lot with the unpaid biglietto, but the exit gate was unmoved.

So I had to do the Exit Gate Backup Of Shame and then I re-parked the car and wandered forlornly around the airport until I found a man working in some sort of office.

"Excuse me," I said, "but this ticket is not functioning." ("Mi scusi, ma questo biglietto non funziona.")

He took the ticket and looked at it for a minute.

"Signora," he said very solemnly, "this is a biglietto for the train to Pisa."

"Ah," I said. "Well, that would explain it then."

In my defense, I need a lot of biglietti and, although they are all different, they are not that different.

But Jonathan is at last back home now. He brought a suitcase full of New York bagels and his old viola from high school. We stopped at the supermarket and bought smoked salmon before heading back up the hill to lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea.

Saturday, we went to lunch at the pub. Alice was there with Celeste. At one point, singing broke out. Jonathan is very happy to be back home.

 

Semina (whose real name is Francesco) likes to hunt and is good at it and usually very successful and known around here as the go-to person if you need any sort of wild game, but especially wild boar, which is his specialty.

A couple of days ago, a chef at a high-end traditional restaurant in town asked if Semina could get him some boars' heads for some sort of ancestral Tuscan delicacy he was planning. So Semina went out and was very lucky, actually getting three boars, very fat from having spent the holidays gorging themselves on the last of the fallen chestnuts.

The chef only wanted the heads, so Semina severed those and put them all together in a bag, but then had to figure out what to do with all the rest of the boar meat. He kept some for himself and some undoubtedly went to Daniele at the pub to be roasted with red wine and wild herbs.

But Semina also knows three Albanian brothers who are sharing a house up here in the hills and could use a little neighborly generosity, so he cut off a couple of nice fat pork haunches and put them in a bag for the brothers as a little New Year's gift and then headed out to make his meat deliveries.

He stopped at the house of the three Albanian brothers first and dropped off their bag of boar meat, for which they were quite grateful, and then continued on towards the restaurant in town. He was only halfway down the mountain when his cellphone rang and it was the eldest of the Albanian brothers.

"Semina," he said, sounding serious and a little scared. "Are you sending us a message? Is this a threat? We don't understand what we have done."

Semina opened the bag of meat still on the floorboard of his car and saw that it had the haunches in it. He had accidentally given the three Albanian brothers three severed boars' heads in a bag.

When he told us this story last night in the pub, Jonathan laughed and laughed and laughed. He is still laughing this morning.

As we were leaving, Semina said to us, "Now remember -- if you don't let me help you move, then we are no longer friends."

So sometime at the beginning of February, we will have a moving party and invite our friends from the pub to help us carry boxes of books to the new house and then eat lasagna and drink wine together all afternoon.

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.

The third draft of my memoir is sitting quietly marinating for a while so that I can come back to it with some "objective distance." Fat chance.

But, in any case, I am using my free time since I am not working on it (and since the chestnut butter days are now behind us) to work on some promos for Armadillo Massacre Number Three. Last night, we shot some footage in the pub. Did I ever imagine my life would end up this way? Um, no.

I hope I never forget the time a longhorn steer escaped from a parade in downtown Colorado Springs and went into the lobby of my bank. Good times.

 

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."

 

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.

Driver's License Update: 

To recap, Jonathan has a valid Swiss driver's license, which -- BY INTERNATIONAL TREATY -- can be exchanged for an Italian driver's license. We tried to do this exchange for about TWO YEARS. 

We failed. 

A rather fussy man in an office in Lucca refused (repeatedly) to grant Jonathan an Italian driver's license because the Swiss one came from exchanging an American license. So Jonathan eventually was reduced to having to take driving lessons, written and practical, with every teenager in Pietrasanta. He is the only one in class who ever takes notes.

The instructor at Jonathan's driving school told him on Wednesday that someone dropped out and there was an opening to take the written test next week and that Jonathan could sign up if he wanted. Jonathan, who has been studying very assiduously, said he would like to go ahead and take the test. 

On Thursday, Jonathan had to have his eyes officially checked and present an official photograph of himself and fill out many official forms and pay many official fees.

On Friday, the driving school entered his name into "the system" to register for the test this coming week. All should be good.

But, no. 

"The system" has now flagged Jonathan as an "anomaly" because he already has a Swiss license (which "the system" knows about from his previous attempt to exchange it) and so should not have to take the test, but merely exchange his license. In fact, he is not allowed to take the test next week. Maybe ever.

We are having fun.

Jonathan had another out-patient operation on Friday to remove a lump under his left arm to be biopsied. We stopped by the pub on our way to the hospital to show Daniele and Alice the t-shirts we had made with my drawing of the pub on them. Daniele offered us a coffee but we told them we couldn't stop because we were on the way to the hospital for Jonathan to have a lump removed.

"Another one?" Alice said to me. "You're going to have to get a new husband."

"Not now," I said. "Not when I've got this one almost perfected."

Jonathan had local anesthesia so that he was awake for the procedure itself. They carefully draped a curtain, though, between his eyes and his arm.

"Do you put the curtain there because people get scared if they look?" he asked the surgeon.

"Oh, no," the surgeon said. "We don't want you to see what we're doing because then you would just do it yourself the next time."

It turns out that we needed some headshots. These things happen.

Today is a terrible day here because of the devastating results in the US presidential election. It is like a nightmare that we can't wait up from.

Jonathan got an email this morning from a friend saying, "Who's glad he moved to Italia now?" But people we love are still in the US and we are very well aware that not everyone has the ability to just pick up and move to another country. And, even here, there is no escape from the incredible harm of a fascist taking power in the US. We are all fucked.

But after 30 years of teaching about totalitarianism, I know that a key goal of oppressors is to atomize and isolate people living under their control. Totalitarianism is threatened by community, connection, and solidarity. Reaching out to our communities and strengthening our connections with each other is one of the most powerful ways to resist oppression. 

After waking to the terrible news, Jonathan and I sat and cried for a while and then decided that we had to do something to get out of the house and into the world. So we went down to town and stopped into our little bookstore here, Nina La Liberia, to chat with Andrea and Valentina, the owners, who were also on the edge of tears. But at least we are on the edge of tears together. 

Then we went together down the entire two-block length of Via Barsanti and took pictures every few feet of the buildings and the doors and the windows. It felt like maybe making some art -- any art of any kind -- is a tiny part of the resistance and maybe the only thing we are capable of doing in the midst of our shock and devastation today. So here are the pictures. I love you all.