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.

 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.

 

At long last, on Saturday we finally signed the lease for the belfry house and paid our rent and got the keys. The movers are scheduled to come on Friday to deliver all of our old furniture and the last of the ghosts from our house in Colorado.

In the meantime, we went on Sunday to see the house for the first time on our own. The owners had warned us on Saturday that the latch to the gate to get in was somewhat broken and quite tricky to open. 

They did not lie. It was so tricky, in fact, that in the end Jonathan had to scale the two-meter-high security fence -- no mean feat -- and drop down on the inside of the yard to let me in from there.

The neighbors presumably watched all this in amazement from behind their curtains while shaking their heads at the inexplicable ways of Americans. We will doubtless provide them with hours and hours of amusement for the next few years.

In the meantime, we are celebrating the "Giorni dei Merli" -- "Days of the Blackbirds" -- here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea. These are called the Days of the Blackbirds because they are supposed to be the coldest days of the winter and Nonno tells us that when it is so cold, the blackbirds fly down into the chimneys to get warm and the soot from the smoke there gets onto their feathers and that is why the birds are colored black.

There have been special celebratory feasts every day at the pub and the big bottle of lottery wine, which was never in the end claimed by its winner, was drunk by all of us.

But the signs of spring are all around. I saw some yellow daffodils blooming on a sunny slope in the olive groves yesterday and the mimosa trees are glowing. The wolves are also flourishing and on the most recent night of the full moon, one sat right outside our dining room windows and howled at it. He was answered by friends on the next hillside. There is nothing like wolves howling literally right outside the door to make a house feel cozy on a winter night.

 

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.

Two important updates:

1. The raffle for the giant bottle of wine was finally held at the pub. We did not win. But the person who did win (#53) bought their raffle ticket so long ago that they can no longer be located. The word has been put out that they can come and get their prize, but no one has shown up yet. So the bottle may be raffled off yet again some time in the future. Fingers crossed!

2. At the pub the other night, two people came rushing in all breathless to find Mario. "We were just walking by your house," they told him, "and we saw a wolf in your yard, inside the gate!" Mario left with them to go see what was up, but by the time he got there, the wolf was gone. This reminds me of the time in Colorado when my friend Norma got a message from UPS that they couldn't deliver her package and she would have to come pick it up at the distribution facility herself instead. The reason they gave in the message was "Bear in driveway."

Here during the shortest days of the year, I mostly want to hide under the covers on our bed and watch Christmas-themed food videos on YouTube and then make the things and eat them. This has led to many trips to stores all over town searching for things like molasses -- which is impossible to find, despite very diligent nostalgia-and-hunger-induced effort.

So we go down to the pub and eat Daniele's pears roasted in red wine and then wander home while the wolves howl in an amazing chorus and I hurry to get safe inside our house and Jonathan lingers outside, hoping for a glimpse of one. So far, I am relieved to say, he has been unsuccessful. But the wolves are so numerous (and so convivial) that they woke me up before dawn yesterday with a rousing symphony of howling.

The winner of the raffle of the giant bottle of wine at the pub has not been determined yet. We bought our ticket (#17) last Easter, which was the first time the raffle was supposed to have been held, and have held onto it for these many months through many further announcements that the raffle was going to be happening any day now. But things do not rush forward and it may be many months still before the winner is known.

Still no word on my Italian citizenship, btw.

Likewise, we are supposed to be signing the lease and paying the rent and getting the keys to our new house in ten days' time, but there is no movement on that front and we are glad that we gave ourselves a whopping four months of overlap, while we still have this house, to actually make the move. We will doubtless need every bit of the time.

But I am in no particular rush, just savoring these last weeks living with Jonathan in this misty, hidden dreamworld where we can feel, especially on foggy days or in the mornings before the mist rises back into the sky, that we have somehow managed to travel back in time to the days before televisions and cell phones and traffic jams, when a person's whole world could be just one tiny village in the hills of Tuscany and the people and things found there would be enough for a full and complete life.

We went to hear our friends sing in the local choir concert last night. Because there are so few people up here, the choir makes up ten percent of the total population of the village. I like to think of them practicing together in the evenings, as they have done for decades now, from the time before there was anything else to do on a long winter night. I sent a clip last night to Jonathan's sons and Gabe replied, "No wonder it's easy for people to believe in the divine."

 

 

The wolves have been howling at night lately. It echoes around the forest and the ravine behind the house and, when we walk out at night, we are careful, peering into the darkness and intent, listening to every sound. The dark comes very early now. Somehow, it all makes Christmas seem so much more real.

The Christmas fairs seem sparkly in the dusky winter light. In Pietrasanta, there are stalls selling special cheeses wrapped in straw and special sausages. There are stalls with local wine and new olive oil and different types of honey -- chestnut and linden and acacia and "a thousand flowers." There are stalls with serving implements carved from swirly olive wood and ones with delicate lacy shawls and sweaters crocheted with wool from local sheep and one with handmade soap from local olive oil. There is a stall with fifty different types of herbal teas, including one called "butterfly." Everything seems to twinkle a little bit.

But despite all this, the holiday season doesn't seem actually commercial. Instead, everyone we know is busy exchanging homemade baked goods and homemade wreaths and homemade jams and jellies and pickles. Jonathan and I are bringing around jars of our lemon-ginger marmalade and loaves of Jonathan's fresh-baked bread.

The commune here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea has put up a creche in the little park that commemorates the fallen war dead. There are sheep that have been made by pinning cardboard sheep faces onto hay bales. They give off a very distinct "Little Prince -- please will you draw me a sheep?" vibe and every time we go by them, I feel warm in my heart.

Now that the cold weather has come, the air out over the sea is crystal clear and we can see all of the individual houses and gardens down on the coast and even across the bay to the headlands at Porto Venere. The evening air often smells of woodsmoke and the only birds are owls and the sunset over the sea is the color of rubies. The leaves are falling every day and we can see down into the valley behind us now to the lights of Solaio. Late at night, wolves howl and the sound echoes around the valley forest.

We bought a two-foot-tall plastic Christmas tree at the big supermarket out on the highway and installed it in the living room. I thought that having at least a few of our old family ornaments hanging on it would make me feel more like it was Christmas. But now that it is up, I realize that I miss the smell of the fresh-cut fir trees that we used to have every year, hiking up into the high mountains and tramping through the silent snowy forest to find the one we wanted. We brought thermoses of hot chocolate and hot apple cider and scrambled eggs and bacon wrapped in tortillas and Christmas cookies. 

We always decorated the tree right away when we got home and the whole house smelled like the snowy winter forest. I will go out later and cut a pine branch or two from our woods and bring them into the house for the sake of their perfume. But I know that it will not be -- could not ever be -- the same.

Because there is a fried catfish motif running through Armadillo Massacre Number Three, I have made a new trailer based on that theme from an idea Tris came up with. The only problem was finding catfish and buttermilk, neither of which are readily available in Pietrasanta -- or even in Italy in general. For the catfish, I substituted the fish in the grocery store that looked to me most similar (it turned out to be plaice). 

And for the butter milk, I thought, "Well, we'll just make it ourselves." For my entire life, I have been under the impression that buttermilk was the milk left over after you churn cream into butter.

So we bought three half-liters of heavy cream and dutifully churned it into butter, carefully saving the leftover milk in a big bowl. When it was all done, I got set up to film and then while I was waiting for Jonathan to be ready, I gave the buttermilk a little taste -- just out of curiosity and to make sure it was right.

So do you know what is left when you churn butter out of cream? Not buttermilk, that's for sure.

It's skim milk. Just plain skim milk.

So at that point, I looked online to see how to make buttermilk. It turns out that buttermilk is a cultured product produced in a similar manner to yogurt, but using a different culture agent. All of the recipes for making it yourself begin with, "Take two tablespoons of buttermilk and add them..."

But if I already had access to buttermilk, why would I be making it myself? In the end, we stirred in a couple of spoons of plain yogurt to the milk and carried on. The end product was tasty nonetheless.

But now we are left with a giant ball of butter as big as a baby's head. We used some of it to make cookies and I also made a concoction of butter, honey, cinnamon, and cloves that we are eating on Jonathan's homemade bread. I've had worse things in my mouth. But we still have a lot of butter to go.

 

Some updates:

Wildlife: The wild boar in our woods has been going, well, wild. Last night. for the first time, we heard him rustling around out in the garden up close to the house and this morning there were new trenches uprooted all in between the grape vines. We have not, thank god, had any face-to-face interaction with him.* But we were visited by the biggest grasshopper that I have ever seen in my life. I realize, of course, that this is not the same.

* (Jonathan says he is disappointed by this, but I didn't notice him rushing down into the dark and noisy woods last night.) 

Festive Season: This weekend is the Festa di San Martino. Jonathan and I went into town this morning to the special holiday mercato and celebrated by buying sweet baked goods and killer booze. I am on a diet (to try to make up for my rather debauched summer) where I am trying not to eat any sugar or to drink any alcohol at home. So that's going well.

Yesterday, we inaugurated the official winter season with a big Bollito at the pub. Daniele made a gorgeous tortellini al brodo and we all ate and ate and drank much wine and then finished off with Punch Livornese, which is hot rum with espresso floating on top of it. This is for when you want to feel absolutely shitfaced and simultaneously totally wired. Festive season, indeed.

Italian Language: Now that AI runs our lives -- whether we want it or not -- whenever my Italian teacher sends me homework to do between my lessons, Gmail offers to translate it for me. Very considerate, but not likely to improve my language skills.

Persimmons: Mimmo has figured out how to get the persimmons down from the tree out back and, knowing that I love them, has very sweetly made a project of getting as many as he can for me. On Thursday, he got 21. I have them all sitting around in the kitchen getting ripe, which they will do either one-by-one (best case scenario) or all at once (most likely scenario).

Law School: Jonathan has become the sweet grandpa of his year in law school. The other students, who are mostly younger than our youngest child, all use the informal pronouns with him and treat him with great affection. He is on the group chat with them, where they mostly seem to discuss the parties that they have every weekend night and not a small number of other nights as well. I think we should start going to the parties, showing up with a bit platter of deviled eggs and suggesting we all play charades.

 

It has been raining lately and up here on our mountainside sometimes we are inside the clouds and sometimes we are above them. 

The wild boar have found their way into our garden again and left long trails off dug-up trenches in between the grape vines and all across the olive terraces. Mimmo says they aren't really hurting the plants, so we just quietly co-exist with them here in the rain.

In the pub, everyone has moved inside now to sit around one table near the wood-stove. They have put up a sign on the door that says if someone neglects to close the door after themselves when they come in, the next round of drinks is on them.

We sit so close together that our knees are touching. There is the smell of wood smoke. Two different people brought bottles of wine with them Friday night and Daniele railed against them -- but gently -- from where he was playing scopa in the corner with Almo and Alvaro and Luca. Our national tennis hope, Jannik Sinner, won in two sets -- 6-4, 6-3 -- on the television over the door to the kitchen. 

Nonno bought us all punch al mardarino and we drank them as if it was deepest winter although it was only a cloudy evening after a long day of rain and the dark of true winter is still three months away. We ate spicy salami from Napoli and then gorgonzola bruschette and then octopus bruschette and there were, at the height of the evening, twelve people squeezed in around a table for six and when the actual diners started showing up at 8:30, we wandered away and Jonathan and I walked home the long way, holding hands in the wet streets with the moon coming in and out of the clouds and an owl, sounding lost, calling again and again in the woods.

Luciana sent a picture that she took from her bedroom window of our drive and our red maple tree. She can't see our actual house from hers -- no one can see our house because it is hidden away of the back side of a little hill. Jonathan didn't recognize the view and thought she was sending a photo from some fabulous vacation spot. "Wow! Where are you?" he texted back.

She is here, looking at our house.

 

Autumn is here now and I startled a beautiful deer in back of the house yesterday when I went out to hang up the laundry. It was a lovely dappled brown and black and it disappeared into the woods immediately.

The chestnuts have started to fall and so have the corbezzoli berries. The porcini mushrooms are still going. I am making plum jam later today, but chestnut butter is on the immediate horizon and corbezzoli jam after that. The air is cold in the mornings and very clear so that we can see the individual windows on the houses down on the coast. The sea looks smooth and burnished in the sun.

Daniele and Alice have decided to start a line of their own wine at the pub and Daniele asked me to design the label. (At first he hired an actual professional designer, but he didn't like anything the designer came up with and I happened to be sitting around drinking wine with the boys at the time, which is how most things happen to me. That has been true my entire life. Being underfoot has worked out well for me as a life strategy.) I did about four designs and they chose the one with the green door, which will be a good souvenir of the place. So I have, at long last, come into my true calling. Jonathan and I are anxiously waiting for the labelled bottles to appear. The naked bottles are already there and Daniele gave us one to take home to "inspire" my drawings.

I also made another book trailer. These are much easier to make than the actual books themselves are.

It is very quiet in the house just now. The birds seem to have gone further south since autumn has come. The mosquitos, alas, have not followed the birds and, in fact, have taken full advantage of the recent rain to breed like rabbits and rampage around in giant clouds of ravening bloodsuckers. At night, we scratch ourselves and listen to the owls (the only birds left, it seems) riot in the woods.

Jonathan goes three days a week now to the University of Pisa where he is enrolled in law school. This was an unexpected summer development, sparked by a casual comment made by the official Italian translator while she was officially translating some of my citizenship documents into official Italian. And, since this is a civilized country that recognizes the benefit of having an educated populace, higher education is fantastically cheap (especially compared to the exorbitant cost in the US) and readily accessible. Jonathan just had to prove that he has an undergraduate degree -- which he does -- and then he started going to classes ten days ago.

The best things (besides the actual education and fascinating information gleaned, of course) are that 1.) he takes his bike on the train with hm and then bikes past the Leaning Tower of Pisa on his way to class every morning, and 2.) in one class there is only one other student and Jonathan is older than the student and the professor combined.

I am still riding the incredible high of having my novel under contract with a publisher, which really says something given that I spent the day yesterday changing all the n-dashes in my manuscript to m-dashes and reformatting my paragraph indentations. Today I begin my dance with the endlessly fascinating Chicago Manual of Style. It has hidden depths.

So many hidden depths.

But I also made a book trailer. It can never be used because I don't have rights to the music. But I went ahead and did it anyway just for the fun fun fun of it.

 

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.

It has cooled down a bit (low 80s) and I am able to sleep now and, as a consequence, think consecutive thoughts again. 

I have changed the title of my finished novel to "Armadillo Massacre Number Three," for instance, and decided that if it ever gets published, I am going to immediately start lobbying for it to be made into a big Broadway musical along the lines of "Little Shop of Horrors." 

Since there are armadillos in it and since the narrator of it is dead and speaking to us from the afterlife, I think the musical version of it should have two choruses of background singers, like in Greek tragedies. 

One will be a group of singers dressed up as angels and the other will be dressed up as armadillos. I can just see the armadillos singing and dancing in step like the Temptations.

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 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.

 

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)

 Aiden and Meghan's baby has arrived -- a month early and very small, but breathing on his own and in general being a champ. He didn't cry when he was born, but, as Aiden said, "took it straight." 

They are all still in the hospital, hoping to be able to go home in not too many more days. I offered, of course, to fly there immediately, but for now the three of them are happy just being their own new little family. And Aiden is sending lots of pictures, none of which I am allowed to post anywhere public. So here is a picture of him instead.

I remember a thousand moments of his baby- and childhood -- a thousand moments that he doesn't remember now, but that I will never forget. He was my little boy and now he has a little boy of his own. Time passes and we all grow up. But there is a tiny part of me that lives forever in his childhood.

 

We've been having a week here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea. On Monday, we realized that we put my birthdate on the formal citizenship request in the place where Jonathan's should have gone. You already know about that. On Tuesday, the doctor told Jonathan that the strange lump under his arm is probably not cancerous, but that it should nevertheless be biopsied. On Wednesday, in the middle of the pouring rain, I went into the cantina and discovered that the floor was a centimeter deep in water. Sitting on the floor, soaking it all in, were multiple boxes of our books. Now, the books are all over the house, opening up like crinkled flowers as they dry out. On Thursday, I got seven mosquito bites on my right thigh and one on my left. These are the Southern Tiger Mosquitos -- brought north by climate change -- that leave big red welts that itch like fire for days and days.

On Friday, we found out that on the day almost a year ago when we sat in our attorney's office and I said, "Don't I need my criminal record from every state where I've lived?" and she said, "Oh, no -- only the FBI federal one." and I said, "Well, how nice! Tra-la-la-Tra-la-la-Rum-tum-tiddle-um-tum," we were very much mistaken. I am now in the process of trying to figure out how to get a money order for US$7 to the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, DC, and -- even more fun -- how to get the lovely Apostilles from all the states where I've lived. And of course, all week long, the political horrors coming out of the US continue to be godawful. I now personally know five people who have either already lost their jobs because of these monsters or are on the verge of losing them.

On Saturday, nothing too disastrous happened here at the house, although the cantina continues to be a flood zone (but we have moved all of our boxes out of there and they are -- once again -- piled all around the living room.) Jonathan and I went to the big Esselunga HyperMarket at Lido di Camaiore and bought a bunch of adorable mini-lemons and brought them home and candied them. We then invented a new dessert called Exploded Cannoli.

I don't want to seem immodest, but we are geniuses.