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."

 

 

Jonathan being in law school is part of our routine now. Three mornings a week, he wakes up before dawn and rides his bike down to the train station in Pietrasanta for the half-hour train ride to Pisa and then peddles past the Leaning Tower as the sun rises on his way to his first class.

We went into Firenze last week and bought him a folding bike that is easier to get into the crowded morning train. Because it folds up to be the size of a carry-on bag, it has very tiny wheels and makes Jonathan look like an escapee from a travelling circus. He is now a local character and people make sure to tell him when they have seen him on it -- an interesting event in their day.

This is all well and good on the way down the hill, but at the end of the day when he comes home, he has to peddle up the mountain (a thousand-foot elevation gain over only about four kilometers of road) on his tiny wheels like a demented clown. The hard-core spandex cyclist crowd  -- many of whom are actually professionals who use the lovely Via Capriglia as a training ground for the Tour de France and the Giro d'Italia -- pass him easily, but often give him complements and friendly encouragement as they go by. One buff young man even circled back last Wednesday to say, "You are my hero of the day!" He didn't, Jonathan says, call Jonathan "Gramps," but he was clearly thinking it. So, a dubious complement, but we take whatever we can get from the whippersnappers.

When Jonathan goes past the pub, everyone on the terrace cheers wildly.

In the meantime, I am home making chestnut butter. We are in the height of chestnut season now and I can't seem to resist. If it weren't that peeling the nuts is such a tedious chore, we would probably be drowning in chestnut butter by now. So I guess the tedium is a blessing.

My drawing is now on the labels of the house wine at the pub, which is fun. The label says "Una comunita' e' una famiglia" -- "A community is a family."

And for purposes of historical record, below is a picture of everything I bought at the market last Thursday. It weighed 13 pounds all together and cost 14 euros -- about 15 dollars. Some day we will marvel at that.

 

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.

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 olives are really coming into their own now and Mimmo has sent a text saying he won't be able to be around much these days because of the harvest. I myself was out this morning gathering a small batch of ripe olives from our own trees to brine here at the house. I would have gotten more, but I walked face first into a big spider web, danced around a bit like a lunatic out there in the middle of the olive grove, and immediately after that decided that we probably have enough olives for now.

The autumn wildflowers are blooming all over the hillside and we are being deluged with the corbezzoli. Jonathan and I have made a pact between ourselves to never buy commercially produced jam again. Even so, we will never eat all that we have already made.*

We went yesterday to a food and wine festival in Pisa. We bought tickets (10 euros each) to go to a Cheese and Honey Tasting run by the National Organization of Cheese Tasters, the representative of which was jovial, but also gravely serious when it comes to matters of tasting cheese. We sat in a room for an hour with 30 other people paying very close attention to cheese -- sniffing it in the approved manner (one piece in each nostril) and tasting it very solemnly and deliberately while the cheese guy discoursed knowledgably about the attributes we should be noticing and the festival photographer wandered around taking pictures of people putting cheese up their noses.

We were given four different spoons to taste four very different types of honey and then pair them with the cheeses. The honey came from a place called the Queen of Nuts and if they had had a t-shirt, I would have bought it.

We wandered around the festival and bought three types of pasta, two types of pasta sauce, two jars of Tuscan soup, honey vinegar, melon liquor, honey-and-orange-flower-infused gin, and a cake. The best part, though, was that for three euros, you could get a wine glass in a pouch to hang around your neck and then when you went up to one of the numerous wine stalls, they would give you a free taste in your glass.

We each got a glass because we thought they were funny, but we actually drank no wine because when we got back to lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea, we were going to the regular Sunday night Giro di Pizza at the pub and it isn't wise to begin drinking too early in the day if you are going to end your evening with the professionals.

We are in the midst of a slow-motion tragedy there. Our beloved Renata is moving back to Poland after 22 years in Italy. Her mother passed away and her father is now alone and needs her, so she is moving back in November. It will be a terrible loss for us all and they did not tell Nonno right away.

She spent the evening teasing and playing as usual, making Ugo's hair stand up like a shark fin on the top of his head and turning Nonno's baseball cap around backwards. But at one point, she noticed that Geppolino's shoes weren't tied because he has a hard time now bending down that far, so she tied them for him, very tenderly and sweetly, and I thought I might cry.

Of course, how Geppolino would get his shoes off again once he got home is anybody's guess.

*Here is the recipe for the Italian Polenta Cookies with Corbezzoli Jam Thumbprints:

1. Make the corbezzoli jam by getting a lot of corbezzoli berries out in the garden, washing them gently, putting them in a pot with about half their volume of sugar, and a big squirt of lemon juice. Heat until boiling, stir frequently, and cook down a bit until it seems jammy. The corbezzoli berries are naturally very sticky, so this shouldn't take long. Let it cool while you proceed with the cookie dough.

2. Make the cookie dough by first creaming together one cup butter, one half cup sugar, and two tablespoons honey. When it is light and fluffy, add in one egg, one teaspoon lemon zest, and half a teaspoon each vanilla and salt. Mix thoroughly. Then add two cups flour and a half cup polenta (or grits or cornmeal). Mix until just combined. Then cover the bowl and refrigerate for at least an hour. Entertain yourself during this hour possibly by brining some olives or drinking some wine.

3. Assemble the cookies by rolling the dough into little balls about the size of a jumbo/colossal olive. Press you thumb down into the middle of each ball to make it into a little cup. Fill each little dough cup with corbezzoli jam. Bake in an oven at 325 degrees for 13-14 minutes. Cool on wire racks.

4. The texture is supposed to be gritty like that, I swear. Also, tragically, I'm sorry to say that this will not use up very much of your jam.

 

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.

 

It is a blustery day and from where I am sitting, if I turn my head I can see the waves breaking in frothy white rows at the beach.

We spent New Year's Eve at the pub -- a more melancholy evening than it was a year ago. A year ago, Mirio came to our table and joined us and welcomed us to the family of the regulars. That night we first met Almo and finally learned Renata's name and a man that we had never seen before -- or since -- grabbed Jonathan in the sort of passionate and loving embrace that betokens many, many bottles of wine.

But there has been much death and other sadness in this past year and, for all the food and wine and fireworks, the party was a subdued affair. Daniele and Allice were long gone before midnight came.

And now January is here. We have yet another rental car, but still no driver's license for Jonathan or visa for me. The police will supposedly do a surprise check to see if I actually live here, but since we don't know when they are coming, we don't have any way of making sure that we will be home when they do. But I guess one excuse is probably as good as another for them to get out of the office and enjoy a ride up the lovely Via Capriglia.

We went into Firenze on Wednesday to go to a van Gogh show and then to lunch and then the Palazzo Pitti.

But we spoke only Italian to each other at lunch to keep from interacting with the loud English-speaking tourists seated next to us. For now, it feels like all we need is just the two of us. We hibernate together up here in our aerie, watching the surf break and the lights glitter down below us on the plain. At night, especially, it seems like we are very high up in the air.

I have taken some pictures of some of the doors here at the house. It seemed seasonally appropriate.

 

 

We are living now in wind. It has been blowing for three days -- so hard that we lost a big tree out back and a dozen fence posts. In one night, the big persimmon tree was stripped clean of all its lovely red and orange leaves and now scores of persimmons hang there on the bare branches, getting ripe, just out of reach, taunting me.

We got a literal windfall of corbezzoli berries, though, so I have been making giant pots of gritty jam. It was either that or step in all the sticky red berries whenever we walk out back, ending up afterwards tracking red splotches around behind us like a couple of very untidy serial killers.

There were a few very small and very unexpected sweet potatoes for sale in the fruit and veg store the other day. They were labelled "Patate Americane." This led me to attempt to bake Jonathan's favorite pie, Sweet Potato Pecan. The important ingredients for this are: sweet potatoes, pecans, dark corn syrup, brown sugar, eggs, and pumpkin pie spice. The ingredients from that list that are regularly available in Italy: eggs. For the rest, I just had to wing it. We are eating it anyway.

Last Sunday, we went to Capezzano Monte for the celebration of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. There was a mass with music by the Capezzano Monte Filarmonica in the church, then a little band concert in the park, and then a big fried-chicken lunch in the school house/community center, where we sat at long tables and talked (as is almost always the case in Italy) about food. Our friend Claudio from the pub was the head chef. It was like a lost episode of The Andy Griffith Show, only with wine. Lots and lots of wine.

We have more time to go to things like this lately  because two days ago, I finished the first draft of my new novel. Now it needs to sit and marinate while I clear my head of it. That way I can come back to it later with clear eyes.

Tomorrow we are going to the Merenda Allongata (Elongated Snack) at the pub to usher in the holiday season. It lasts from 4:00 to 8:00 p.m. and features much wild boar, including Daniele's homemade, secret-recipe wild boar sausage. We had planned to sort of diet and get in better shape before the holiday season kicked in, but it seems to have snuck up on us very quickly and we missed our chance. So now when we say we are "rolling in" to the holiday season, we mean it literally. I have no regrets.

Update Number Two: Looking more closely at the label from the wine of choice at the pub, I see that it is actually named for a quote from Baudelaire. Here is the whole quote, the first part of which is on the label:

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."