The weather forecast today predicts three straight days of hard rain, beginning this afternoon. Jonathan has gone down the hill to Pietrasanta to stock up on bread and wine and coffee before the deluge. It is the first time that we have been separated from each other in many weeks and I feel a bit lost without him nearby. I find that, despite being busy with other things, I am nevertheless also waiting for him to come back home even though he left less than an hour ago.

The "other things" I am busy with are copy edits. In the midst of this big move, this enormous life transition, the unspoken activity is a book. I am finishing a book and have spent more hours working on it these past few months than on any other single activity. But it is not very exciting to write about -- the days I have spent checking references, the long hours logging quotes, the tedium of requesting permissions. Three minutes with a lizard are much more entertaining than an hour figuring out the exact titles of long-defunct British literary journals from the 19th century (Is it the Leader or The Leader, etc., ad naus.?)

And so Jonathan is in town without me, Mimmo is working in the bosco just behind the house, and I am supposedly working on copy edits. Not very hard, admittedly.

George Clooney seems to have cleared out now that the rains are coming. Or at least we haven't spotted the helicopter recently. He did not say goodbye to us.

The persimmon tree out back dropped a couple of persimmons, even though they aren't ripe yet. The tree is full of green ones, but we have no idea how we will ever manage to get to them when they are ready. To climb a tree here is to risk death if you fall out on the wrong side and plunge a hundred meters down the mountainside. I think there is a life lesson here. Unfortunately.

We are befuddled.

We find that we do not know how anything works. It has been 40 years since I lived in Italy and I have forgotten many things. Many things have changed. It has been 20 years since Jonathan spent any significant time here and back then he was always a guest of his first wife's family and, therefore, did not need to know how (for example) the trash bags worked.

We do not know how the trash bags work. There are five different kinds: for paper, for "organico," for plastic bottles, for glass, and for "indifferenziata." These things are all picked up on different days of the week, having been put (and this is the part that got us) into different types of bags. We did not at first realize the part about the different types of bags. We don't know how any of this works.

We did, after two tries, manage to buy the correct type of bags for the "indifferenziata," but then when we got them home and took one off the roll, it devolved into a plastic sheet with a plastic string attached to it. Is it supposed to do that? Have we gotten a defective batch of bags or are we ourselves the defective ones? We don't know. We don't know how any of this works.

At the Fruit and Vegetable store, there are plastic shopping baskets inside the front door. Our first time in, the lady who works there pointed out the paper bags also by the door and so we put our three plums into one. So far, so good. But the next time we went in, as we were putting our plums into the paper bag, we were sternly spoken to by the other lady who works there. The only word of this dressing down that I understood was the word for "bag." Am I not supposed to put the plums into the bags, after all? Am I supposed to put them into the bags differently? Use more bags? Fewer? A different type of bag? Bring my own bag? We don't know. We don't know how any of this works.

The bags are just one example of the things that we don't know how to work. I still haven't figured out which lights switches turn on which lights or how to light the burner on the stove to make my morning coffee without using at least three matches -- sometimes four. I broke the bathtub drain trying to get it to open our first night here.

The local newspaper headlines on display in town announce that George Clooney is vacationing here. And, indeed, a helicopter has been ferrying someone glamorous from the roof of a house below ours down to the beach and back every day. George, of course, is a notorious prankster and this would explain the lizard in our bed last week. George thinks that kind of shit is funny. I bet George is not down there right now being befuddled by bags. He probably pays someone to figure out his bags for him. He probably has someone on staff to do nothing else.

My friend Benjamin came for the weekend -- our first visitor. And even though he is a lovely person, he knows jack shit about Italian bags. So we were all befuddled together. But on the walk down the path to town on Sunday (only our third time and our first time ever without getting lost even once!), we came across a fig tree with late season figs still on the branches. We got two -- perfectly ripe and warm from the sun -- and shared them standing there on the hillside with its view of the sea and the smell of rosemary and the tiny purple and yellow and white flowers in the grass and the cricket song and the quiet. The fig tree is in the middle of nowhere -- we had been walking 30 minutes before we came to it. All of the other figs are already over with for the season.

These are the things that George is denied in his luxurious helicopter descent. These are the things that make our befuddlement worth it.

Jonathan says that the chestnut trees look like Dr. Seuss creations.

 Update II -- Extremely Important Point of Information: The little lizards are much less charming and picturesque when you find them in your bed.

 Update -- Extremely Important Point of Information: The "strawberry grapes" do indeed taste faintly of strawberries. That is all. 

Yesterday we went down the "path" from our village into town. It is a thousand-foot elevation drop through terraced olive groves and other people's chicken runs and it took us almost an hour, although we were almost certainly lost for part of that time. I don't remember the chicken runs from when I lived here and regularly walked down the path 40 years ago. But, then again, there is so much that I don't remember from 40 years ago. (You would think, though, that illegally crashing through someone else's chicken run would stick in the mind. It will now!)

The olive harvest will start soon and there are nets, still bundled up, strung in among the olive trees. When it is time to harvest them, the nets will be spread out a couple of feet off the ground and then the tree branches will be raked with long wide-toothed wooden rakes to bring the olives down onto the nets without damaging the trees.

The trusted gardener, Mimmo, is here now -- a kindly, white-haired man who will be around once or twice a week, depending on his other work. The olive harvest will take a lot of his time soon.

I cut a giant bunch of rosemary from the yard this morning and have it steeping now for rosemary-infused olive oil.

We are in our house now, perched all topsy-turvy on the vertiginous side of the mountain with the ground dropping away hundreds of feet below us into the blue Ligurian Sea where Percy Shelley met his death.

The chestnuts and green persimmons clustered in the trees all around us are simultaneously very close and very far away. I could almost reach out and touch them from where I sit on the porch, but could never climb so high up into the tree. There are old stone steps everywhere with geraniums in pots and lizards sunning themselves and outbuildings scattered haphazardly at different levels and rosemary in profusion and olive trees and grapes called "strawberry grapes" and the sound of church bells in the distance throughout the day. The stairways seem to have been designed by M.C. Escher to maximize the feeling of being in a dream.

On Monday we arrived here with all of our luggage to be greeted by the Signora and her daughter and the rental agent, all of whom showed us everything around the place and explained how everything works and with whom we signed many forms. They spoke very quickly and very simultaneously and although Jonathan says that he got almost all of it, I only really understood that if we leave the gas on and blow up the house, we will be in trouble. Which seems fair.

The Signora's daughter asked Jonathan about our house in Colorado and he told her it was built in 1895. "Yes," she said. "I had heard that all the buildings there are very new." (This is not the usual response that we get. Perspectives shift.) She had seen a documentary about tornados in the US and wondered if that might explain why there is nothing really old in the States. Could be.

Then we went down to the town to open up a local bank account. Again, it was a long process involving much rapid speech with technical banking terms of which I understood only that I should not use my birthday as my PIN and that at some point I would be asked three security questions. I have not been asked them yet, although that was now three days ago. Or if I have, it happened in such rapid Italian that I did not notice. As the afternoons wear on, I have a tendency to simply start saying "si, si, si" to everything and smiling a lot. So far, so good.

Then we went to do a big shopping at the HyperMarket out on the road to the beach while we still had the rental car to carry things home. It turns out that the organizational grouping of groceries is highly culturally specific so that whereas, say, flour and salt and sugar all all grouped together in American grocery stores, they are not in Italian ones. Also, it turns out to be harder to tell the difference between dishwasher detergent, laundry detergent, shower gel, dish soap, toilet cleaner, and shampoo just by reading the labels than you would think. There are possibilities here for making mistakes that you really do not want to make. We were so confused that we ended up with pre-packaged octopus salad and screw-top 3-Euro wine and called it a day. We will live on love. And, I guess, octopus.

Tuesday, we drove to the airport at Pisa to return the rental car and took the train back to Pietrasanta. Then we took a taxi 95 percent of the way back up the mountain and walked the rest because the taxi driver was worried that if she took us all the way to our house, she would never be able to get back. So we are marooned here in paradise now as if we have fallen off the edge of the world.

Emily Dickinson wrote, "what indeed is Earth but a Nest from whose rim we are all falling?"

The important thing is not to panic.

We have arrived, at long last, in Pietrasanta. Our last days at "home" are a blur -- the final packing, the final garbage run (goodbye, futon!) , the final cleaning -- all made more challenging by the roofers showing up unexpectedly on Monday morning to begin removing all the layers of old roof that had piled up over the decades -- layers which delighted the local fauna, no doubt, but displeased the house inspector. So our last days of leave-taking had a soundtrack of splintering wood and crowbars. Metaphorically appropriate, but hard on the nerves.

Our last night was spent sleeping on the floor. Never before in all my years at the house has the floor ever seemed so unyieldingly solid. No structural problems there!

I sobbed as we left, of course -- partly for the place itself, which I loved, but mostly for the time in my life that it represented, a time when I was a mother with my beloved little boys at home and a professor who spent long hours talking about Ideas with generations of students who cared about them. When I was turning in the rental car at the Colorado Springs airport, the booth attendant asked me, "Heading home?" -- which seems like a simple "yes/no" question. I told him some lie because the real answer would have been too emotionally difficult to explain: "I don't know."

And so it began -- lines, cramped seats, cramped legs, execrable airplane food, the peculiar stink of airplane bathrooms, and our second mostly sleepless night in a row while the tiny icon of an airplane on the seatback screens inched its way across a map of the ocean.

And then, in the early afternoon, we finally touched down in Milan.

I had worried a bit about Customs (so much luggage!) and about Immigration Control (no extended-stay visa!), which just shows how long it's been since I was in Italy. Not a word was said to either of us -- just another middle-aged tourist couple off a plane-ful of them. We were blithely released into the afternoon sun, where our rental car waited.

We only got lost twice on the drive to Pietrasanta, which is pretty good -- especially since it was Thursday and we hadn't really slept since Monday night. Jonathan drove and I promised things to God. This is our customary division of labor.

Pietrasanta has changed, of course, in the last forty years. It is still lovely, but now it is filled with art galleries and restaurants in the places where the marble workshops and bronze foundries and stores selling chisels and power grinders used to be. We went to the place that used to be my regular bar, the Bar Igea -- always filled in those days with artists, sometimes still wearing their blue overalls sprinkled with marble dust or gesso or blood -- but it is now an upscale "Cocktail Lounge" open only at night. The important thing, in moments like this, is not to panic.

Our new best friend Lorenzo, an old punk who runs the hotel where we are staying until our house is ready for us on Monday, tells us that there are still many working artists here, just that they have been pushed out of the very center of town. And, indeed, I saw two men at lunch on Friday with the telltale pencils and ruined shoes of people who have spent the morning working in the studio.

Later, we drove up the mountainside for a peek at our village, even though we couldn't go to our house. And by "mountainside," I mean "sheer cliff with dozens of narrow switchbacks pretending to be a road." I had not remembered it as being quite so death-defying, which only confirms that I was 20-years-old and therefore clearly thought I was immortal when I lived here before. Jonathan drove our little standard-transmission car all the way up in first gear and did not tell me (while I was saying "Ooo! Look at the sea! Jonathan, look at the sea!") how close we came to stalling out a couple of times on practically vertical switchback turns. This would have been disastrous as the car has no real emergency brake, thus raising the possibility of us spending that always tense moment between "stopped" and "first gear" rolling precipitously backwards down a very steep roadway before plunging to our deaths over the side of the cliff. Of all the times not to panic, this is probably the most important.

But the village seemed magical, as things do when one has risked death to see them, and the sea was very blue (with what may or may not have been Corsica just visible in the distance) and the fig trees were heavy with green figs. It was so quiet that we found ourselves whispering.

Our first night, we had pizza and wine at a table in the street. Jonathan is speaking Italian like a pro. I am speaking Italian like someone who speaks only Spanish -- and only a little of that and only badly. We are, so far, very dazed and very happy.

The inspector's report came back with a laundry list of things "wrong" with our house -- basement windows and hidden leaks and tree roots making their way into the water line. I was suitably dismayed.

One of my oldest and dearest friends is a freelance writer and we talked together tonight -- a last catch-up before I go. He is working on a big story now for National Geographic -- a story about pediatric hospice. After 20 minutes of me rambling on about basement windows and tree roots, etc., the words "pediatric hospice" detonated into the echoing air of our empty house.

I do not care now about basement windows and tree roots, etc. It is good to remember that none of this bullshit matters.

I do not believe that I am moving to Italy. No really. Not in my heart.

I am, at the moment, very much here -- thinking hard about the house, my house, because it has been requiring so much attention lately. And the car. And the utility bill. And the rest of the long list of things that must be done in the next five days. Italy has not seemed real for many weeks now. Or, if it has, only fleetingly, in waves.

We made a reservation at a hotel in Pietrasanta for our first few days in country, before the Rustic Farmhouse With Trusted Gardener is ready for us. The online picture of its lobby puts me in mind not of Italy, but of our very own kitchen floor here at our house, whose checkerboard tiles we installed ourselves one winter, the boys and Jonathan and I.

But then Jonathan got an email from Lorenzo at the hotel asking about our expected arrival time and for one minute, Italy seemed like it was really happening.

We were caught off-guard by the house inspectors, who surprised us by coming over without warning first thing early Wednesday morning. Despite our discomfiture at this, we were fortunate that the bed did happen to be made and that Jonathan was in fact wearing pants. This is not always the case.

We wait now to hear the report -- Jonathan nonchalantly, me with loathing in my heart for our judges. If they can't see that the beauty of the house makes all the tiny quirks (solid roofs are vastly overrated, in my opinion, and really just separate us from nature and our animal kin in a way that is surely detrimental to our very souls) that come with living in such a unique (experience the wilderness!) place worth it, then they do not deserve this house (the elements are our friends -- welcome them with open arms!)

Driving down Union Boulevard last week, we were caught in a sudden deluge when the heavens opened up and it seemed like the sky itself was, at long last, as predicted, falling. Any rain at all is an event around here and we have been known to go out and stand on our porch to stare open-mouthed at a light drizzle, but this was really an astounding downpour.

"You know," Jonathan said to me while bravely navigating between the sudden-onset lagoons that had appeared in the road, "in Italy, we will have to get used to rain." And for just one minute, Italy was real.

Update: The house sold in one day. The buyer seems very nice, as far as we can tell. A professor, a musician. He loved the house enough to outbid other buyers. I hope he is as happy here as we have always been.

The listing for our house went live this morning. I have only cried twice. Maybe three times.

Jonathan and I are now sitting outside at the Dogtooth Café while strange people judge the suitability of our Eden for their own purposes. In a while, we will go up into the mountains and stare at the sky. But for the moment, I have to be somewhere with cellphone coverage so that I can approve appointments through the appointments app. It is all hideous.

We did the last things this morning at dawn -- putting down the edging in the garden, weeding the front flower beds. Our little house is ready now, as best it can be, to make its way in the world without us.

I wonder whether all the years of joy we had in it -- all the bedtime stories and sudden delight at morning glories and cups of tea in the evenings and the hidden messages we wrote under the kitchen tile we put down and the long, slow summer afternoons when we did nothing much but we did it together -- will all of that have somehow soaked into the house so that the people who go into the house will sense it there? Will 26 years of love make itself felt? Will the ghosts of our hearts haunt the place even when we're gone? 

My new best friends the painting crew are here. I am in the only room of the house that is not being painted while they go through a thousand rolls of blue masking tape in all the other rooms.

This is the 10th stage of the process of revolutionizing our lives out of 12 stages total. I made a list.

One: The Wild Romantic Imagination Stage. I think it was cold. I think it was even snowing. Or maybe it was just another bleak winter day when Jonathan and I hatched our plan. I don't remember exactly how it came about other than that it started as an inchoate longing to go somewhere new together.

Two: The Doing Things Online Stage. This is an easy and fun stage. It is easy and fun to surf the net looking at rental properties on hillsides in Tuscany, for example. Or to search for the menus of restaurants that would be near you and decide what you would eat if you were actually there at the moment. Or to drive around on Google Street View ogling the produce outside the "Frutte e Verdure" or the bread in the window of the "Galleria del Pane". It is so easy and fun that, in an excited dither, suddenly (over the course of one full month) we had rented a rustic farmhouse with trusted gardener on an actual hillside in Tuscany.

Three: The Sorting Through Decades of Our Stuff With a Hard and Critical Eye Stage. Visit 1 out of 99 to the ARC donation station.

Four: The Precious Relics Stage -- Part One (also Crying Stage -- Part One). The tiny baby shoes! The homemade birthday cards! The little bag of extracted wisdom teeth! (Well, maybe not the teeth...)

Five: The Making Friends With Skilled Craftspeople Stage. Oh, the parade of people who actually know what they are doing (aka, not us)! Plumbers, electricians, landscapers, contractors, floor refinishers -- we have come to know and love you, been through challenges together (trucks that wouldn't start, damp, spiders, kidney stones, attack dogs) and learned each others' secrets. Our time together has been ... special.

Six: The Standing Together in the Epoxy Aisle of Home Depot Trying Very Hard to Concentrate On How Much We Actually Love Each Other Stage. Nuff said.

Seven: The Finally Packing It All Up Into Storage Stage. Followed very quickly (and inevitably) by the Oops! I Need That Again One More Time substage.

Eight: The Farewell Tour Stage. Coffee and crying with dear friends. Mostly crying. My friends are understanding and tolerant. And also -- fortunately -- waterproof.

Nine: The Precious Relics Stage -- Part Two. Is it possible to pack up and carry away with me enough objects so that I can hold on forever to those years when the boys were growing up here and I had them with me every day? No. (More crying.)

Ten: The Everything Gets Painted Beige Stage. And our life here is erased.

So that is where we are now. There are still two stages and 21 days left to go.

Eleven: The Having Strangers Sit In Judgement Of The Place That Has Been Our Eden Stage. We will try to be out of the house whenever it is being shown by the real estate agent. Obviously.

Twelve: The Walking Away Stage. Actually, driving away in a rental car that we will return at the airport while, almost certainly, crying. And then it will be a whole new world -- the dreams of a bleak winter day made real.

It has recently occurred to me that for the rest of my life, this time now will be "that last summer."

I will turn to Jonathan years from now and say, "Remember that last summer in Colorado when we stuffed ourselves with Pueblo corn because we knew it would be the last?" or "Well, Tris moved to Alaska that last summer we were in Colorado, so that would have been 2022" or "Remember that last summer when we kept getting rid of furniture so that we ate off smaller and smaller tables until finally we only had a kitchen stool in the dining room and then finally at the end we had nothing but picnics on our futon on the floor?"

The contractor has now finished the repair work in the basement. His baby was born 10 days ago, between two of his residencies here. It is a little boy -- everyone is healthy and happy and sleep-deprived, as is customary. This means that we have been working on this house so long that children have actually come into the world during the process. No word yet on whether our new little contractor will be named after me. I am sure they are probably thinking about it, though! Fingers crossed!

There is new beige carpet in the boys' old bedroom, completely changing the quality of the light in there. The house painters will be here next week and paint all the walls beige, which is apparently what home buyers these days want in a house. I find this depressing and also, as a cultural sociologist, an important clue to the general psyche of the American populace. People who would want to live in an all-beige house would absolutely elect far-right fascists to office. The cruelty is the point.

As I write, hidden away in a corner, the hardwood floor is being refinished. It was supposed to happen last week, but the head refinisher had to have some kidney stones out. It's the whole circle of life around here. 

While the finish on the floors is drying, we are not able to walk on them, which means our access to our only bathroom is cut off. For two days. We have bought an 8-foot 4x4 beam which we intend to use as a bridge between the kitchen (which we can reach through the back door) and the bathroom. At first, we thought about just trying to leap across the distance, but even with a running start and an empty bladder, the reality of inadvertently slamming into the projecting corner of the basement stairwell and crumbling into a heap on the (presumably) sticky hardwood hallway floor and being stuck there until EMTs pried me up using (again, presumably) some sort of very large crowbar was, well, off-putting.

"Remember that last summer in Colorado," Jonathan will say, "when we had to have the floors refinished twice?"