It's another beautiful day here in Capriglia-by-the-Sea. Alice has been decorating for Halloween down at the pub. This makes us love her even more than we already did.

When we went down night before last, she was busy making a big spider out of a trash bag and some sticks. She had already made a dead body wrapped in a bag hanging upside down from a tree on the terrace with a sign saying "He Didn't Pay." We thought this was pretty funny, but she told us that the priest (the main employee of the only other place in the village that is open to the public) will certainly preach a sermon against Alice and Daniele because of the decorations.

Last Easter, she told us, they served a very playful menu featuring such dishes as "The Passion of the Tordelli" and "Lamb of God Chops." The priest came to eat -- and he ate deeply, with fortitude and vigor, enjoying his meal to the fullest. Then he went back to the church and wrote Alice and Daniele a very stern letter calling the menu "blasphemy" and threatening to report them to the Catholic Church Office of the Inquisition, which is a real thing that still exists.

In the end, Alice apologized profusely, took down the menu, and managed to mollify the priest with protestations of remorse and also cheesecake. But clearly there were no feelings of great love left between the parties.

It could have been very serious for Alice and Daniele. The priest could have caused them to be shunned in the village, forbidden the members of the congregation (i.e., everyone) from going to the pub. It would have been an interesting measure of the lingering power of the Catholic Church, though, to see if a priest's interdiction would have had any effect on the old men who sit all day under the trees drinking bottles of wine and gossiping. It is not clear to me which side would win in a contest between eternal damnation and having to go all the way to Capezzano Monte to drink wine with one's friends.

On our way down the mountain (and from here, everything in the world is "down the mountain"), we pass a house. On the front of the house is a mailbox. In the mailbox is a letter. A big juicy letter. It has been sitting in that mailbox for days and days now, untouched, sticking out into the sun and the wind and the rain. It is taunting me.

We don't ever get mail. Well, last month we got three pieces of mail out of the four that my brother sent me. (He is very kindly receiving all of our forwarded mail in the US and passing on to us the things that are truly necessary.) The one piece that didn't come was my Criminal Record from Arkansas, which I need for my application for Italian citizenship. It is out there somewhere now, floating around and showing that in my early life, I was either very good or very sly.

But that has been it. Just three things to show us that they could deliver the mail here, but they choose not to. The box of books that we mailed ourselves from Colorado last August has not arrived. My subscription to The New York Review of Books, which was arriving with great regularity all summer long to Gabe's apartment in Zurich, stopped completely when I changed the address to here. The thousands of cards and letters, with which I am sure my many friends are deluging me, have yet to materialize.

Now, you might think: "But who needs physical mail here in the actual 21st century?" That is because you do not have a Visa card that you depend on that is due to expire very soon and for which you will need the actual physical replacement. I do. Actual physical checks for our insurance rebates, mortgage escrow payoff, book royalties, and some of the pay for Jonathan's consulting work are things that it would be nice to be able to lay our hands on. I could go on and on. (I'm like that.)

We check the mailbox here at the house every day because we live in a state of perpetual optimism (punctured diurnally by despair.) And we also go into town and enquire in the Post Office whenever we feel we are able to handle the emotional strain. We take a number from the machine and wait until we are eventually called to the service counter -- from where we can clearly see boxes and letters sitting on the Posta Ferma shelf right behind the counter -- and ask if there is any Posta Ferma for us. Once they looked through the things on the shelf and said "no." Twice they typed our names into the computer and said "no." But mostly a rather forbidding man behind the counter tells us that Posta Ferma does not come there (without so much as asking our names or deigning to turn his head to even glance at the Posta Ferma shelf which -- again -- we can see completely clearly right behind him) and tells us to go check downstairs behind. 

Downstairs behind smells strongly of garbage and appears to be some sort of loading dock. The workers there look at us like we are crazy and tell us that Posta Ferma doesn't come down there and that we should enquire upstairs. Twice we have actually gone back upstairs to say to the people upstairs who sent us downstairs that the people downstairs told us to come upstairs. The forbidding man then says "no" and waves us away. 

We go away empty-handed and just hope that whoever has our box of books is enjoying them (some of them are Jonathan's high-level math books and therefore will of course provide hours of amusement and pleasure) and that whoever has my Arkansas Criminal record is using it for good and not evil.

In the meantime, the persimmon tree is loaded with luscious persimmons, most of which we cannot reach even with a ladder, even by climbing. We get what we can and call it a day. (The chestnuts, as if in compensation or maybe in a warning about being wary of abundance, continue to be oppressively available.)

 Me in art class last night.

 The view of the sea from Capriglia last night. There may be words for this, but I don't have them.

I am being oppressed by chestnuts.

The birds are singing, the famous Tuscan sun is shining, warming all the famously lovely red clay tiles, the persimmons are getting fat and orange in the trees, the sea dazzles my eyes at sunset so that I almost can't bear to look at it. And the goddamn chestnuts are falling by the bushel all over the place. One hit the roof of the car as I was driving along the other night and I thought a bomb had gone off.

We have ceded entire parts of the yard to them -- or rather, to their prickly-burr husks that make walking in sandals a dangerous proposition. Mimmo came yesterday afternoon and blew tons of them away with his leaf blower, but by evening, the ground was covered again. Even going out to gather them is a little dicey because they rain down sometimes with such ferocity that getting conked hard on the head is almost inevitable. Death by chestnut would be the most gruesomely Tuscan way to die. I'm surprised the Medici didn't resort to it more often.

We are eating them out of self-defense, if nothing else.

Unlike other nuts, chestnuts don't last long in their raw state (you can't eat them raw, either) because they contain a lot of moisture and will begin to rot within a week. Even frozen (and our freezer is too miniscule to hold many of them) they only last two or three months. It's now or never with the chestnuts.

So we have caramelized them in sugar, nutmeg, and cinnamon and we have glacéed them with honey, ginger, cumin, and a dash of cayenne. And now, like the old Southern ladies of my youth at the end of summer who had canned enough tomatoes to last through this winter and the next and the one after that, but still have a garden lush with tomatoes coming on, we have gone drastic. The ladies made homemade catsup. We are making chestnut butter.

We have tried a variety of methods and flavors -- becoming more wildly inventive as our desperation grows. The best so far (and there have been many attempts) is this:

• Cook the chestnuts (either roast or boil).
• Peel the shells off and sauté briefly (the nuts, not the shells) in melted butter.
• When cool, pulverize in your teeny-tiny little food processor that you drove all the way to Viareggio to get and gasped with delight and surprise to find in only the second store you tried.
• This turns into a crumbly "flour" to which you add vanilla paste, honey, cinnamon, and slightly more rum than you had originally intended.
• Say "oops!" after you glug in the rum as if it was a mistake.
• Blend, tasting and adding more of the various flavorings (especially rum) until it is the consistency of chunky peanut butter.
• (Chocolate and coffee together is another good combo -- improved by the addition of rum.)
• Eat a ton of this spread on bread you bought fresh at the panificio down in town earlier.
• Feel much friendlier towards the chestnuts.

Three separate people patted me consolingly on the arm in art class last night. So, um, things are clearly going very well.

There are several questions that I ask myself frequently:

*What's that smell? (Follow up: Oh, dear god, is it me???)

*Uh oh, have I been caught? (Follow up: For which transgression?)

*What fresh hell is this?

*How did I get myself into this?

The last one is particularly relevant lately because I have started taking art classes. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Seeing as how this is a town famous for its artistic community, I figured Pietrasanta would be rife with art classes. What I hadn't quite understood somehow was that it would also be rife with internationally-renowned artists and that they would be in class with me. This was unexpected. They are sculptors, mostly -- coming to class twice a week to avail themselves of the model. So class is made up of the teacher, me, and nine professional world-class artists.

Everyone was very kind to me in a pitying sort of way. If the teacher did sigh and roll his eyes, he didn't do it to my face.

The idea of the class is to reproduce from life a realistic and exact reproduction of the model, who on the first day, from my vantage point, had exactly the facial features and tilt of the head of Michelangelo's Pieta in Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome. (It is demoralizing to have such a stark contrast between my own work and Michelangelo's right from the get-go. I mean, talk about making your shortcomings really glaring...) The model was using the exact same pose as the previous week and to get her back in the precise position (down to the fingertips), the teacher said, "Wait, I have a picture for reference." I assumed it would be a photo on his phone. But no. It was a drawing so exact that it just as well could have been a photograph.

All of this, of course, happened in Italian, a language to which I cling with the very tips of my fingernails. I have now learned the Italian words for knee, charcoal, and eraser.

But I have gotten myself somehow into this and so went back for the next lesson on Thursday, marveling at the bravery of my sons, who were also the new kids in class so many times, and at the generations of college students who have done this when I was the professor. There is a lot of human courage that goes unrecognized in the world.

Here is my drawing from the second night. This is the last time we will speak of it.

I think this house is under an enchantment.

It's not just the topsy-turvy layout, the wandering moss-covered stairways vanishing down into the woods that make it feel like a dreamscape Wonderland. There are also the spring flowers blooming in the fall and the magical appearance of things we need just when we need them -- a lovely marble bench that suddenly materialized under the elm tree one day when I thought "I wish there was a place to sit here," for instance. I swear it wasn't there a minute before. And new outbuildings show up constantly -- the most recent one was magically stocked with firewood. Autumn is coming on.

But things disappear, too. We have lost a room. Here is a picture of it. I recognize everything about it as unequivocally our house -- even the bowl on the table in the picture is here now, sitting in the cantina. But the room itself, with the built-in shelves over the radiator, does not exist. Or at least we can't find it.

The islands out at sea appear and disappear on a regular basis. Perhaps it is an atmospheric phenomenon. But then again, perhaps not.

The chestnuts are falling with a soft tocking sound on the stone walkways. We have made marrons glaces twice and are now beginning to search for more uses of our bounty. The olives are coming along nicely. I haven't figured out yet how to get to the ripening persimmons. I dropped a clothespin underneath the clothesline yesterday and it fell so far down the mountainside that there is no possibility of retrieving it.

The sea is so luminous at sunset that it makes us gasp. 

An Important Update Regarding My Growing Mastery of the Italian Language: Words that seem like they would be cognates in different languages, but actually are not, are called "false friends." For example, the Italian word "chiesa" ("church") when said aloud sounds very similar to the Spanish word "queso" ("cheese") -- especially to someone who has spent the last 26 years living in the American West, where Spanish words fill the air like oxygen. But the two words are not, in fact, related at all. This caused a fair amount of confusion earlier this week when I was trying to buy a piece gorgonzola in the deli.

I am especially aware of my American-ness today -- because today we have finally acquired our car and this gives me more joy than it is seemly to admit.

True, it is a tiny Fiat500 and I feel that there should be circus music playing in the background whenever we drive it. But it is wheels. And as much as I would like to gently turn up my nose at American car culture, the truth is that I love it.

My favorite place to drive is the Texas panhandle, leaving Amarillo and angling up through all that emptiness towards New Mexico and the Sangre de Cristos towards home. And my favorite time to drive is night when the highway is empty and the little radio stations fade out until another one takes its place so that you never know what you are going to get and you can hit a hundred miles an hour on the straightaways easy and the stars revolve across the sky and up ahead you see the faint glow of an all-night last-chance gas station when you are running on fumes just thinking that you weren't going to make it. I love the way the headlights hit the roadside signs and they light up like jewels. I love gas station candy bars. I love hanging my hand out the window to feel the wind pressing against it. I love driving when someone I love is asleep riding shotgun beside me. It is desolate out there with only the dashboard lights and the ache in your bones from sitting so long to keep you awake. But it is also beautiful.

And so, of all the ways in which I am so very much aware of my own American-ness these days, it is my fervent and abiding love of cars that is the most telling.

We are, in spite of our American-ness, becoming accepted more as regulars at the pub. It is called, officially, the Society for Mutual Aid and when we sauntered down there last night for a glass of wine at 6:30, the staff were still sitting on the terrace finishing their lunch. They shared their cake with us. It was very delicious cake. But what was even more lovely was the sign that we are, at least in the opinion of the waitstaff, OK.

It's a rainy day here -- the first of what is forecast to be a whole week of them. The sea is the same gray color as the sky and the chestnut leaves are hanging down dripping.

We have still not figured out how to turn on the heat in the house, although we did manage -- after two long examinations of the Senora's detailed, hand-written-in-cursive directions -- to find the thermostat. We are bewildered by it. Naturally.

Partly, this is because we live in a constant state of bewilderment these days. Partly this is because it is a fancier thermostat than either of us has ever seen before in our lives. There are buttons. There are screens. There are dials and sliding levers. I suspect that it is programmable. It has that look about it.

Programmable things baffle me even in English and I usually give them a wide berth (having seen enough sci-fi in my life to know where this is heading.) I would not, though, have thought that the heating system in a rustic farmhouse on a remote hillside in Tuscany -- a farmhouse where I have to light the stove with a match in order to make myself a cup of tea -- would be technologically so complex.

And so we have left the thermostat to its own devices for the time being and built our first fire in the fireplace.

It is a lovely day.

 

A snake more than a meter long has shed its skin out front, raising the possibility that this place is the Garden of Eden that I have somehow inadvertently stumbled into. I don't think it is, but the idea cannot be entirely discounted. Excited to see what happens when we begin eating the fruit off the persimmon trees!

After the blazing heat of our first two weeks here when everyone sensible (not us) was at the beach doing nothing and we were hauling large bags of groceries and household items up the side of a mountain, the weather has turned a bit cooler. I saw a red deer run fleetingly past our window last week.

The olives are ripening on the trees on the south side of the house. We have picked about a gallon of them and, having watched three YouTube videos on the subject, have begun brining them for mid-winter consumption.

Our trusted gardener, Mimmo, who works the olive harvest and makes olive oil when he is not gardening at our house, has encouraged us in this endeavor and tells us that these olives will be not only delicious but also organic, never having been sprayed by any chemicals. (He should know seeing as how he would have been the one to spray them.)

This was a relief to hear, seeing as how we were going to do it anyway. (Mimmo is a very kind man and has given us a bottle of his own homemade oil.)

Having had our fill of the terrors of the descent to town by way of both the path (snakes) and the bus (bus drivers), we have broken down and rented a car for the next several months.

It took Jonathan two full days of emailing and phone calls to manage this and, at one point, I despaired. But my hero came through for us. 

The soonest we can get it is next month and the closest place to get it is Milan. Fortunately, I can keep myself busy in the meantime brining olives and trying no to die in the bus.

In an effort to make friends, we have begun to frequent the only business establishment operating in the entire village of Capriglia. Luckily it is a bar/restaurant. (Suppose it had been, say, an abattoir? Imagine the things I would have learned!)

We have made exactly one contact there -- shockingly enough, it is with the barista, Nico. Sometimes, we can hear the sounds of jovial conviviality wafting up to our house from there. Last Saturday afternoon, it was so raucous, we thought it must be a very important football match, that being the only thing we could imagine as the cause of such an uproar. We could hear both cheering and singing. We walked down and the terrace was overflowing with men and empty glasses, but we felt too shy to go in.

But Nico tells us that, in fact, one of the regulars had come back from a trip to another village with quite a lot of really excellent grappa as well as a very large prosciutto and shared them both all around. "They were all so drunk!" he said happily, waving his hand in front of his face. "Everyone here knows everyone else." Not us. Not yet.

But most evenings it is more serene and we stop by for a glass of wine (served with potato chips) before we saunter through the village and then back home for dinner. The view of the sea is very beautiful from the low stone wall at the edge of the village and two nights ago the air was so clear that we could see Corsica and possibly, very faintly in the distance, the coast of France.