The storms have come in waves this weekend, alternating lightning and window-rattling thunder with blue skies and air washed clear enough to see the coast of France from our living room windows.

And Jonathan and I have been out in waves between the storms, alternating cuddling up together at home with trips down to the pub -- Friday night for a convivial late afternoon glass of wine with the regulars. The World Cup was happening on the TV in the corner and no one knew whether to root for Croatia or Brazil, didn't really care that much, lackadaisically settled on Croatia at some point rather late in the game, and then celebrated wildly when Croatia won. Daniele popped open a bottle of prosecco and we all raised a glass, cheering uproariously.

We also entered a raffle (choosing, because I am apparently still in junior high school, number 69.) The winner will be drawn at lunchtime on Christmas Eve. The first prize is a big basket of all the homemade goodies -- sauces and pickled vegetables and olive oil -- that Daniele and Alice produce. Second prize is a giant (two liter? three liter?) bottle of the locally produced red wine that we have been eyeing for months now and wondering about. Third prize is an enormous winter squash. We have our fingers crossed for the squash.

We also went down for dinner Saturday night because the local Capriglia choir was there eating and singing between courses. They were downstairs (filling the downstairs) and we were upstairs. It was lovely, even though no one upstairs stopped talking during the songs, but instead only talked more loudly so that they could hear themselves over the music. But everyone clapped appreciatively at the end of each number. Below is (I hope) a bootleg recording that Jonathan made on his phone.

And today we are going over to our neighboring village, Cappezzano Monte (population either 176 or 354 people, depending on where you get your information) to hear the Cappezzano Monte Philharmonic perform their annual Christmas Concert. The excitement!

The early morning rain here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea has turned into a stormy afternoon, complete with rolling thunder and a steady downpour. Jonathan and I went down to town this morning during the calm before the torrents to do our shopping and got back home just before the heavens opened up. We are trying to reconcile ourselves to the fact that rain is a normal event here and not the cataclysm that it has been for all the years that we lived in the high desert. It is supposed to rain all weekend, but other than perhaps a quick jaunt down to the pub to sit by the fire and hear the latest news, we have nowhere in particular to go.

The Christmas market is going on in town -- a dozen or so little tents lining the street perpendicular to the main drag, selling hand-knit scarves and hats, fancy cheeses and artisanal chocolates, glass earrings, ornaments, crockery painted with pictures of Santa Claus or angels, wooden toys, wine. We didn't see anything we needed to buy, but it was festive just to walk around.

Then we did our usual shopping at the stores we used to ogle through Google Street View a year ago. Now they know us -- although not our names -- and are friendly and chatty when we go in. They have decorated for Christmas, too. I made Jonathan go into the Galleria del Pane by himself to buy our bread so that I could surreptitiously photograph him doing it. It's not every day that dreams come true so picturesquely.

Things have gotten a little more expensive here as winter and Putin make their presence felt, but we still marvel at the prices of things. We got our utility bill the other day and it runs about a quarter of what we regularly shelled out in the US. All the fruit and veg below totaled about twelve dollars, including the three pound (I weighed it) eggplant that I don't even know what I will do with, but that I couldn't resist. It was like buying a baby whale.

"I can't be too bothered with mushy-apple berries." Famous last words.

Jonathan "Maybe We Should Pick More Olives Just In Case" Poritz had the idea of making jam out of the corbezzoli berries. So we picked about two kilos of them, added some sugar and the juice and zest from a couple of lemons and boiled it down for a bit.

Turned out to be delicious and -- according to our friend The Internet -- alarmingly healthy, with a high content of antioxidants and anti-inflammatories and uses in therapy for hypertension and diabetes. Heavens.

Plus, they are another piece of data confirming one of my pet theories: "Add sugar and lemon and it will be fine" (second only in my Pet Theory Hierarchy to "Dredge it in salt and fry it in butter.") 

We are now making delightful treats by filling vol au vent pastry shells with half chestnut butter (rum and vanilla flavor) and half corbezzoli jam. How this is supposed to help with our high blood pressure is something of a mystery, but if the internet says it, it must be true.

Yesterday we went to the State Police Headquarters Immigration Department in Forte dei Marmi and finalized my paperwork for my Permesso di Soggiorno per Stranieri. Jonathan's brilliant idea to hire an attorney to shepherd us through this process was, well, brilliant. Our attorney knew everyone in the Immigration Office and we all had a lovely time together, catching up with family news, drinking coffee, chatting about movies, fingerprinting me (some slight difficulty with that owing to the delicacy of my finger grooves, proving once again that I missed out on my true calling: burglary), discussing kids and work and life in general, and finally making plans to get together soon for lunch (not sure if Jonathan and I are included in that last bit, though.) It was all very convivial and I understood about 20 percent of what was being said (a big improvement!), but smiled and laughed in (mostly) all the correct places. 

Jonathan and I had already gotten our 16 Euro stamp at the Tabacchi, but were at one point sent around the corner to get an 80 Euro stamp of a different kind at the Post Office. While we were waiting in line, another customer told us that we couldn't get a Soggiorno stamp at that Post Office, but would have to go to another Post Office. This seemed quite believable to us, but seeing as how our new best friend in the Immigration Office had told us to go to this exact Post Office (helpfully coming all the way out of the Police Station into the road to point it out to us), we ignored the very authoritatively certain-sounding stranger in line and everything turned out fine.

I do not have my official card yet, mind you. I will have to call them in two months or so to see if it is in, naturally. (Spoiler alert: it won't be.) But I have a temporary piece of paper with my picture on it, two signatures, and three stamps that everyone says will do fine in the meantime. I can't wait to see how many signatures and stamps the official version has. The mind boggles.

Then we came home and went down to the pub for lunch where you can get a first course, a second course, a glass of wine, dessert and coffee for 15 Euros. The old men were all eating at one uproarious table and the other tables all had workers from the new house being built down the road and maybe the road workers who have been painting very helpful white stripes along the edges of the death trap that is the only way up to here. It was all quite jolly and Jonathan and I drank prosecco to celebrate our bureaucratic morning. Then everyone went home for, presumably, a nap. I certainly hope the construction guys slept off their lunches well before hitting the power tools.

It is very autumnal here lately in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea. The chestnut leaves around the house have all turned yellow and orange so that it feels like we are living in the middle of a shimmering golden cloud. I have eaten 44 persimmons and have 37 still to go.

 

It's December 1st and the rosemary is still flowering here in Capriglia-by-the-Sea. And there are also lovely red berries that we have never seen before ripening in some of the trees. We never would have eaten them, but Mimmo tells us that we should dive right in. They are corbezzoli, from the tree arbutus unedo, the "Strawberry Tree," which is the national tree of Italy. Unlike the strawberry grapes on the vines out back, however, the corbezzoli do not taste like strawberries -- more like mushy apples, I think -- although the texture is vaguely strawberry-ish, I guess. And they are a lovely strawberry red color.

But I can't be too bothered with mushy-apple berries because the lovely Mimmo, who now shares a deep olive-based bond of brotherhood with Jonathan (their discussions together of olive lore have become lengthy, detailed, and specific) kindly helped us get some more of our many, many persimmons down from our burgeoning tree, where they dangle by the score just out of reach. He cut one smallish branch off with an extension saw and we harvested what we could from the wreckage. 

"What we could" turned out to be 81 persimmons, all of which are becoming ripe simultaneously.

When we first, many weeks ago now, mentioned our bounty of incipient persimmons to Jonathan's family, his sister-in-law responded with very dire anti-persimmon warnings about people who have perished from eating them, developing fatal bezoars in their stomachs from the tannins. This seemed iffy to us, but we looked it up on the internet and, sure enough, a guy in China did once die from eating some gigantic quantity of unripe persimmons in a very short space of time. But you have to eat a crazy big amount of them. "Who would do such a thing?" we asked each other at the time.

Me. It turns out that the answer is me.

I comfort myself with the fact that at least I am waiting until they are ripe.

And I am back in art class after a couple of weeks away because we were traveling and then I had a cold. I am happy to report that despite my prolonged absence, I have retained my position as the most completely hopeless hack in class (relatively speaking -- you should see the masterpieces my classmates toss out in 10 minutes), although I have now moved up to being a completely hopeless hack using the sanguine conte pencils that have been a hallmark of great Italian drawing for almost a millennium. My language skills are somewhat improving, though. So there's that.

And, through it all, I continue to work away on my book. The page proofs have arrived and I am proofreading them while making the index. It is enthralling, believe me, and quite frankly puts the whole death-by-persimmon thing into a much better light.

 

It is, I think, impossible to describe the beauty of our pub, The Society for Mutual Aid, on a late autumn afternoon when nothing much in particular is going on -- the old men there, who have known each other forever, and their dogs; Alice having a long conversation about marmalade with one of the regulars; the light from the overhead bulbs illuminating everything inside while the sun, red as blood, drops into the sea unobserved outside. The World Cup is on the TV in the corner, but Italy is not playing so no one cares. Three goals were scored while we were there this evening and caused not so much as a murmur -- the marmalade conversation was more heated. Hams hang from the rafters. Daniele is installing another stove. We are given free snacks with our wine -- antipasto or pate and always bread and olive oil.

At night, from up here the lights on the plain glitter like jewels flung out on black velvet and sometimes I ache from the beauty of it and I don't believe that any of this is quite real except for Jonathan breathing next to me in our bed at night and then stirring in his sleep.

 

This past Sunday, a few minutes before 8 a.m. our time, I was out in back of our house taking pictures of some big mushrooms I found out there. I heard some gunshots -- it is still hunting season and there are deer and game birds and even wild boar in the forests around here. I have seen four deer so far in our yard and Jonathan saw two pheasants one day. And we had some really delicious venison slow-roasted with chicory that Daniele cooked up down at the pub last week. People who eat meat cannot be squeamish about hunting. So I heard the gunshots and knew what they were. Hunters for deer or birds or boar.

At exactly that same moment, it was just before midnight in Colorado Springs and a gunman was opening fire in a crowded LGBTQ+ club -- Club Q -- in Colorado Springs. He killed five people -- Raymond Green Vance, Kelly Loving, Daniel Aston, Derrick Rump, Ashley Paugh -- before being subdued by Richard Fierro and other patrons. We heard about it Sunday afternoon here, first just garbled reports. We spent the rest of the day waiting for updates, refreshing our browsers, checking our social media. 

Each of these acts of gun terror -- and the United States has them constantly -- is horrific. And it shouldn't matter whether I know the victims personally or not. It shouldn't matter that this one happened in the place where I lived for 26 years. It shouldn't matter that every browser refresh comes with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that one of the names on these nightmare lists will be someone I know. They are all -- every act of murder -- heinous. 

But dreading to see the name of someone you care about on one of those awful lists nevertheless just makes everything so much worse.

On Tuesday, Jonathan and I had our first meeting with the immigration lawyer who is helping me with the process of getting Italian citizenship. "Why did you leave the US?" she asked me. So I told her the story of Club Q. 

She almost couldn't believe it because such things are incomprehensible here. They should be incomprehensible everywhere. But sadly they are not.

I think that I can safely say that no one saw this coming down the pike. Fueled by the wild enthusiasm of Jonathan "I'm Allergic To Grass" Poritz, we are apparently going all-in as olive farmers.

We thought the olive harvest would be finished by now -- and perhaps it is on the big farms where whole crews of people descend like locusts for the harvest and pick the trees clean. But here at the rustic farmhouse where it is just the two of us, the trees are still bent under their burden and we find that we are once again in the olive brining business. It is simply impossible to walk past trees loaded with plump, ripe olives and turn away. Jonathan, in his zeal, has even gotten out the ladder that Mimmo keeps in the laundry room. I do not believe that even Mimmo himself has ever resorted to such extremes.

"Just look at these!" Jonathan says to me from his perch up among the branches. I go and look. And they are some very plump olives indeed.

Olives straight off the tree are unpleasant, inedible -- bitter-tasting and wooden. But brining olives is an old, old process, going back millennia, and requires nothing but water, salt, olives, and time. We have them all.

First, you wash the olives and discard any with worm holes or other weirdness. Then you soak the olives covered in salt water. We do this in big covered soup tureens, which this rental house has in inexplicable abundance. (Who has been eating so much soup? Who has been serving it in tureens? Who has been eating so much soup that it necessitates multiple tureens? Life here is very strange.) For the first two or three weeks, you change the old salt water for fresh salt water every day to get rid of the bitter tannins and soften the olive flesh. (Big commercial olive factories do this with lye because it is faster, but it also makes a much inferior olive. We are quite haughty in our disdain of such ersatz olive practices.) That is the First Brine.

For the Second Brine, you leave the olives to sit in a mixture made out of one liter of water and 100 grams of salt. You leave them untouched like that for two or three months. We do this in storage jars that we bought at IKEA for just this purpose because even this house eventually runs out of soup tureens.

 

Then after the two or three months is up, you add flavorings - spices, garlic, whatever -- and you are ready to eat them. We make them in batches as big as pretty full soup tureens. At the moment, we have four batches in their Second Brine sitting quietly on shelves in the cantina and three batches having their First Brine here in the house with a fourth batch gleaming in Jonathan "After All, New Jersey Is the Garden State" Poritz's eye.

What will will do with these gallons and gallons of olives when they are ready to eat next February is anyone's guess. Although nothing really says, "Happy Valentine's Day, my love!" like a meal made entirely of garlic-infused olives.

Jonathan and I made a little video of the hair-raising drive from Pietrasanta up to our house in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea this afternoon. It is a thousand-foot elevation gain, but I'm not sure how clear that is. We sped it up some because, you know, people are busy (although not us, apparently.) 

The soundtrack was extracted from "La donna è mobile" - Rigoletto (2016/17) by LiceuOperaBarcelona, released under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Jonathan is down in town this morning -- third day in a row -- trying to renew his Italian passport. He is having an extremely Italian experience in that everyone is being really lovely and friendly and kind (and well-groomed) and he still doesn't have his passport.

The shortest version is that on Wednesday morning he went to the closest passport office (in Forte dei Marmi), was told he didn't need an appointment to be seen, was told that he did after all need an appointment, was told that he could only make an appointment by telephoning during the lunch break, tried calling but no one was there to answer the phone during the lunch break (because they were all at lunch), was taken in very kindly even without an appointment, and then was told that he can't renew his passport without first getting an Italian Carta Identita, which is not available in that office. He was told he could get it at the Commune Offices in Pietrasanta.

On Thursday, he went to the Commune Offices in Pietrasanta to get the Carta Identita and was told he could not get his Carta Identita in Pietrasanta but would have to go to Rome to get it (since that is where his Italian citizenship papers were issued 30 years ago) and then they very kindly said that they would do it here in town if it was OK with the boss, Maurizio. Maurizio was not in the office. "Where is Maurizio?" the office workers asked each other. "The usual place where he always is," they sighed and said to each other. This was not further explained, leaving Jonathan with increasingly alarming speculations. Where is Maurizio hanging out these days when he should be in the office and what is he doing there?

But Maurizio eventually showed up, had a stunningly well-groomed beard (according to Jonathan -- I am sorry that I was not there to see it, but we are keeping me out of the picture at the moment so as not to -- any further - complicate things) and agreed that they could issue the card here in town. But first they would need to see some Italian proof of identity, such as an Italian passport.

Then there was a longish period of time where everyone enjoyed the bureaucratic beauty of needing a Carta Identita to get a passport but needing a passport to get a Carta Identita. 

They were quite nice about it, commiserating even, and eventually decided that since Jonathan's American passport had been accepted and stamped at the border when we entered the country (by, as I recall, the world's most uninterested and blasé border official) that it would be accepted as valid proof of Italian identity. Then Jonathan had to pay the fee, which is not, of course, paid in that office, but is, naturally, paid in a tobacco shop.

This may seem baffling to Americans, but is absolutely true and is a regular feature of Italian life. It's like being sent to the nearest 7-11 to post bail or pay your telephone bill (another thing that we do in the tobacco shop.) So Jonathan hopped off the the nearest cigarette store, coughed up the dough, was given a series of official stamps (actual paper stamps with glue on the back) and went back to the Commune Offices were the printer fucked up twice printing out his card, a discussion was had about whether or not to call in Andrea, who knows how to fix the printer but who was apparently also in his "usual place," meaning that Maurizio got the chance to really show his skills by expertly peeling off all the official stamps and Jonathan's photo from the old version of the form and putting them on the new version of the form, perfectly lined up with the overlapping printing. Jonathan now suspects that Maurizio's "usual place" is not the brothel that he had originally imagined, but is instead a high-end art forger's workshop. This is why he is the boss.

By the time Jonathan left, they were all on a first name basis and using the informal with each other.

So today he is back at the Passport Office in Forte dei Marmi (stopping in first at the Post Office to pay the fee, which is not taken at either the passport office itself or at the tobacco shop, for some reason, and also to inquire if they have any mail for us that they are willing to release. I'm not holding my breath.) He has been gone a couple of hours now, which is probably a good sign.

(Oops! Jonathan is just back. They were out of the forms he needed at the Post Office and told him to go to another office. "Any other Post Office?" he asked. They stared at him and just said "another office" and made vague waving gestures with their hands. Apparently any type of office will do, but not the one he was currently in. Naturally. He went to a Pak-n-Ship Store and got the forms there. Then he spent a good long while waiting in line at the offices in Forte dei Marmi, only to be eventually told that the passport office is closed and he should come back Monday. Also, there was no mail for us at the Post Office.)

 

Autumn has come at last to Capriglia-by-the-Sea, complete with mists and mellow fruitfulness.

I always thought this house was beautiful -- even more so in real life than it seemed in the pictures we first saw back in Colorado so long ago -- but coming back to the house after our Venice-Portugal trip, I was surprised to find that I was feeling not merely admiration for it, but affection. I am getting attached.

It's the goofy stuff that does this. 

The picture of a chicken on the living room wall.

The duck cup that was the only tea cup in the house before we went to IKEA to buy more and that I still sometimes drink out of.  

The farmer wearing a tie and his startled cow on the towel holder in the guest bathroom. 

The fact that you have to go up three steps to get to the bidet and toilet in there (and that, while seated, out the window you have a lovely view from above of anyone in the hammock and also of the shoreline.)  

The picture of the guy diving into water that hangs right above the bidet. 

The way you could (if you were desperate) walk out of the guest bedroom window directly onto the roof of the cantina and from there straight out onto the path up to the driveway. 

The way things keep appearing and disappearing -- yesterday it was a kumquat tree next to the cantina. 

The way the little lizards sometimes still join us for meals. 

It is easier to be charmed by these things, of course, now that I almost always know which light switch is connected to which light, I can light the burners on the stove first try every time, and we figured out how to turn on the heat.

Coming home in the dark from our travels, driving down the coastal plain with the sea on one side and the mountains on the other, we were glad and even excited when we saw the lights of Capriglia twinkling up above on the hillside. "That's our village," we said happily to each other in the car. And coming around the second-to-last hairpin turn, when the pub is suddenly on our right, we looked to see if it was crowded, if anyone was out on the terrace or if they were all inside in the warm yellow glow spilling out through the windows into the night.

We can see the ships out at sea from up here. Especially after dark, they appear as sparks of light surrounded by empty blackness and I wonder if the sailors, too, feel cozy inside their little home and warm and safe together, like we do up here? If I were on one of those boats, would I be able to see the tiny handful of twinkling lights that is Capriglia and think, "That's our village"?

We have been away for a week -- first in Venice and then in Portugal -- seeing loved ones. And the point of seeing loved ones, of course, is to see them and not necessarily the background scenery, which is properly inconsequential.

But.

Having said that, if you are in fact seeing loved ones, you might just as well see them standing in front of crashing waves on the Portuguese shoreline or sitting next to the filigreed palaces of Venice.

Going on a boat through the Grand Canal one night, with the moon almost full and the lights glittering on the water and fleeting glimpses inside gold and red and crystal-chandeliered rooms, holding Jonathan's hand in the sway of lapping waves, Venice seemed like a fairyland -- like we had finally found our way through that small hidden door usually kept locked with a golden key.

It is impossible to photograph this (at least for me) because a flat image of darkness with specks of yellow light, though accurate, is not truthful. There are things that are never like the pictures of themselves. The pictures are only markers to help us remember what we saw with other eyes than merely the ones in our heads.

And so the best picture of our nighttime boat ride through the Grand Canal that I could think of is James Abbott McNeill Whistler's painting, Nocturne in Black and Gold -- The Falling Rocket, which is currently held in the Detroit Institute of Arts. Because I am apparently still in middle school, naturally this reminds me of "The Detroit Rule" for food, which is that putting any place name in front of it makes everything sound more delicious -- "Tuscan Sun-dried Tomatoes," "Viennese Pastry," "Maine Lobsters" -- with one exception.

It was all lies!

We had so many financial worries about blowing up our lives in the US and moving to a villa on a hillside in Tuscany! The big question looming over everything was how we would ever be able to afford to live this life. We thought very carefully about our budget, trying to imagine what we would need to spend money on and what we would have to abandon -- what pleasures we would just have to learn to live without. The propaganda everywhere in America, interwoven with every thought of European life, was that a life of beauty, of olive groves, art lessons, cobbled streets, views of the sea, tagliatelle ai funghi, red tile roofs and wine and roses blooming in November -- all of that would cost a pretty penny and leave us, sooner or later, destitute and regretting our profligate grasshopper ways. Better to work until you die -- it's the American way. But it was all lies!

Here is a very boring post about prices:

Our internet service costs almost exactly one-tenth of what it did in the US. Our cell phone bill is a little less than $15 a month (and we have the Deluxe Plan). Gas costs about $7 a gallon, but the tiny cars are incredibly fuel-efficient. The rent for our car (insurance included) is less than just the cost of just our car insurance back in Colorado. Trash and recycling pick-up is free. A bottle of wine costs about $2 -- or you can go super-expensive and spend $10. An entire basket filled with really fresh and delicious fruit and veg (spinach, eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, onions, peppers, grapes, plums, oranges) usually runs about $4. Yes -- only about $4 for all of it. We pay for loaves of bread at the bakery -- still warm from the oven -- with pocket change. We don't eat much meat, but a week's worth -- chicken, sausages, fish, prosciutto -- usually runs us about $10-15. Espresso is a dollar a cup. When we go down to the pub in our village for a glass of wine before dinner, we get a half-liter of the house wine and a bottle of fizzy water and are given free snacks -- sometimes so many that we are too full for dinner later. Total cost is $5. The rent on the rustic farm house (trusted gardener included) is less than we could have rented out our house for in Colorado Springs.

The whole idea that life must be a grim treadmill of unceasing labor just to stave off destitution is a lie that capitalism uses to scare us into submission. It's all lies.

And I think it is related that the big thing we have noticed is the lack of anger around here. That violence always bubbling under the surface in the US just doesn't exist here. I think it's because there is no feeling of dog-eat-dog in this world. The dogs eat homemade lasagna with fresh pasta and a glass of the house red just like everyone else.

 There are some bees here that are really very, very large. I live in danger.