It is wild garlic season here and it is possible that we have gone a bit overboard. We went to a presentation at the pub a few weeks ago about foraging wild plants and came away from it with the ability to confidently recognize exactly one plant -- wild garlic. So when we discovered it growing in great swathes along the path to Capezzano Monte, naturally, we lost our heads.

After our initial brief foray, we went back yesterday with bags to get more and then spent the rest of yesterday afternoon washing it and then making wild garlic pesto, which was delicious and quite zippy. We have many other plans -- wild garlic risotto, wild garlic focaccia, wild garlic frittatas, wild garlic pickles. There are so many options! And it is good that we have all this cooking to keep ourselves entertained here at home, because the consumption of this much wild garlic will likely mean that we are exiled from the larger society for quite some time to come. 

At least we have each other.

Wild Garlic Pesto

Clean and wash the garlic, trim off the roots, and cut off the white parts at the bottom (save these for the pickles, below). Chop the long green stems roughly and then put them in the food processor. Add a generous amount of olive oil. Blend and then start adding chunks of excellent parmesan cheese, lots of pine nuts and a bit of salt. Continue to add olive oil as needed. Taste frequently to get the balance of flavors that you prefer. You can add a bit of lemon juice if you would like. Serve over pasta or with anything else that needs a little zip. If you eat this alone, you must stay alone afterwards for the good of the community. If you eat it with someone else, you must be truly committed to a life together with just each other. At least for a while.

Wild Garlic Pickles

Sterilize some jars by boiling them in water for ten minutes. While that is going on, make a brine of one cup sugar, one tablespoon salt, one and a third cups apple cider vinegar, and two thirds of a cup of water and bring it to a boil. When the jars are sterilized, while they are still warm, put some mixed (black, red, white and green) peppercorns and some mustard seeds in the bottom of each jar. Then take the white garlic stems saved from above and pack them into the jars. Pour the boiling brine over and close the jar. Let sit for at least two weeks before tasting. Refrigerate after opening. Hopefully, these will neither taste terrible nor poison us. I guess we'll know in two weeks.

Yesterday was just a normal day. These are the hardest to write about because it is hard to describe a "nothing special" that is at the same time so happy.

The loudest sound here these days is birdsong. Sometimes there are church bells mixed in and behind that, almost imperceptible, is the shushing sound of the sea. The spring flowers are starting to bloom. I saw the first poppy of the year on the roadside down near town.

We have been going to town to buy groceries every day this week since the refrigerator died. We went on Tuesday to the UniEuro in Massa and bought the smallest fridge they sell to hold us over until a new big fridge arrives. The nice man at the UniEuro loading dock didn't bat an eye when we rolled up with our clown car expecting to drive a refrigerator home in it. 

"Oh, no problem," he said, cheerfully. And sure enough, by putting down the back seat and sliding the front seats up so far that Jonathan was driving with his knees up under his chin, we were able to close the hatchback with zero millimeters to spare.

So yesterday we bought some chicken for our dinner at the butcher shop (founded in 1907) where three generations of the Lane family work and where we are advised about our meat by Susanna or Babbo, who knows what's what when it comes to meat. Then I bought a new purse for 25 euros in the weekly Thursday market at the Piazza dello Statuto because my old purse finally gave up the ghost.

Then we zipped over to the Coop, which is just outside town and sells things like shampoo and paper napkins that are not available in the charming but tiny stores where we do most of our shopping. The real joy of the Coop, however, is not the access to shampoo and paper napkins, but the regular arrival of the bollini every six months or so. The bollini are little stickers that you get with each purchase. Then when you've collected enough bollini, you can trade them in for prizes.

Our first bollini-fest had Pyrex for prizes. We went nuts getting bollini enough for Pyrex crostata pans and Pyrex mixing bowls and Pyrex measuring cups -- things that are not actually for sale anywhere around here that we know of. The next bollini-fest was for sporting goods, which was not as exciting, but we did get some quick-dry towels. Currently, we are nearing the end of a bollini-fest for bed linens. We've already managed to nab a complete set of sheets and pillowcases for a single bed and are now working on the "matrimoniale" size.

We are supposed to get one sticker for every 15 euros that we spend, but we have noticed that the cashiers exercise great leeway here and that if we say "please" when they ask if we are collecting the bollini, we tend to get more bollini than we are supposed to. We have sometimes gotten as much as twice the number we are owed. Seeing what heights of politeness I can reach with my limited Italian and what largesse of bollini this elicits is one of my great entertainments.

In the afternoon, Jonathan had zoom meetings and I chatted with Aiden for a while about the state of the world and his life. The state of the world seems very bleak, but my son has such a good heart and is so thoughtful and kind and brave that I can't help but feel that everything will turn out OK in the end.

Then, while the sunset was turning the sky and the sea into melted roses and gold, we walked down to the pub to see Renata, who is just back from over a month in Poland visiting her family. She and I talked together for a while, standing behind the bar, about how hard it can be to live far away from the people you love.

Nights like these are my favorites. There was no one there except for Renata, seven of the beasts, and us. We share wine around the table, pouring each other glasses from the communally purchased bottle, and eat the "snacks," which really constitute a full meal -- starting off last night with a large meat and cheese board with baskets of bread and followed up by meatloaf and mashed potatoes, served family style -- Salvatore dishing it out last night -- and then after the fist serving, everyone just helping themselves, all of us seated around the big marble table -- the "tavolo di marmo." 

How the economics of all this free food works is beyond me. We pay for the Dreams & Poetry wine that we drink at 10 euros a bottle, but unless Daniele and Alice are making it themselves in the bathtub at home, there is no way that they turn a profit on these perfect nights.

We told them all the story of our broken refrigerator and about how now we have a giant bag of formerly frozen peas that we have to eat right away. The discussion of what to do with all those peas -- like any discussion of food -- was exceptionally lively. "We should have brought them here for us all to eat," Jonathan said. And it's true.

Jonathan had another meeting at 8:00, so we began to leave at 7:30. "He could go and you could stay here," Renata said to me. "Oh, no," I said, "because I am a very good little wife and while he is working, I am cooking." The boys all thought this was quite funny and wanted to know which dishes I cook well. "Nothing," I said and they laughed. "I don't cook anything well, either," Nonno said. And while we were laughing at that, Guglielmo filled my wine glass again on the sly.

But Jonathan made it to his meeting with seconds to spare and I cooked the chicken while he talked. So that is a typical day here except that every day is a little different.

 

Jonathan blew back home on the Mistral winds Saturday and we had one lovely evening before we woke up Sunday morning to a suspicious (and tragically familiar) chill in the air. We spent Sunday going back and forth to the furnace controls in the basement laundry room and then running around feeling all the radiators and saying, "Nope -- still nothing." 

The wind was blowing so hard that we lost a bit of the roof over the place where we park the car and we actually had to tie one of our windows shut with string. On Monday, the furnace repairman showed up about 5 p.m. and replaced the thermostat which (fingers crossed!) was the ultimate culprit.

The heat did come on and is now working away trying to once again warm up an old stone house that had gotten very deep down chilly.

"Gosh," I said to Jonathan at one point, "it's actually warmer inside the refrigerator now than it is outside in the kitchen."

Then later I said, "Like really warmer."

Then later, "OK, so I just opened the refrigerator door and an actual blast of hot air came out."

So now we have everything from the refrigerator sitting out on the kitchen table while we try to figure out what the fuck is going on. The panel at the back of the inside compartment that usually feels cold is now hot to the touch. There are some instructions with no words, but only pictures and numbers, on the inside of the freezer door. These do not help at all.

But the good news is that there are violets and tiny white daisies and purple crocuses blooming all over the yard. Barbara and Sara, who run our veg store, gave me a giant bunch of mimosa flowers before Jonathan left and also gave me their telephone number and told me not to hesitate to call them if I needed anything at all. Jonathan brought them back a bottle of fancy Vermont maple syrup and now they are giving us some honey from their own hives.

And I continue to plug away learning Italian. I have a lesson once a week with Cristina, but also have a grammar book that I read on my own and some flash cards that I bought at Title Wave Books when I was in Alaska last June. The flash cards have vocabulary words on them, but also sentences that I have to memorize: "Doctor Rivetti, it's a pleasure to meet you." -- "Dottor Rivetti, e' un piacere conoscerla." "I'll take the pants, the shirt and the sunglasses." -- "Prendo i pantaloni, la camicia, e gli occhiali da sole."

Tomorrow, I have an appointment to have a pap smear, which I will almost certainly have to endure without Jonathan there to translate.

Me to doctor: Dottor Rivetti, e' un piacere conoscerla.

Doctor to me: Prendo i pantaloni, la camicia, e gli occhiali da sole.

 

Jonathan has been gone for a week -- first to Switzerland to see his kids and then to New Jersey to see his parents. I stayed here because my permesso di soggiorno still has not arrived, shockingly enough. (Neither has Jonathan's driver's license, for those of you innocent enough to have believed that something promised for November would be ready no later than February.) And so I can't leave the country. Or at least I can't come back in if I do.

The first day that I woke up without Jonathan, the house felt lonely and empty and a little cold to me. "Ah," I thought to myself. "Everything is so bleak in the absence of my darling Jonathan that I actually feel cold from it. It is not the house that is cold -- it is my heart!"

It was the house.

It turns out that the furnace was malfunctioning and for those three days while the naughty gods waited waited for the truth of the situation to dawn on me, it got colder and colder in the house. Rain poured down outside and the Mistral blew through, searingly cold. Eventually I did come to the realization that this was more than emotional cold and figured it all out and everything is fixed now. But for the space of those days, it seemed like the house and the world outside it were all just a reflection of how much I missed him.

Also, this is a photo of what it looks like around here when we do laundry while it rains. Glamorous. They don't show you this side of things in all those romantic movies set in Italy.

Our world here is very fragile. Somehow I feel like we have managed to arrive only at the very end of something. Last winter seems like it was a hundred years ago.

Nonno has spent the last week in the hospital, although they say he can come home today. When we asked what was wrong, we got answers with vague medical terms that don't really translate. Valerio looked downhearted and just said, "Well, he is ninety years old, you know." Mirio, who is himself just out of the hospital, seems to have suddenly aged many years. We doubt they have told him the truth about either his own or his brother's condition, but I think he knows anyway. He tries to keep our spirits up, though. "The wine in the hospital was terrible," he said to us, twinkling. "It tasted just like water."

This is a picture of Nonno and Hugo, when they fell asleep in their chairs one afternoon last autumn while watching TV. When the old men are no more at the pub, it will be a very different place. Bar Igea, the bar down in town that I used to go to forty years ago, the place where the sculptors and marble workers used to go in their dusty clothes and battered shoes to have a glass of wine with their friends and where the old men sat all day in the shade of an ancient spreading tree and played checkers, is now a chic cocktail bar called The Black Cat that is only open at night. The big old tree was cut down to make more room for parking in the piazza. I have never been in there in its new incarnation.

There are half a dozen For Sale signs on houses on the lovely Via Capriglia now. Some of the houses have olive groves, all have majestic views of the sea. They are beautiful stone houses going cheap because people don't want to live like this anymore.

Of the regulars at the pub, Almo is by far the baby. He is 54. That may seem irrelevant, but what I am getting at here is that we -- Jonathan and I -- now live very much in a world of quite elderly men. It is not a world for the faint of heart.

Mirio is sick.

He spent all last week in the hospital and they were afraid for a while that he would never leave it. But he is out now and among us again, sweet-natured and gentle and a little repetitive in his discourse. And I would be perfectly happy to have him tell me once again how it was after the war when they were all so hungry and how he found some figs once growing on the hillside but gave them to an old man who had nothing to eat and how he began working the marble when he was 11-years-old, walking down the mountain from Capezzano Monte to Pietrasanta every morning and back again in the evening. I would be quite happy if he would show me again the pictures of his sculptures -- the one that is now is the airport in Geneva, the one in the Piazza della Signoria in Firenze. 

He is jovial enough still, but more quiet, and he leaves to go home early. He is not allowed to drink wine -- only one glass with meals, which is nothing here. Only one glass with meals is almost the same as no wine at all.

Mirio was our first friend among the "beasts" -- joining us at our table on New Year's Eve a year ago and introducing himself and showing us pictures on his phone of himself working the marble and explaining to us for the first time the story of his life. Since then, he has always been our friend.

Alice told us what the doctors have said -- Mirio has an "alarm clock" inside him and one day soon it will just go off and his time will be up. 

They have not told Nonno the truth of the matter. Nonno is 90 and Mirio is his younger brother. Mirio is 89. They have been together, side by side, since before they can remember, through all the dark days of the war and the hunger and then later the days when the modern world came here. They don't tell Nonno the truth because they know that he would worry too much about his little brother.

But Nonno is quieter now, too, like Mirio. And when everyone else is watching the evening news on the television in the bar, Nonno's eyes are focussed on something very far away.

Mirio went home early last night. But he was there for a while and he taught me how to make a hat out of newspaper like the artigiani di marmo wore when they worked in the old days. He made one for me -- a simple thing that I will keep forever.

While Mimmo was here this morning working in the yard, Jonathan went out to chat. There are three things we can always talk about here: olives, food, and Italian bureaucracy. Usually, Jonathan and Mimmo talk about olives -- today they talked about Italian bureaucracy. Jonathan told Mimmo about how it has been almost four months now and still no sign of his driver's license. His second temporary permit is about to expire. Magdalena at the driver's license place just sighs when he calls. It is not up to her, she says -- it all depends on what they do in the administrative office in Lucca.

"Yes," Mimmo said. "There is someone sitting in an office in Lucca with a giant pile of driver's license applications on his desk. When yours gets to the top, he takes it off the top and puts it back down at the bottom."

I was inside the house, but even so I could still hear Jonathan laughing. But, you know, ruefully.

I am making a deck of Tarot Cards with Tuscan images on them. This is the Ten of Staffs. It makes more sense when you see the whole deck.

And I am in the process sending my new manuscript out into the world, poor little thing. I hope that people are kind to it. While it is busy touting itself on the streetcorners, I have begun working on a new book -- set, this time, in Boston, where I spent many years and learned, eventually, to speak the language of the natives, which is many things -- colorful, jocular, r-less -- but is not English. Here is a bit of the book:

The quickest way from Tower Street to I-95 is to go to the end of the block (the opposite one from the cemetery), turn right on Washington, and then take the first left onto the Arborway. The Arborway is a wide street that runs right next to the green and extensive Arboretum, filled with all sorts of exotic and educational trees that would probably have been lovely to drive past if I wasn’t so busy trying not to die. The fear of being slammed into by a crazed Bostonian driver took the edge off my aesthetic appreciation of the trees, one of which would almost certainly be the very last thing I saw in this life as I hurtled into it, rammed from behind by the tightly-wound descendent of some hasty-pudding-eating Puritan.

What I am saying here is that Boston drivers are crazy. I was surprised to find this out, having somehow associated Boston with decorum and grave deliberation. Ha! People who will burn their neighbors to death as witches on the say-so of a bunch of hormonal tweens will flatten your sorry ass without a second thought if you even so much as pause at a stop sign. They will run you down and will flip you off as they do it.

The key to understanding this behavior is that all Boston drivers want to be first. They want to be the car that is first – the car that is in front of all the other cars ever. You could try explaining to them that there really is no such thing as “first” in general city driving, but they wouldn’t hear you because they would be too busy honking at you to drive faster and then flipping you off. It’s the “can do” spirit that is to blame for so much of American history.

Here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea, when we talk about "snout to tail" cooking, we are not being the least bit metaphorical.

Thinking it was pasta sauce, I inadvertently bought a jar of pig lungs. Sort of thing that could happen to anyone.

The bad news is that I now own a jar of pig lungs. The good news is that I am therefore completely prepared to serve dinner should my in-laws visit again.

 

Later today we will go down to town to buy some vegetables at the Frutta D'Oro, which is my favorite store in Pietrasanta -- more so than the art galleries or the upscale bespoke clothing shops with fantastic dresses made of velvet and heavily embroidered silk. More so even than the shops that sell old china and ceramic tiles and strange objects made of metal and blown glass. Quite often at the Frutta D'Oro, there are unusual vegetables that we have never seen before, things that look like Dr. Seuss made them up. Jonathan knows not to immediately eat anything when we get home before I photograph it.

We normally do our vegetable shopping first thing in the morning, but today we are holding off on the chance that Jonathan's new glasses will also be ready to be picked up. They were promised for last week, but we only halfway believed that. Today is the next day held out for possible delivery and we halfway believe that, too. Eternal optimism is one of our best shared traits.

Still no driver's license or visa, btw.

I sent off the first draft of my new novel manuscript to two different professional editors to get feedback. It went about as well as I should have expected -- their advice is completely at odds with each other, almost comically so. A passage, for example, that the first one specifically mentioned as one of his favorites in the whole book, the second one advised me to delete entirely. The ending that the first one said was "awesome," the second one likened to torture. He actually used the word "torture."

So I have begun re-writes. It is a gloomy process and I will be very glad to take a break later on today and go look at outlandish vegetables in town. 

 The truth of the matter is that I mostly live in a world that I do not understand. But it is a beautiful world nonetheless.

Lately, some sort of animal has been coming around at night and digging up the turf underneath our big maple tree. The boys down at the pub, without ever seeing the evidence, thought it might be a wild boar.

Today while Mimmo was here working in the yard, Jonathan asked him about it. Mimmo said it could be a badger or even a baby deer.

"What about a wild boar?" Jonathan asked.

"Oh, no," Mimmo said. "You'll know when it's a boar causing damage, because if it's a boar, you'll be doing this."

 

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.