While we were in the US, I took the opportunity to be finger-printed (again) and request my criminal record (again) from the FBI, who have not yet discovered any crimes I've committed. I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that my various misdeeds have all been so trifling as to be beneath the notice of any authorities, but it does come in handy now.

So with my clean record in hand and an Apostile for my long-form birth certificate, I now have a three month window to apply for Italian citizenship. After three months have passed, they figure I might have had enough time to begin a new life of major crimes and I would have to get new fingerprints and a new copy of my record. Having waited this long, though, I really can't see myself being bothered to begin any hard-core criminal activities now. At 62-years-old, it just strikes me as exhausting.

My one stumbling block is the language test, so I have signed up to take it on December 5th and am now kicking my studying into high gear by hanging around more with the boys down at the pub. Last night we discussed our various attempts at making alcohol at home.* Jonathan and I once failed miserably in our attempt to make honeysuckle-infused vodka, turning out some glaucous beige shit that smelled of dirty feet and rotting cabbage. But Nonno tells us that he has had great success making liqueurs with both plums and figs. It is good to have a diet rich in fruits and vegetables. When people tease him about being old, he says that he will outlive us all. I hope so.

We sit inside now that the weather has turned colder and talk about this and that while the card players play at the table in the corner and Renata gives us a platter of sliced meat and cheese and bread because Daniele and Alice have stayed home now that the tourist season is over, so there is no great pasta bowl of one of Daniele's fantastic dishes to appear out of the kitchen tonight. Jonathan and I walk home holding hands and we can see all the islands very clearly out in the sea and all the boats heading into the harbor at La Spezia. The air is very clear and cold. We are glad when we get home that the heat has come on inside.

*If the language test is food-and-booze-related, I'm a shoo-in. Otherwise, I'm toast.

 

It's rainy today, with clouds and mist huddled around the house blocking our view of anything other than the dripping chestnut trees and the moss-covered stones. There are no sounds.

Jonathan is baking bread. The first corbezzoli have started to fall, so soon we will make corbezzoli jam. And then it will be chestnut season again and we will make our famous (if only to us) butter-rum chestnut butter. I feel somehow that I should learn to knit.

Instead, I have made a caramel-apple pie and a batch of late plum jam. We have been gorging ourselves on wild porcini sauteed in rosemary-infused olive oil. We are cautiously hopeful about the upcoming olive harvest.

Last Friday night, we celebrated Oktoberfest at the pub, even though it was still September. In these precarious days, we feel we should not delay our fun.

And Avi's father passed away early Saturday morning. He was a musician, a violinist, and Avi was his only child. We went to the funeral and then home alone in the rain. It's hard to believe that only one month ago, we were so hot and so tired of the katydid song and so glad to go into the cool water at the beach.

The Trofeo del Leone is happening this week and we went Tuesday evening to watch a couple of the games and eat grilled sausage sandwiches and hang out in the cool night air with our friends. There was a horse and a pony for pony rides and much excitement because the soccer field here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea is less than half-sized (the steepness of the mountain slope making big flat places nonexistent up here) and so the players kept inadvertently kicking the ball into the spectators or even into the people who were not really watching the game, but were instead standing chatting to their friends or quietly guzzling inexpensive prosecco out of plastic cups until they were blind-sided by an incoming soccer ball to the head.

The teams themselves were made up of players of varying ages and abilities and although Daniele was the coach of one of the teams and although the teams had names like "The Drinking Monkeys," I didn't know any of the good players. It is possible that there is a connection between being able to run around with agility on a soccer field and not spending all day drinking in the pub. That might explain why the good players were unknown to me. Just a thought.

There were children and lemonade and laughter and bright stars slowly making their way across the summer night sky. But there was also the moment of silence at the beginning of each game when we bowed our heads and remembered Leonardo. And at one point, I noticed Geppolino, Leonardo's increasingly frail father, standing by himself looking lost, all alone in the crowd.

Today it is raining and the forecast is for rain most days all next week. Jonathan and I went down for one last ice cream at the beach yesterday afternoon. I have put the comforters back onto our bed. Summer seems to be over.

 This morning at the Frutta D'Oro, there were these little round peppers. 

"What do we do with them?" we asked Barbara.

"Well, you cook them in boiling water and vinegar for a few minutes and then you stuff them with things," she said.

"And what are they called?" we asked. "What is their name?"

"They are called 'those little round peppers that you stuff with things'," she said. 

Presumably, it sounds better in the original Latin.

The summer tourists all had to leave their rental houses yesterday. So today, even though it is still as hot as ever and sunny, the beach has an atmosphere of winter coming on. Only a few of us are left. We have been nodding at each other all summer and now we recognize each other -- not only as faces, but as members of the fraternity of permanence.

The sea is strangely flat and still and clear today. The cold water feels lovely after a sleepless, sticky night. I saw four dead meduse washed up on the sand. Their season is coming to an end, too.

You may ask yourself what Black Forest-flavored toothpaste tastes like. I asked myself that and now I'm stuck brushing my teeth with it. Live and learn.
 

We are in the last days of summer now. It is meltingly hot and the meagre charm of the katydid chirping has long ago worn thin.

Forty years ago, I ate a pistachio gelato at a little gelateria by the beach here and it was so perfect, so intensely creamy and flavorful and rich, that I have never really recovered from it, but remembered it -- through all the years and all the other ice creams -- as the pinnacle, the Platonic Ideal of gelato in comparison to which all merely earthly gelatos would, inevitably, fall short. It was no fault of their own -- such ice cream as I ate on that summer day in 1984 cannot exist in great quantities in our limited universe and to ask that there be two such pistachio gelati would be greedy. The gods have their limits, too.

But the same shop is still there. I recognized it immediately. So after months of going past without going in (out of fear of finding the old idols fallen in the dust and also laziness), on Tuesday -- here at the end of the summer season just when everything will soon close down -- we had an ice cream.

My god.

It was so good that I became an instant addict and spend all my mental energy now trying to figure out when I can have more, how I can have more, how much more I can have... Like any addict, I plot ways to justify needing (not just wanting, but actually needing) more of it and of tricking Jonathan into going for just one more hit.

I had Cinnamon Apple and Salted Caramel. Jonathan had Lemon Zest and Campari Grapefruit. I dream about the Cinnamon Apple at night.

In the meantime, between ice creams, I have been working on my series of paintings, "21 Views of my Groceries." 

We are in fig season now and stringhe season and apricot season, waiting for the first porcini mushrooms to arrive. Barbara and Sara gave us some very lovely gourds to photograph and more honey from their hives. The bees have been getting nectar from the lemon tree blossoms and you can taste it in the honey.

Our olives are looking good, but we don't know yet if the flies will come again this year and lay their eggs in them so that every olive is ruined by larvae. Mimmo is pessimistic, but sometimes that is just our way of placating the gods. They delight in overthrowing our expectations, so it is prudent to expect the worst. 

We are leaving for a short trip to the US week after next -- seeing the boys and supervising getting all of our old belongings into the container to be shipped to Italy. Tragically, we will be missing the soccer tournament that will be held at the pub in Leonardo's memory. The soccer itself is not all that exciting for me, but the announcement poster says that there will also be "jugglers, fire eaters, and singing animals."* I am very sorry to miss that, but Alice says that she will send me a video.

*It really says "singing and animals," but we have all agreed that singing animals would be even better.

 

When we first moved here, I bought a little clock at the Ikea in Pisa for our bedroom. It has a clock, a timer, an alarm, and a thermometer. This is a picture of the thermometer at 4:00 a.m. this morning in our bedroom.

What I am saying here is that it is hot. Fucking hot.

We went down to the big Esselunga supermarket in Lido di Camaiore yesterday just to hang out for a while in the cold foods aisle. I'm thinking of bringing a folding chair with me next time and just setting up camp in front of the gelato.

Instead, for now, I have filled our bathtub with cold water and take a dip in it three, four, five, six times a day. Inside my head, I think of it as "the swimmin' hole."

The beach is lovely, of course, although the sand is burning hot by 10 a.m. and the jellyfish are a regular feature now. They are, apparently, a species called "barrel jellyfish" and all advices are that we should not worry about them -- their sting is hardly ever fatal. This information is not as comforting as I am sure it is intended to be.

The olives and the grapes are looking good, though. And we went to a concert that the Coro di Versilia held in an abandoned Roman-era marble quarry over in Capezzano Monte. In a tribute to our life at the pub here, they sang a song with the phrase: 

L'Aqua mi fa male, il vino mi fa cantare.

Water makes me sick, but wine makes me sing.

We consider it our theme and live by its message.

I was a guest on a podcast this week talking about the pub. I have not listened to it because the sound of my own voice horrifies me. It's hard for me to believe that I spent so many years talking for a living. Fortunately for me, during all of those years, I never listened to a word I was saying.

https://karenchristensen.substack.com/p/i-dont-need-therapy-i-just-need-to?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

I read in the news yesterday that there is a "heat dome" over southern Europe. I had not known until I read it that we are officially in a crisis -- the news does not, however, come exactly as a shock. It was 84 degrees at 4:10 a.m. in our bedroom this morning, where Jonathan and I lay side-by-side gently sweating into our sheets and waiting for it to be morning so that we can go down to the beach.

Our beach club is very tranquil and sedate in the mornings -- mostly just old people like us reading their newspapers or taking a stroll along the strand. Every now and then there is a parent or grandparent with a baby still asleep in their arms. Paolo smiles and greets us by name while the sleepy teenagers who work at the cafe clear up the remaining evidence of the previous night's festivities. (It is only in the evenings when the Riviera beach parties really get hoppin'.) Jonathan sits at the cafe and keeps me up-to-date on the developments in the love triangle among three of the teenaged cafe workers. 

These mornings even the sea seems sleepy -- like glass, clear and olive green. Every now and then a pale little ghost fish flicks by, hiding in the light refracted on the bottom sand. I wade out and stand waist deep in the cool water staring off at the watercolor horizon, washing away the sticky feeling of a hot and sleepless night. This morning, I saw a jellyfish, also ghost white but with a deep blue-violet edge around its cap, waving along just under the surface of the water. At that exact moment, I felt refreshed enough to head back to our umbrellone on the sand.

Back at the house, it is fresh fig and lavender season. We have made fig jam twice -- once with lemon and once with amaretto. But now it is too hot for jam making and we just eat the fresh figs whole and cold from the fridge.

And there are bundles of lavender hanging upside down, drying, all over the house. When it is dry, I will make lavender sachets with it to put in all the clothes drawers to keep away the moths. And when the winter comes, every time I pull out a sweater, there will be a little aromatic burst of summer and I will long once again for the heat. ("I won't," Jonathan says.)

Nonno's birthday party was last Friday night. We all chipped in and bought him a helicopter flight over these mountains that he has loved so much and that he used to hike in as a young man, but now cannot reach. At our house, almost at the top of the mountains, we saw the bright red helicopter fly over us late Sunday afternoon. We knew it was Nonno because it buzzed the terrace of the pub twice and we could hear the cheering.

"He seemed as happy as a bambino," Alice said, having gone with him to the helipad to see him onto the flight. "And now he will have a new story to tell." We will go down to see him sometime in the next couple of days and tell him that we saw him and he will tell us the story of it and I will be happy.

That is quite a statement, given the general situation. I'm starting to feel about ice the way Harrison Ford did in "The Mosquito Coast." The Italian word for jellyfish, by the way, is "medusa." (If nothing else, my vocabulary is expanding.)

 

Some updates:

Jonathan's Driver's License: The man at the Massa DMV now recognizes Jonathan on sight, which is nice because it means he is speedier about telling Jonathan that his driver's license is not there yet.

"There is a guy in the provincial office in Lucca who handles these things," he told Jonathan, "and he only comes in here once every two weeks."

"So I should come back in two weeks?" Jonathan asked.

"Sure, why not?" the DMV guy said. "Knock yourself out." (I'm translating here from what is, let's not forget, the language of Dante.)

Reptiles: It has gotten very hot here in the past couple of weeks. After he rides his exercise bike, Jonathan leaves his very sweaty t-shirt outside hanging over the railing of the porch, where it forms a little sauna-like tent on the top of the porch wall. The lizards like to go in under there and enjoy the warmth and the moisture. But now we have discovered that they have begun growing to enormous sizes, unlike anything we've seen before, and have turned a vivid glowing green. 

I contend that Jonathan's exercise sweat is so intense that it is actually radioactive and the lizards are mutating in extraordinary ways in response to their exposure to it. They will soon have some sort of lizard-y spidey powers. Jonathan doesn't think that this is funny.

Tarot Cards: The Tuscan tarot deck I've been making is finally finished and we received the first draft deck from the printer. It looks lovely, so we have ordered a ton more to give away to our friends as presents. While this is a happy conclusion to months of (rather sporadic) work, I am now left with no art project in the offing. So I am using a little book that Fiona gave me to paint pictures of our fruit and veg. There are 21 pages in the book and when it is all filled, I am going to call it "21 Views of My Groceries."

Street Umbrellas: The wind has had its way with the umbrellas on the Via Mazzini and blown them all around so that some of them have gotten their handles hooked together. It looks like they're holding hands up in the sky. I would not have thought that they could have been more beautiful, but it turns out that they are.

 

We are having a nice time at the Massa DMV getting Jonathan's driver's license. And by "nice," I mean long and leisurely. The first time we went, they told us to come back "next month." So we waited a month and went back and were told to come back in "two or three weeks." So we waited three weeks and went back last Tuesday. We were told to come back in "seven to ten days." It's the Zeno's Paradox of driver's licenses.

The internet at our house has now died, which is only very slightly different from the internet at our house when it was alive. But still. Friday, Jonathan had a zoom meeting with some clients in Washington state from the upper room of the pub while the boys outside on the terrace screamed joyously at each other. "Please excuse the background noise," Jonathan said to the people in Washington. "I'm in, um, a restaurant." Fortunately, it is doubtful that anyone in Washington understands Italian.

My broken toe is slowly mending, owing to the miraculous curative powers of sun and sea air. Jonathan's back is doing less well. He has put himself in the hands of the legitimate medical establishment and has been twice so far to the physiotherapist to have a massage and also a mild electrical current run through his body, which is a thing they swear by. It hasn't seemed to do any good but, as Jonathan points out, he can now charge his cell phone by resting it on his belly.

And the cheeping sound we have been hearing for the past few days turned out to actually be cheeping. Four baby birds have hatched in a  nest built in an empty flower pot attached high on the wall of our front porch. We are still trying to think of names for them. Send suggestions.

 

Unlike last week, when we were wrapped in tragedy, this week we've been beset by smaller disasters largely of our own making.

Jonathan read an article online touting the health-giving wonders of intermittent fasting. It was on the internet, so it must be true. On Mondays and Thursdays, we are only allowed to eat a quarter of our usual calories. Since our usual calories lately have included consuming entire bags of mini Snickers bars (thus the need for drastic action like fasting), you would think that eating only a quarter of them would be a cinch. But (in the spirit of taking ourselves firmly in hand) we are interpreting this as having one scrambled egg for lunch and a very small plain green salad for dinner. The rest of the week, you can eat normally (as long as your "normal" doesn't include entire bags of mini candy bars -- see above.) They say the first few times you do this are the worst and then it gets easier. All I have to say to that is, dear sweet Mary Mother of God, I certainly hope so.

So last night (a non-fasting night) we got very excited about trying out our lovely salt-cured lemons for the first time. We found a good sounding recipe on the internet (where, you will recall, everything you read is true) for salmon with salt-cured lemon, parsley, and olive pesto. It smelled great! 

It turned out that it smelled great because you can't smell salt. You can taste it, though. In fact, salt was ALL we could taste. So. Much. Salt. It was like we had made Dead Sea sauce. We scraped the pesto off the fish as best we could and tried to eat the remaining salmon because when you are going to be fasting the next day, you do not throw out your dinner -- no matter what. Last night's Festival of Salt is a testament to that. 

We are also reluctant to waste any food (although we may make an exception for the salt-cured lemons) because we are feeling rather poor lately. We got our first tax bill from the Italian government and it was slightly more than my entire take home pay for all of last year. Our friends in America keep saying that this must be a mistake, but it is not. It is this year's taxes, the advance payment for next year, and the Italian wealth tax to punish us for having squirrelled away all those American 401K nuts for the American winter of our old age. We should have just spent it all on hookers and blow when we had the chance.

But this is the price we pay now for living the life of grasshoppers who sing all summer. The good news is that our tax dollars support things like maintaining the terrifying-but-at-least-very-well-maintained vertiginous road up to our little mountainside haven, the pub where we eat and drink so cheaply (it is somewhat tax-supported because it is technically a social club for workers and pensioners), and the free national health care that we receive.

And we are certainly getting our money's worth with that. Jonathan went to the physiotherapist last week for his back. They massaged him and stretched him. It is sometimes hard for us to completely understand all of the unfamiliar medical terminology in Italian, but it seems that the national medical establishment has determined that Jonathan's problem is that he is both too tightly wound and too short. I said that I could have told him that. He has another appointment tomorrow. When this is all over, I expect he will look like Mike Teevee at the end of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

With Jonathan and I both less mobile because of our injuries, it takes us a long time to get the basic housework done. We hobble down to hang out our laundry in the back. We hobble from the car into the veg store and then hobble back to the car with our haul. (Fortunately, the veg store is so tiny that we can reach almost everything in it with just a few steps.) We hobble to the kitchen with our dirty dishes after meals. (Again though, fortunately, there aren't very many of them on two days each week.) Last night I was hobbling back to the house after putting our trash out at the street for pick-up this morning, when some animal very distinctly growled at me from inside the roof of the cantina as I went by. Given the way things have been going lately, this is probably no more than I should have expected. In any case, my rate of ambulatory speed suddenly increased quite dramatically. It was a miracle.

And, to complete the small disasters of the week, we are of course both angry and morose about the political situation in the US. But, to be fair, that one is not our fault.