This one time in college, my friend Katrina had a gigantic fight with her boyfriend. She says that afterwards it was like a red mist rose up and the next thing she knew, she was standing in front of the bathroom mirror with a disposable razor in her hand and only one eyebrow. 

These things happen. The eyebrow eventually grew back and, in the meantime, Katrina looked really rather chic.

In a not completely dissimilar episode, I gave myself a haircut last Tuesday. I, however, do not look rather chic. I look like someone who gave herself a haircut in the bathroom mirror without really thinking things through. I comfort myself with the knowledge that, like Katrina's eyebrow, it will grow back eventually. In the meantime, I am happy to say that I recently bought a hat.

We met with the immigration lawyer on Monday and learned that I will have to pass an Italian language test sometime soon. If I am tested on things said by drunken marble workers in bars, I am set. If not, I am toast. So my new Italian tutor came up to the house on Friday to meet with me and assess my skill level. She had quite an entertaining drive up the hair-raising Via Capriglia and eventually just abandoned her car at a convenient stopping place by the side of the road and decided to walk the rest of the way up to the house. The Via Capriglia can have that effect on people. We have decided to meet via Skype from now on. (There are major doubts about my language skills, but my driving nerves are clearly Grade A.)

The poppies have reached our grounds now and a rose bush has appeared out of nowhere covered in deep red blossoms. The jasmine all around the house has begun to flower. It is blooming all over the village and tonight we saw the first honeysuckle.

 

The cherry trees outside have gone from bare branches to blossoms to ripe cherries in the space of only a month. The cherries themselves, alas, are not very tasty. Friends visiting here last weekend from Switzerland tell us that these cherries are used to make excellent homemade schnapps. The possibility of Jonathan and I managing to make distilled alcohol in our own home without accidently poisoning ourselves in relatively low, so we are giving the schnapps a pass. Songbirds with blushing pink throats fill the branches, pecking at the fruit and singing happily. So we have decided to think of the cherry trees as just very large, very lovely bird feeders.

Down at the pub, Daniele is also feeling the spring -- he is experimenting and feeding us all with the outcome. Two nights ago, we had a lovely penne with a creamy tomato basil sauce with exactly the right amount of hot pepper to make it sing. And then last night, we were gifted with the first fabulous pizza of the season -- anchovies and zucchini flowers. Daniele wants all the world to eat and to be happy. There are worse ambitions.

 

The rain comes in waves these days. In between storms, the view is very clear and the sea is ink blue. During the storms, the mists roll in and it seems like we are alone on an island with cherry trees and new figs and lavender and no one else in the whole world. It is warm and yellow inside the house and outside the rain falls gently and the clouds gather around us and we can't even see the hills just behind the house.

The rain has washed away all the wisteria blossoms and the red poppies by the side of the Via Capriglia hang their heads down like beautiful ladies all left heartbroken.

At the pub, we have become part of the furniture and when the power went out in the rains last Friday, Jonathan called down and Alice told him how to turn it back on again.

Mimmo has been asking around about the fur near our front gate and the consensus now seems to be emerging that it is not wolves after all that have left it, but wild boar, who apparently like to scratch themselves against metal gates whenever they get the chance. This does not strike me as particularly comforting news. The wild boar are just as vicious as the wolves, but somehow I imagine the wolves to be swifter in dispatching their victims -- a small consolation, maybe, but a consolation nonetheless.

We went to the opera in Firenze Friday night -- Don Giovanni. The performances were amazing, of course -- one does not end up singing opera in Italy by being second rate. But for me, everything was haunted by echoes of other summers when Jonathan and I drove down to Santa Fe to the opera there -- a road trip across the Sangre de Cristos and then dropping down into Santa Fe for a night or two at Garrett's Desert Inn (which no longer exists) and a visit to our usual café, our usual bookstores, our usual restaurant. We have an umbrella here with us now that we bought one rainy afternoon at the Five and Dime on the plaza -- it got broken last week, but I will not throw it away.

And then the opera at the Santa Fe Opera House open to the night at the edge of town, where we would be cold together in the high desert air and dazzled and the sky was always clear sapphire blue. Once a man at the table next to us in our usual restaurant leaned over and asked us if we were married and for how long. "Why do you ask?" we said. "Because he looks happy," he said, pointing at Jonathan. But we were both happy then and, in my memory, the operas that we saw glow and sparkle and I remember sleeping very close to Jonathan on those nights to stay warm.

 

The wisteria have come now into all their voluptuous gorgeousness. The arbor has a roof made of them and a wall made of a hillside of wildflowers. The light underneath flickers and there is a constant drone of very fat and lazy bees.

The little lizards have come back now that it is warm again. They are sunning themselves on the walkways and on the grape arbor, which is just beginning to have leaves, and they flick away when we get near. They are charming as long as they stay out of my bed.

The old men at the pub have mostly moved outside again now, under the big leafy tree that shades most of the front terrace. In the afternoons, from up here under the wisteria, I can hear them laughing down there, adding another note to the riotous birdsong.

The red poppies are out in great swathes all along the Via Capriglia. They started slowly, only a few down in town, but every day we see that more have bloomed and that they have come higher up the hillside. They have made it all the way into Capriglia itself now, but are not yet here on our property. I am waiting for them.

In the meantime, I have have discovered white wisteria down by the gate and deep purple irises in the woods.

Jonathan's parents have come for a visit. They arrived Monday evening.

So Monday morning, Jonathan and I went down to town to buy groceries, etc., for them. Alas, Monday was May Day and everything in town was closed. No shops opened -- not even our usual big supermarket down near the highway.

But we ran into Daniele and Alice, who own the pub up here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea, down in the piazza.

"What do you need?" Daniele asked us. 

They are so incredibly kind. They just immediately and spontaneously offered us the resources in their kitchen -- whatever we needed. These are the people whom we are lucky enough to live among now. There is no way that I can ever begin to repay their kindness to us, but it would be such a joyous experience to try.

I am enjoying the second day of what is apparently going to be a three day stomach flu. I miss my Dad very much today. 

Tomorrow was supposed to have been our last day in this house. By our original agreement, we rented this house only until April 30th. But a couple of days ago, we signed a new lease to give us another year here. I feel profoundly grateful for this -- to have left now, with the first leaves just beginning to come out on the strawberry grape vines and the cherries still tiny on the tree outside the kitchen window, with the hillside covered in poppies and buttercups, to have left when the fig trees are just putting on their first leaves like green flames at the tips of their fingers, to have left now would have broken my heart. 

But the Signora, whose house this is and who told us very clearly when we first rented it that it is not for sale and it is not even for long-term rental, has, out of her kindness, allowed us another year here, another year in our haven above the sea.

I am very lucky and I am very grateful for many things. Here are some of them:

Today I talked to a dear friend of mine for a while. Her friendship is precious to me.

Lately, I have been painting with egg tempera, losing myself in the joy of it.

We have found people here in this little town who share our politics and our ideals -- and they own the pub!

We are having fresh peas with dinner.

The sky over the sea is watercolor.

There is more, of course -- the boys, Jonathan, another old friend from Colorado Springs I talked to earlier this week, my much beloved brother. But I don't have pictures of those people today.

 

We are awash in flowers here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea. That and the birdsong.

 

Here is a completely factual and objective description of the events of yesterday afternoon exactly as they happened:

1. I was sitting on a chair in the living room shelling fresh peas.

2. A pea escaped and rolled under my chair.

3. I saw it go under.

4. I immediately lumbered down to the floor to retrieve it, but it was not there.

5. It is a bare tile floor and there is no other nearby furniture under which a pea could hide.

6. I had a clear view in all directions and there was certainly no pea. I looked all around very carefully. No pea.

7. Anywhere.

8. Instead, there was this fifty-centime piece sitting right where the pea should have been.

9. Earlier in the day, Jonathan and I had been talking about money -- specifically, how to get some more of it.

10. Obviously, the pea had changed itself into the coin.

11. There is no other explanation.

12. This house is enchanted.

(13. p.s. I know what you're thinking, but we ate the rest of the peas.)

 

An interview with me in Rev magazine went live today with this fabulous illustration by Natalie Foss. The part where I wax rhapsodic about public bathrooms was kept in. The part where I used the phrase "In a dog eat dog world you just end up with a bunch of chewed up dogs" did not. Probably just as well.

The article is here: https://www.lyft.com/rev/posts/how-weak-ties-build-strong-communities

When we first moved to Italy, Jonathan and I were overwhelmed with the beauty of it. Every day, we marveled. Every day, we ate up the world around us in delight. Every day it seemed as though we had at last somehow -- magically -- found our way through that tiny door into the enchanted garden beyond.

Naturally, we worried. We worried that somehow we would over time become insensate -- numb through familiarity to the constantly unfolding loveliness around us. We worried that we would lose the ability to see it, to marvel at it, when our eyes were accustomed to it.

A different thing has happened, though. As we have adjusted to living here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea, with its sweeping views of the sea and the clouds and the green of the olive groves and the hillsides covered with wildflowers, we seem to find more beauty, not less. We notice things all the time that have been there, but that we were perhaps too dazzled to see before now. 

I have walked past this planter, for example, on the main street in Pietrasanta easily a hundred times now, but I only noticed it a few days ago -- the beautiful terracotta fruits and vegetables at the base of it. It is a lovely planter, sitting quietly on the wall, waiting to be seen by someone paying attention. And all of Pietrasanta is like this -- tiny treasures everywhere once you notice them.

We have not lost our sense of wonder, after all. The more accustomed to our world here that we become, the more magic that we find.

 

We did not win the giant chocolate egg in the Easter raffle down at the pub, which is actually a bit of a relief. It was instead won by Mirio's two grandchildren, further confirming my suspicion that the drawings are rigged -- but in the best possible way. The kids were very happy and excited and shared the chocolate around very sweetly with everyone. It was the best of all possible raffle outcomes.

We are going for our Easter lunch there tomorrow -- planning on having nothing but a nap for our dinner afterwards. Daniele will be gone for a week teaching a cooking class in Amsterdam next week. He says that if we can come up with a group of ten people, he will teach us how to cook traditional Tuscan food. I would love to do this. But where would I get ten people all at once here? I do not think that the old men in the pub who make up most of my social circle these days are interested in learning how to cook traditional Tuscan food. Eating it, of course, is a different matter.

After a spur-of-the-moment but nevertheless overwhelming urge that necessitated an unplanned immediate trip to the fish section of the grocery store, I painted my Egg Tempera Painting Number Two yesterday. The paintings never come out like the images I see in my head, but I am happy in the belief/delusion that someday they will.

 I worry.

I know that it doesn't do any good, but I worry anyway. One of my big worries about moving to Italy, where I don't know the systems and don't understand the logic behind the processes by which things happen (and I am not alone in this, btw) is what would happen if we had a medical emergency.

Now I know.

Some friends from the US came to stay with us for a couple of days and one of them had a medical emergency their first day here -- not life-threatening, but incredibly painful and needing real medical attention.

So we went down to the little hospital at the very foot of Via Capriglia, where there is an after-hours walk-in clinic. The doctor warned us that since we are not Italian, we would have to pay upfront for the care. Being Americans, of course, we are used to astronomical medical bills. I once had to pay upfront at the emergency room in Colorado Springs when one of the boys had broken his arm, even though I have medical insurance, because the other boy had broken his leg (jesus!) the weekend before and my insurance payment had not made its way through the system yet. If I had not been able to instantly cough up several hundred dollars, they would not have treated my child because his injury wasn't life-threatening.

This is the reality of US health care and so we were prepared for the worst -- especially because we were so carefully warned. The doctor there treated my friend and then the bill came.

Twenty bucks. The entire, uninsured cost of the visit was twenty bucks.

We went to the all-night pharmacy to get his prescription filled thinking, "Ah, now -- here it comes! Prescription medicine with no insurance -- this will certainly cost a pretty penny!" Once again, we were carefully warned that because we are not Italian, we would have to pay.

Thirteen bucks. Entire, uninsured cost -- thirteen bucks.

The whole process took less than an hour. There was no waiting anywhere. The total cost was 33 euros. My friend is doing well. We dropped them at the Pisa train station yesterday to continue their trip.

Jonathan pointed out that the reason for all of the careful warnings about payments was because an Italian would have paid nothing. Ever. So that is what happens when you have a medical emergency in a country with socialized medicine. Just fyi.

We also discovered that in the duomo down in Pietrasanta, you can take communion, should you wish, with the gluten-free version of the Body of Christ. Again, just fyi.

And I have tried out egg tempera painting using the pigments that I got from Zecchi and a traditional recipe from the early Renaissance for mixing up the paint using egg yolks and white wine. It just takes a splash of wine, but since you then have an open bottle, you can have quite the relaxing time while painting. I painted a tiny artichoke. I think I'm in love (with both the paint and the produce.)

We have made reservations for Easter lunch this Sunday at the pub. They are holding a raffle to win the big chocolate egg that didn't get sat on. We are number 49 -- our hopes are high!

Jonathan and I blew into Firenze today -- hoping for one last visit before the summer tourist season roils in. That horse, however, turned out to be already out of the bag. We threaded our way carefully through crowds and I felt sorry for the people who only get to see lovely, stony, serene Firenze all filled up this way. I began to feel guilty, even, that we were there. We, after all, were just parts of their crowds -- they who perhaps only had Firenze this one time in their lives. 

So we visited a few of our best friends in the Uffizi (via the joy of our annual pass that means we don't pay and we don't wait in line -- which now feels like cheating somehow. Although one of the big selling points of the pass is that you don't have to stand in line, but just go right in whenever you want, there has never before actually been a line to cut to the head of -- until today.) 

Then we went over to Zecchi, the lovely art supply store on a tiny side street near the Duomo. After drooling over the jars of powdered pigments for all these months, I finally decided to take the plunge and buy some.

The staff at Zecchi are very kind and very helpful and patient, explaining things to me and helping me choose colors. They even took the time to specially make me a little jar of cadmium yellow because there were only big ones in stock. They let me try all the brushes to see which ones I liked best. Everyone so jovial.

But there was a woman in there, who started shouting at one of the other salesmen, the head clerk, I think. She was being just awful to him -- rude and demeaning and preemptory -- because she couldn't get the wifi to work on her phone. He was trying to tell her how to connect to the store wifi and she wouldn't even let him talk -- she kept interrupting him, wouldn't listen to what he was trying to tell her, but was just berating him because she couldn't check her email in the store to find her supply list of the things she needed to buy for an art course she was taking for a week.

It was horrible. Jonathan and I were in an agony of mortification, because of course she was speaking English and, although it was hard to tell because of her anger, she sounded American to me. I was paralyzed with embarrassment for my whole native country.

She stormed out and in the silence that followed her exit, Jonathan and I just stood there, feeling so much shame. I apologized in my best (very broken) Italian to the men working there for all Americans. They were, of course, lovely. "There is no problem with Americans," the head clerk said to us. "There is just a problem with her." We all commiserated together. Then we turned our attentions to more pleasant topics -- the different types of spolvero paper and their various uses. Nice men so happy to share their extensive knowledge of art materials with us.

And then, lo and behold, she was back! She had her list. She wanted to shop. So the head clerk she had been berating helped her with all her purchases, subdued, but correct and perfectly civil. She paid (rather rudely). She left. 

We stood frozen as she made her way out of the shop -- the three men who worked there and Jonathan and I, no one moving or saying a word. I had my back to the door, but I could see the head clerk's eyes as he watched her leave, watched the door close behind her, watched her walk off. Then his body relaxed. "It's OK," he said to me. "She's Irish."

We all laughed. 

They gave us a 10% discount on our entire purchase, for no particular reason -- maybe just for not being her.