after autumn
Between the start of the new year and the Italian folklore celebration of La Befana, the night before Epiphany, I walked under the second of Bologna’s two towers, La Garisenda. The tower had caught the attention of the country during the autumn because it was now leaning too far and required structural intervention. For Bolognesi, and those who temporarily called Bologna home, the area would be cordoned off, disrupting the flow of the city. The international media also picked up the story and people were messaging me from around the world asking about the danger of the tower that tilted over my usual walks to the pharmacy and where I picked up the bus.
In newspapers, journalists said there was a risk that the tower would collapse into the second, taller tower, which, with La Garisenda, makes up the due torri of Bologna. Still, the Bolognesi maintained there was no need to cordon off the area. The tower had always been leaning. Even Dante remarked how La Garisenda had bowed down to the pedestrians of Bologna as far back as the 1300s.
“Qual pare a riguardar la Carisenda
sotto ’l chinato… “ / “Just as the Garisenda seems when seen
beneath the leaning side… “ -Dante
Chinato: bent, bowed (down), reached (down), nodded, lowered, sloped.
A Roma:
On January 5th, the night in Italy where a kind witch delivers gifts on a broomstick to children, we took the train to Rome. Rome is eternal and everlasting, but our time here in Italy is not endless. Now, away from Italy, I miss walking from my apartment to Bologna Centrale with one bag and jumping on a train traveling at high speed - alta velocita - to Venezia, Genova, Milano, Roma, or Napoli. I knew each time that I stepped out of my apartment and walked towards the train station that I’d miss the possibility of transportation by rail from Trieste, at the border with Slovenia, to the heel of the country.
In Rome, we eat Gricia and Cacio e Pepe at a trattoria in the neighborhood of Testaccio. At the table next to us a grandmother sharing a meal with her granddaughter eats Roman trippa. But in Rome, we also search for Chinese dumplings in the neighborhood near the international organizations and diplomatic missions. Taking advantage of flavors we’ve missed during the fall now accessible in Rome.
On the morning of La Befana, when children across Italy wake to gifts delivered by the kind witch on the broom, I head out of a hotel in Rome towards Rome’s Termini Station. Rome is wet, and M. uses a hotel umbrella to walk me to a metro station to take la metropolitana one stop to Termini to catch the airport train to Fiumicino Airport. There, I take the morning flight to Amman. Waiting for take off on the tarmac, the heavy wind blows the humid air and rain around the aircraft. Whenever I land or depart from Fiumicino, I notice the stone pine trees with their umbrella-crowns on tall trunks which surround the airport creating canopies welcoming you as you return to Rome. The stone pine trees emerge throughout the city of Rome, too. As the plane took off, the pines blew in the wind. Above the clouds, I see the first sunshine in days. A damp, humid start to the year and the end of the winter holidays in Italy. For me, the year, and the next decade, begins with the brilliant blue Jordanian skies.
After a day spent climbing the hills of Amman and stopping for falafel eaten at plastic tables with hummus and pickles, a driver takes me three hours south to Petra. On the drive, the long stretches of highway were paid for by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. These are only in Arabic, unlike the rest of the country where the signs are often bilingual Arabic-English. Since the war started across the border in Israel, tourism is down, and when I arrive at Petra, the ancient temple complex and home to nomads, I hike for the day only passing small groups of visitors from Italy, solo travelers, like me, but from Japan, and some families with young children tied around them. I spend the day hiking through the sand, rocks, and carved tombs exploring the temples and treasuries of the archaeological city in the desert. When we return to Amman, we stop at a gas station and the driver, who has returned to Jordan after years in Sweden and Norway, lights a cigarette and tells me about returning home to Amman after decades away. He offers to drive me to the Dead Sea, but I say next time, and we continue our drive north.
In Amman: As I climb up and down hills and wander through narrow streets of stairs, I realize that I have left my journal at the hotel. I want to write as I experience the city. The steps high above the arena of the Amphitheater are a perfect point to pause exploration and switch to reflection– a chance to look back on the city I’ve spent the morning climbing. Heading towards the Amphitheater, I stop at an art gallery to pick up cards to write on the back of. A card, in Arabic, translated by the gallery owner: If your wind blows, take advantage of it. I gravitate towards the card because of the wind. The type of wind is unspecific, but I think of Aura, and the light morning breeze I’ve felt while wandering through Amman. Later, back at the hotel, I searched for other translations. The most accurate: If the wind blows, seize it.
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When I return to Bologna, I stop Italian classes at the American University. The reason is the container of the classroom environment and not because I don’t want to dive deeper into the Italian language, the content. The classroom is filled with young international students around a table following the syllabus to reach an arbitrary level of proficiency set by the University. I chose imperfection in this language not proficiency. I want to continue Italian, so I find a teacher, L., who comes to the apartment we rent between the university quarter and Ghetto Ebraico, Bologna’s historic Jewish Ghetto. Each Wednesday morning she buzzes at the door to enter the building and I hear the slam of the heavy wooden doors from three flights above. Guests always pause at the entry door to the apartment after climbing the steep stone stairs. Ciao, ciao, ciao, catching their breath from the climb. On the stove stop is a Bialetti moka pot for coffee, and in the cool early spring, we cradle the small espresso cups just large enough to warm our hands. At the table, I light a candle and set out my new Fabriano notebook and some old pens. As we progress in the language, L. shares books with me by Jhumpa Lahiri, In Altre Parole - In Other Words - written in Italian by a non-native Italian speaker with an American, Bengalese, and British background who has also been pulled towards La Lingua Italiana. In early spring, we’re distracted by the change in seasons. During one class, we pause to open the tall shutters and windows of the apartment to take photos of the bright yellow mimosa on the rooftop of the apartment across the street. The mimosa flower is the symbol of women for the festa della donna in early March. Later in the spring, when I return from a week-long hike from Bologna to Firenze, through the high altitude of the damp Apennine Mountains and the warmth of the Tuscan countryside, I tell L. how I spoke only Italian for a week. She responds that it was also una caminata linguistica. During that hike, I learn words like fango (mud) and arse (arid) enthusiastically talking about the changes in the landscape that shifts gently throughout each day. During my lessons with L., I found the container to deepen my continuing relationship with the Italian language. I read a book in Italian, only occasionally checking I’ve understood the translation with the English version by my side. Beyond literature and travel, L. shares Italian regional history with me. Liberation Day in Italy arrives, and I read a book about the resistance movement and death that played out in the same mountains I spent a week hiking through to reach Firenze. On April 25, following her recommendation, we drove into the hills above Bologna to Monte Sabbiuno where there is a monument to the fallen - caduti - resistance fighters who were massacred by the nazis in 1944.
“Per conoscere una nuova lingua, per immergersi, si deve lasciare la sponda. Senza salvagente. Senza poter contare sulla terraferma.” / “To know a new language, to immerse yourself, you have to leave the shore. With no life vest. Without depending on solid ground.” - Jhumpa Lahiri
Harvesting Oranges:
At the end of winter, we have an extra day this year. Why, in a leap year, is the day not added to spring or summer or even fall? Instead there is another day in the darkness of winter. Un anno bisestile, in Italian. In Italian, the year doesn’t leap or jump.
From under La Garisenda, I catch a bus from the center of Bologna to the suburbs of the city to meet a therapist in her art studio below an apartment block. The apartment block is tall, post-war, and suburban, not a crumbling stone palazzo in the city. In winter, I jump on the bus as the sunsets and by the time I reach the studio, it’s dark. If I’m early, I stop at a bar nearby, quickly knock back an espresso, and leave a euro coin on the counter. During one session, I take a bright blue book with me and place it to my left on the table. The therapist asks if there is anything I’d like to read, as she notices I’ve brought a book with me. I’d picked up the bright blue book in London a few weeks before. I read from the the Living Autobiography, by British-South African writer, Deborah Levy, which starts with the line:
“That spring when life was very hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn't see where there was to get to, I seemed to cry most on escalators at train stations” - Deborah Levy.
Most surprising, the therapist said after I finished reading, is that the protagonist cried so much during the spring, the lightest of the seasons. Crying in winter or late fall in the darkness would make more sense. In Italy among the beauty and warmth, I wasn’t sure how to get into the lake and swim let alone across it at times. Later in the session, the therapist raises the possibility that maybe I use this time in Italy to harvest oranges. While I understood the sense, I didn’t know exactly what it meant. When is the orange harvest? There were times in Italy when I felt distance from life here and life, at home, in the United States. Which path would I take when the winter ended and spring encouraged us to get outside and move again? The therapist continued the thread of la raccolta - the harvest - during the session. Although, during the winter there is uncertainty and darkness, we need winter for the soil to freeze (how often does the ground freeze now with a warming climate?). The seeds grow beneath the surface, and we can’t see the seeds sprouting under the ground until they emerge in the spring, but they are there.
Thinking of oranges and citrus fruits, I stepped out into the extra day of winter to take the train from Emilia-Romagna towards Liguria. After a night in the port of Genova, I take the train to Santa Margherita Ligure to finish the journey by bus to Portofino. The train line along the Ligurian coast passes by gardens filled with lemon trees, nestled between the hills and the sea. I remember seeing wild, urban orange trees in Rome in January with fruit squashed on the pavement below. In Italy, the citrus season for lemons, oranges, and clementines is during the winter, adding brightness during the darkest time of the year.
At Santa Margherita Ligure, I stopped to buy groceries. Portofino, my destination, is a summer town with few stores and restaurants open during the winter; I am here as winter slowly turns to spring. While searching for the market, I notice streets lined with orange trees and I take photos. In Portofino, I agreed to meet the owner, Alice, at the bottom of the 100 steps that lead to the apartment in the hills above the small port town. At the bottom of the steps is one lone orange which has rolled loose on the floor - where has it fallen from? On another wall, there is an orange peel discarded after someone’s sweet snack. Later in the afternoon, in the final hours before February turns to March, and before sunset, which is now at 6pm as the days get longer, I take a trail to a headland to find a lighthouse with a view along the coastline and out to sea. The trail is beneath shuttered villas closed and winterized before they’ll slowly open like the stores and the restaurants and hotels in Portofino for the summer season around Easter. Behind the garden walls there are trees of oranges sloping down towards the coves and natural pools in the Ligurian sea, an arm of the Mediterranean.
On March 1st, I wake up to rain on the roof of the apartment on the hill above Portofino and up the 100 steps. Still, in the rain, I walk the paths in the hills above the Ligurian Sea. In Wales, March 1st is Saint David’s Day, the patron saint of the country of my grandmother. I’m reminded that she would always say any fool can enjoy themselves in the sunshine, and so I walk into the light drizzle along the paths of Portofino noticing the orange trees at the end of a long winter as the waves of the sea crash at the rocks below.
The Balkans: Swimming Towards Albania
The sun of spring sets to the west behind the mountains of Albania. When the sun rises tomorrow, climbing east above North Macedonia's mountains surrounding the lake, it will be June. The promise of summer lies ahead, with light stretching from early in the morning to long into the evening. In three weeks, it will be the summer solstice.
Like the yellow rays of North Macedonia's flag, the lines of light shimmer and reach across the lake each evening at sunset, and a small group of travelers gather by the church of Saint Jovan Kaneo. With its Byzantine and Armenian mix of styles, the church perches on the cliffs above the ancient tectonic lake, its waters reaching depths that speak to the geological forces that shaped this landscape millennia ago. I think about the contrast of the peace now compared to disruptive forces of those tectonic shifts. Slowly, and then all at once, the sun disappears and the group of travelers take their final sips of Macedonian wine or beer, pack their glasses into canvas tote bags, and follow the broadwalk, a wooden walkway beneath the cliffs suspended above the lake, that leads into the town of Ohrid. Other travelers climb up from the church and above the cliffs following a road that also takes you back into the town through woods. On this path, you see the houses' rooftops and narrow streets cascading down the hill to the water's edge.
At Lake Ohrid, I choose a room in a guesthouse on the lake with a balcony that opens onto the water below. Until now, my travels in the Balkans have provided small moments to sit by the water of lakes in parks in Chișinău or by the swirling river below the bridge in Mostar, Bosnia, rebuilt after the destruction of war and now a site for divers to plunge into the water below.
Here in Ohrid, the destination is the lake, and I want to spend as much time in or around the water as possible.
From the balcony in my room, my eyes follow the edges of the tectonic lake as the mountains rise from the water around it. Boats cross the lake, creating gentle ripples or waves, depending on the power of the boat, and crash on the shore. At night illuminated crosses emerge in the dark hills above the Macedonian side of the lake looking towards the western mountains of Albania. I sit by the lake, walk along its edges, dip my feet into the water, and watch its energy shift throughout the day. The lake is calm in the morning before the boats disturb the natural rhythm as the day goes on. Waves from the boats crash at the shore below my balcony and a dog runs to the shore and barks at the waves - the splashes rising from the water to the dog's face. From my room, I walk down to the lake. I slip my feet into the water to test the temperature, and unsurprisingly, the water is still cool in May. Sitting on the edge of the lake, a water snake appears with its head above the surface. Un serpente, in Italian, I mouth. Soon, the animal in the water disappears into the depths of a tectonic lake. Serpente - змија, in Macedonian.
Serpents make me feel an unease. My reaction, like a serpent, is to hiss until they disappear. Imitating what I know about snakes. While serpents create discomfort and fear within me, as a mythological symbol, they often represent both good and evil. At a time of change, I focus on the mythology of snakes and serpents bringing fertility, new life, and transformation. I sit in a space of discomfort between lives, homes, and direction. Like the snake appearing in the calm of the lake, as similar discomfort appears throughout my travels in the Balkans, and here too in Ohrid, bringing unease even when those moments have been surrounded by calm. When the serpent appeared by my feet in the water I was disturbed by its presence and reacted with fear, stopping me from diving into the water.
But before I leave North Macedonia, I want to swim in the lake, far out and away from the safety of the edges. When the sun starts to lower on my final afternoon and evening in Ohrid, I join the other travelers at the church perched above the lake again and watch the sun start to fall beyond the western mountains. The next morning, I’ll travel over those mountains and away from the depths of Lake Ohrid onto Albania. Now I must swim. At first, I use the steps at a spot where people lay towels on the rocks along the water. Water taxis carrying travelers from monasteries, churches, and towns along the shores of the lake return to Ohrid for the day.
I swim away from the steps, float in the water, and then swim back to shore to climb back onto the rock. As the sun starts to move, I follow the rays and walk beyond the small church perched on the cliffs following the path through the woods and long grasses with mountain flowers cascading down the cliffs until it becomes rock and finally water. I continue on the cliff trail until it turns and slopes down towards a small bay of stone beaches between trees where people hang their bags on the branches before diving into the water. I follow them. I climb over the rocks, lift my feet, and swim into the light that is moving further away towards Albania. I want to swim across the lake to Albania rather than take the bus with the ticket I purchased today for Tirana. I swim following the rays of light of the North Macedonia flag which warms my face. Then as I imagined, and had been waiting for, I turned onto my back and floated under the sky which belonged neither to North Macedonia or Albania. I'd waited until the perfect moment to enter the waters of Lake Ohrid. I swim towards the shore where the swimmers are drying in the last of the sunshine and the paddle boarders are drying in the sunshine, too. And I look back out towards the mountains around the water's edge, and there, swimming with me the whole time was il serpente, a water snake similar to the one that had made me feel uneasy about entering Lake Ohrid earlier in the trip. The serpent floats with only its head above the water until swimmers disturb it, and it swims parallel to the shore away from the group of swimmers. On the walk back along the cliffs towards the small church perched on the cliffs above Lake Ohrid in the Byzantine and Armenian Style the sun continues to warm my face and dry my body. How's the water? A traveler asks me. My response is to enjoy floating in the warmth of the sun in the bay below. Peace. The traveler calls back to me as he continues along the path and I head back towards the guesthouse.
Final Approach:
I tell the flight attendant sitting next to me that descending into DCA, Washington’s national airport on the banks of the Potomac, is my favorite landing in the world. She responds that there was a beautiful sunset over Boston a few days ago, then returns to studying the landing checklist on a phone– still in training to work for the airline.
The month before returning to DC, we spent a week exploring Puglia in Italy’s heel. We reached the city of Bari by overnight ferry from Albania and swam in the designated city beaches, south of the city’s port, filled with families on a summer Sunday afternoon. I jumped from a rock and cut my heel in the salty waters of the Adriatic. We rented a car and stopped at beaches, continued to swim, and had days punctuated with sweet breaks of Caffè Leccese – coffee sweetened with almond syrup and served over ice in a small glass. Two to three sips of caffeine and sweet mandorla. And, during our days in Puglia we stayed in a Trullo, in the province of Bari in the hills behind the port city. Trulli, the stone huts with a corbelled roof kept dark and cool inside, offer shelter from the heat of Puglia in summer.
Back in Northwest Washington, tucked away near the woods and creeks hidden in the city, I created a trullo to reset and reconnect with the city after a year overseas. In the English basement a friend had found me for the summer, I created a space far from Puglia, but similarly, it was a space that kept cool during the humidity of the DC summer that could feel like a wet, warm blanket.
At the local farmers market, I bought guanciale, and for days after, the kitchen of the trullo smelled of the fat that sizzled in the pan as I cooked it to create Roman pasta dishes. I also picked up pickles and fresh tomatoes and feta from West Virginia. For lunch, I drizzled the olive oil over tomatoes, feta, and scallions. Each day, I paused to bike to a public pool, floating on my back in the late afternoon as temperatures in DC hovered above 90+ degrees Fahrenheit and the skies became heavy before the summer storms closed the pools. Sometimes, when the rain lasted too long, I decided to just walk out into it rather than shelter under trees or in doorways. Back at the trullo, wet, I dried the clothes, took a warm shower, and lit candles as the summer rain lingered into dusk.
Happy Hydra Days:
At an event in Brooklyn the writer Deborah Levy leaves a note in a book for my friend saying Happy Hydra Days. Two days after the book event, I leave New York City in the early fall for Athens, Greece, where I’ll hand deliver the signed book to read on the island of Hydra.
I arrived in Greece as the dawn broke into rays of sunshine over Athens. It is no longer summer. The fall equinox has come and gone, but the warmth of the rays delays the dark depths of winter that will soon fall over the east coast. The owner of the apartment in Exarchia, a radical neighborhood known for left-wing activism, met me at the taxi from the airport. How radical still is the neighborhood if this is the second time I’ve rented a short-term apartment through an app as an international visitor to Athens?
Amid the warmth of the light and the thrust of my body seven hours ahead into a new day without a night of sleep, I forgot to confirm that the taxi driver accepted credit cards. By law, they must, but that doesn’t mean anything in Athens. The owner of the apartment tells the driver, 'Fuck you,' and throws cash at him. He opens the doors to the cool apartment building and apologizes for my bad welcome to Greece. After he shows me the roof terrace and how to flick the hot water on for a shower, he leaves. I lock the door behind him, fall into the cool white sheets, and wake up in the middle of the afternoon.
Friends join me, and we spend the weekend wandering through Athens. A light rain reminds me that fall comes to Athens too. We shelter from a rain shower at a community library founded by an Afghan refugee. An anthropologist friend in DC, who spent summers working with the Afghan refugee population in Athens, recommended that I stop by. Since 2015, at the height of the refugee crisis across the Mediterranean and Europe, Exarchia has sheltered many refugees. Some refer to the spaces for refugees to live as squats, others, as sanctuaries.
The flying cat departs from the port of Piraeus, where the Athenian fleet was based at the height of Ancient Greece. Now the port transfers Athenians to the Saronic Islands and overnight travelers to Crete. En route to Hydra, the catamaran passes through the narrow channel between the island of Poros and the Peloponnese mainland. Passengers exit ("exodus" in Greek) at Poros, and the flying cat continues onto Hydra.
At the port, we’re greeted by a donkey. We leave our bags on the ground, which are heaped onto the donkey to be carried and navigated through the narrow streets climbing the hills. On Hydra, there are no cars. The owner of the house has been on Hydra for decades, first arriving on a short trip with friends—a break from the wet and gray island in northern Europe where she went to school. Then she spent a month there a few years later. Marriage and children followed, and now Hydra is home. Her children, who went to school on the island, are now spread across Europe. Hydra has only six schools, she tells us. Hydra will always be here, but “go into the world first,” she tells her children. Now they’re spread out across Europe: Hydrian, Greek, European.
Stories appear like this across the island of Hydra—characters and avatars and prompts emerging.
At lunch in a taverna with the Peloponnese mainland across the strait, cats chew on the remains of shrimp. After we finish a white fish drizzled with lemon and oil, the waiter takes the bones on a plate away from the tables where Danish, Australian, and Polish visitors have lunch. Twelve cats appear from under tables and behind walls to follow the fish, taking all the remaining salty meat from the bones. At another table, unaware of the trail of cats, a woman eating alone complains about how all the food is so salty. The Cretan salad (with feta) is too salty. The shrimp saganaki, a salty cheese, is too salty. The chef appears and tells her that of course the meal is salty. Feta is a salty cheese, as is saganaki. She picks at the shrimp and tosses the shells on the floor for cats to pick up and eat quickly. She pays the check for the salty meal, walks towards the salty sea, and dives straight in, floating in water so buoyant because of the salt.
At a beach the next day, Americans panic about another hurricane hurtling towards Florida. A woman trips over the corner of the wooden walkway laid out over the stones for visitors of the beach club. Her cup of cappuccino rolls off the walkway, spilling onto the beach. A young waiter comes with a bucket of water to wash away the incident. He offers her a new cappuccino. She asks if her husband can smoke a cigar—Habanos. It mixes with the salty air and drifts towards us on the loungers behind them, mixing with the scents of herbs on the cliffs. A young woman speaks to them. They stay in their sun loungers and turn their necks to have a conversation about their travels through Greece. She is French; her father is Greek. She’ll ask him about traveling in the Cyclades on a bike or motorbike for them. They speak in French, but she uses the words “bike” and “motorbike” in English, interrupting the flow of the french conversation. She lives in London. They are Brazilian but live in Buenos Aires. She dives into the sea, and they continue smoking their Habanos.
At another bay, as the sun sets over the mainland, a lone man, toned with olive skin, sits on a towel. He must have spent the summer on beaches like this. His life on beaches like this? He wraps one arm around his knees, the other holding a cigarette. Behind his sunglasses, he stares beyond the headland towards Athens. Next to the towel and neatly folded pile of clothes are running shoes. It’s as if he came to Hydra quickly, in a hurry, with only running shoes. He never enters the water; he smokes and looks towards Athens, wondering, perhaps, why he left it behind.
The next day, towards the port of Hydra, where the flying cat will soon return to Athens, I notice a man at a bar bent down to light a cigarette. The position of the bar, near the end of the harbor, provides a clear view towards the headland of the Peloponnese across the water. Ferries and catamarans turn and pass the narrow strait near Poros. Behind is Athens. You can’t see the city, but you know it’s there, and on a clear day, you see the mountains east and south of the city. As the man sits up after lighting his cigarette, it is the man from the beach. This time, he is wearing the running shoes and sits down to look towards Athens. Is he ready to return? Run back—or run away?
A fan whirs above the bed, and I sleep with the doors open onto a balcony with Hydra behind and around the bedroom. The morning sounds of donkeys and roosters fill the air. It’s October, not summer, so across the valley, I faintly hear a school in the hills (one of the six on the island) and the hum of children playing in the yard. At night, as the sun sets, tortoises move and stamp over the aluminum roofing in the garden next door. But in the morning, the tortoises seek shade under trees. I get up from under the light white sheets to buy Greek yogurt and bottles of water for my friends, still asleep. Soon our routines must move on from those happy Hydra days.
The closest market to the house is the Four Corners Market. You walk past Leonard Cohen’s house to reach the market. It was his closest market too. Always turn right on the way to the market and left on the way back to the house. A notice on a gray door invites friends on Hydra to celebrate the life of someone who had called the island home for decades, since the 1960s. The invitation comes from his “companion.” This was in August; now it’s October. I imagine the companion, friends, and family in the heavy heat of August, gathered under a tree in the cemetery. Afterward, they would share stories of how the island has changed since the bohemian 1960s—a cheap island for artists to hide—to now. Still, the island attracts writers and a crowd from across the world seeking a slower pace, creative spaces, small bays, and natural pools to cool in the waters before stopping for sweet cappuccino freddo or espresso freddo at bars, climbing Hydra’s streets with the mountains and crags rising behind the town.
On Hydra, as time slows, I look towards the mainland, the Peloponnese, and beyond. Hydra comes at the end of a moment, a phase, a time spent in Europe. What will serve me going forward, and what do I want to leave behind? I decided that I don’t want to leave anything that doesn’t serve me on Hydra. When I come back, it will be waiting here. Instead, I’ll leave it at Charles de Gaulle Airport, like lost luggage that might eventually end up, unclaimed, at the lost luggage store in Scottsboro, Alabama.
On the flight from Paris to the East Coast, the passenger next to me asks, How much longer do we have on this flight? At least four hours—about halfway through. We haven’t even seen the first glimpses of Canada yet, marking the transition from Europe to North America. We continued the conversation in French. She has left Lebanon (Beyrouth) to spend months with her sister in Virginia. Luckily, she has a five-year U.S. visa and another for Canada, where her brother sells the best shawarma in Ottawa. If needed, she’ll go there next. She’s more concerned about telling me about how she nearly missed her flight in Paris than the war at home. Still, she drops the word les bombardements into the conversation with such ease—carelessness? The drop of bombs ring in my ears. In Paris, the agents keep telling her to calmez-vous, madame. She asks, How am I meant to calm down? Not because of war—because she was about to miss her flight. The stress of travel, missed connections, and delays dominates her thoughts. She tells me this happened before, when a flight from Beirut to Montreal was delayed, forcing her to pay her own way to Ottawa when she arrived in Canada.
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I walk around Howard University’s campus in the warm late fall sunshine. The stage is being packed away, and the red, white, and blue balloon arches droop around the campus entrance. Security is light but the school is still closed off with fences and only limited pedestrian entrances. Two days after the election, police no longer ask why you’re walking through the campus. Across the street, where the public pool is shuttered for the winter, I sit on a bench above a running track with the warmth of the sun on my face. In a Harris-Walz shirt a woman talking on the phone walks past me back towards the university. Despite the loss, the stage that had been prepared for a victory speech but instead was a moment for election concession, must be packed away. For now, my t-shirt sits folded in a new closet, and for the rest of the year we give ourselves permission to tune out, slightly. How are you? I am okay. On the days when I say I am good, I am surprised.
This winter solstice, I don’t wake to the ripples of the Venetian Lagoon below the window of a Murano hotel room, as I did the year before. The ripples in the lagoon are from water taxis ferrying between the islands and Venezia. This winter solstice, the longest, darkest night, I don’t anchor my day around sunset, but around 4:30pm, central time, I notice the sun dropping over Tennessee ahead on the highway coming back from Alabama after a visit to the Unclaimed Baggage Store. We’re six months on from the long night of summer solstice, midsummer, in Georgia the long table of the Supra meal toasts of Georgian wine and the light setting and filling the car with a warm orange light on the drive back to Tbilisi. Midwinter feels like a season, not just the solstice. As the dark days stretch on, I light candles at dusk. And, later in the season, as we travel through the South by car, I step into the dark, wet night in Memphis searching for food and blues music, the wind blows off the Mississippi River. Back at my desk in Washington, DC., snow falls outside. Since leaving Bologna last summer, La Garisenda tower still stands, bowing and nodding and leaning down to the pedestrians below, just as it has since Dante’s time.
