(excerpt from this morning's email to my beloved)
I woke to my alarm, forgotten and unnecessary, and haven't been able to get back to sleep. This is probably because the first thing I did on waking was to get up and open the big window in my bedroom, and sit out on the deep sill and look at the quiet, lapping canal below, with its sleeping boats; the fig tree, still dense with the night, in a private garden across the canal; and the shuttered green windows and pink and yellow walls of my neighbours.
What struck me again - as it did yesterday - more poignantly than all these remembered sights and sounds (for sights and sounds can be remembered and rehearsed into a safely conscious space) was the smell of Venice. The dank, musty smell, laced with a little sea salt and Parmesan cheese, a whiff of sewage and something other, uniquely Italian, which I can't identify - is just the same as when I was here with Eric, all those years ago. It unsettles me with a little sorrow and longing for that intensely romantic time, but only enough to remind me I'm alive and still young, and still making my own wonderful story.
I couldn't go back to sleep.
So, I can tell you the sounds of morning in Sestiere Cannareggio, Venice. Since I woke, there has been the soft rumble, every few minutes, of water taxis on the large canal at the end of mine. There is the gentle slap of water against dank brick and fiberglass. That was all there was until just before seven. Then dawn broke, announced by a raucous shrieking of what sounded like geese, and then at seven the bells began. They peal regularly, but I haven't studied their system, yet. Now I can hear wooden shutters being opened and the scrape of a spoon on a breakfast bowl. A man opposite just opened his front door (metallic squeal of hinges) stepped out to hang his garbage bag on the gate beneath the fig tree, and loped back inside in his teeshirt and faded shorts. Someone just flushed the toilet in the building opposite, and a man downstream is throwing bread from his window to the pigeons in the square by the well, photographing their nodding frenzy of enthusiasm. Another tourist.
The stone windowsill is cold. I'm going to make myself some breakfast and a coffee, and return here with a cushion and my thoughts.
I woke to my alarm, forgotten and unnecessary, and haven't been able to get back to sleep. This is probably because the first thing I did on waking was to get up and open the big window in my bedroom, and sit out on the deep sill and look at the quiet, lapping canal below, with its sleeping boats; the fig tree, still dense with the night, in a private garden across the canal; and the shuttered green windows and pink and yellow walls of my neighbours.
What struck me again - as it did yesterday - more poignantly than all these remembered sights and sounds (for sights and sounds can be remembered and rehearsed into a safely conscious space) was the smell of Venice. The dank, musty smell, laced with a little sea salt and Parmesan cheese, a whiff of sewage and something other, uniquely Italian, which I can't identify - is just the same as when I was here with Eric, all those years ago. It unsettles me with a little sorrow and longing for that intensely romantic time, but only enough to remind me I'm alive and still young, and still making my own wonderful story.
I couldn't go back to sleep.
So, I can tell you the sounds of morning in Sestiere Cannareggio, Venice. Since I woke, there has been the soft rumble, every few minutes, of water taxis on the large canal at the end of mine. There is the gentle slap of water against dank brick and fiberglass. That was all there was until just before seven. Then dawn broke, announced by a raucous shrieking of what sounded like geese, and then at seven the bells began. They peal regularly, but I haven't studied their system, yet. Now I can hear wooden shutters being opened and the scrape of a spoon on a breakfast bowl. A man opposite just opened his front door (metallic squeal of hinges) stepped out to hang his garbage bag on the gate beneath the fig tree, and loped back inside in his teeshirt and faded shorts. Someone just flushed the toilet in the building opposite, and a man downstream is throwing bread from his window to the pigeons in the square by the well, photographing their nodding frenzy of enthusiasm. Another tourist.
The stone windowsill is cold. I'm going to make myself some breakfast and a coffee, and return here with a cushion and my thoughts.
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