This is not about what happened in the middle of the night.

Belvedere, Villa Gamberaia, Beth Dow via 20 x 200

I will tell you the truth. Sometimes in the flicker and clicking, the rapid departure from one imagined place to the next, a real sting can pinch the underside of a winter-white arm. Like you, I am a vagabond in this world of ours, this world that is without actual walls or locks on the doors, this world that has no odor, no scent to ring off alarm bells: good day! or bad. After the sting, the order of things goes disappear, protect, retreat, define. And then, a gathering of one's rights and wrongs, an assessment, straight back, freedom, flight.

"What I like about the landscape of Italy," Gianni informed me, "is that there's none of this nonsense about the great outdoors. That sort of thing's all right elsewhere. Here you could practically say it's an indoor landscape. It's Nature with beautiful manners -- no, that's too tame. Rather, it's as if Nature was capable of thought, of joy." -The Bay of Noon, Shirley Hazzard