The bus was much more comfortable than the plane. It spent two hours in Rome picking up people. We slept through all of that. Heading out of Rome, the highway was lined with multi colored flowering shrubs. There were palm trees and other flora to attest to Rome’s tropical climate. As we climbed the hills around Rome, more and more tiny, ancient villages spilled over the tops of mountain sides or hugged steep cliffs looking down on the modern villages of the suburbs. Modern houses gave way to higglety pigglety fields of hay bales, crops the colors of Italy and tilled fields the yellow orche, raw and brunt siene of my palette, olive groves planted with such symmetry that there were diagonal rows as well as straight. A modern shepherd watching over his flock from a Jeep Ranger while the two pieranneze sheep dogs lolled in the shade. The sheep, at first glance clearly a rock strewn field, were freshly shorn with angled knobling bones almost bursting through their skin. Poppies were spread through the fields of grain, holly hocks of all colors reared up along the road side surrounded by blue, pink and yellow wildflowers. The mountains closed in, compressing the valley, at first lying like indolent lizards and then turning craggy and menacing. The clouds moved like light over a model revealing the form through the folds of land. And then the piazza in Pratola, Bijore picking us up, fnding out during our first steps in Castelvecchio that my best Italian friend’s mother had died three days ago. I had been thinking about her mother so much and about how I hoped to meet her this summer. When someone is so sad it is almost impossible to say the right thing, so maybe it is better I cannot speak and she doesn’t have to.
