I have just stepped off the Lufthansa flight from Venice to Portland via Frankfurt after fifeteen days of peddling a bike in, over, down, around and damn near under the Dolomites…as fast as was possible. I certainely spent many a day there feeling washed up, wrung out and in having been hung out to dry.
In my mind I am mostly still in Italy, wending my way from one tiny alpine village to another, listening to a myriad church bells marking the passage of time, drinking in the sights and smells of meadows now choked with the autumn crocus and noting the cracks in limestone walls sprouting tiny cyclamen. People appear industrious and gainfully employed in these pastoral settings. Much too busy to be petty.
Awaiting me at home is a mountainous pile of mostly junk mail and unread newspapers. Better it all should be tossed into the recycling bin. In the doing so I catch an article on the front page of the WSJ dated 9/18 and begin to read further. Perhaps it is because I have just spent fifeteen days washing my cycling kit every night and hanging it out to dry from various hotel windows and balconies from Castelfranco to Cles to Cortina d’Ampezzo and many another lovely village, that my attention is captured.
