Sometimes the past is pressed against the present, or another present is present. While traveling in Europe you feel it like a veil of wind on your skin. You scratch the surface, the past rises up through the transparency of summer. Sometimes you get at origins — Blue sky of Greece with a handmade white church. Gray slate and zinc rooftops of Paris which started a dream you dip into and which will continue after you. Previous city dwellers were seduced – are you there, Emma Bovary? –by a profusion of pinks and reds, silks and taffetas that inhabit the ground floor of a department store like Bon Marché. Romantics swooned over a bunch of flowers pinned to a dress, a hat, to the swirl of a hem that swirls at recreated 19th century dance ball, where mesdames et messieurs dance in period costumes in the Luxembourg Gardens. But simplicity: a bowl of eggs. Wild cats. The umber stones that came from the earth, were gathered by anonymous hands to make fences, return to the hillsides leaving sign that humans, and some gods were there.
