Alys and Jess Tour Europe

I felt it change on the train from Naples to Rome. I remember turning to Alys and asking her if she felt it to, how the light was changing. She said she couldn't feel it, yet I was so sure. I am programmed, it seems, to sense the onset of fall. Something I get from my mother who at first sense digs up the fall decorations and props up tried cornstalks by the front door. The light was shifting, blanketed over what could have been a field of corn, but what I knew were grapes. The light spilling like fabric, lavishly over the leaves. Light that would no longer burn my skin or my eyes. I welcomed fall then, in that moment, with such a sense of relief that I sunk deep into my chair and just watched it take place outside the train window. Passing by in surges, light moving like liquid.

Every fall, this change, what is always so dramatic and definite to me, seems to go unnoticed by others until it is undeniably apparent. I relish its arrival. Fall is many things to me; it is a shift from drinking white wine to red, sunglasses now paired with scarves. Sitting on a bench, in a park, and having the sun hit my shins only to feel pleasantly warm; no longer hot. This year fall means views from train windows, moving views spanning across Italian countrysides. In Rome fall meant evening walks that smelled crisp, warm yet encompassed with a sense of calm. Of balance. Fall means solitude and renewing a sense of self. Even Rome felt calm. Perhaps because most of the tourists had gone home, or perhaps because others felt it too, fall telling them to breathe before the bustle of the holidays and the lull of winter consumes. Rome looked beautiful drenched in the first of fall and Florence looked stunning. Florence where I could indulge in gelato to the brink of gluttony; Rome where I could indulge in nostalgia and farewells.

I could have walked in Florence for weeks, months even, just feeling, smelling fall. It was a city composed from the subtle beauties of other places I have seen: the cobblestones of Prague, the grandeur of Rome, the quiet, peacefulness of Santiago de Compostella and the bike pedals of Cambridge. The loveliest pieces have found their way to Florence. Now fall fallows me to the farm in Marche. If nothing else, I know it will come.

Jess