The hills are alive

In a week and a half, A. and I will be winging our way across the Pond to regions Tuetonic. 10 days and several hours from now, we will be listening to the tale of the Flying Dutchman and the woman who loved him, against all odds. We will travel to see medieval arms and armour. We will hike in the Alps, and I will think not a little of Heidi. We will travel by rail over high, historic mountains to a city founded on Friday, March 25 at noon in the year 421 on marshy islands. I will stand inside St. Marks and if God has truly blessed me, I might even hear the polypony I so often imagined. I’ll see too the poryphory statues of the tetrarchs, the mosaics, the four mysterious horses of St. Marks. I’ll see the winged-lion of the Most Serene Republic. And I’ll pay way too much to sit in a cafe and drink coffee — perhaps the same cafe frequented by Lord Byron and Dickens.

It seems more than a thousand miles distant from where I sit now. It is a world distant. It is a place I visited often in fancy, but where I have rarely travelled at all lately, even in the realm of the mind. I have become too focused — to concentrated on a small and arcane realm of the world. Granted it pays well, but I yearn for vistas again. And I shall see them. And that, friends, makes me a very lucky woman.