Consolation

Consolation
by Billy Collins

How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,
wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard
and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.

There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous
domes and there is no need to memorize a succession
of kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon.
No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon's
little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.

How much better to command the simple precinct of home
than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica.
Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps?
Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyed camera
eager to eat the world one monument at a time?

Instead of slouching in a café ignorant of the word for ice,
I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress
known as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morning
paper, all language barriers down,
rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.

And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone
willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner.
I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal
what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.
It is enough to climb back into the car

as if it were the great car of English itself
and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off
down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna.

En Abril, Aguas Mil

I know... it's not even April anymore. But you get the idea.
Recently, the weather has been causing some serious confusion here in Sevilla.

First of all, it seems that our spring weather has taken a few steps backward, or at least it slowed down a bit. I am sort of okay with this, though. It was really nice for a while there -- but at the rate the temperature was increasing, we were due to hit 90 degrees by the beginning of May. While I like sunshine and warmer weather, I was not exactly ready to sweat bullets or combat heat exhaustion. So, I suppose these last couple of weeks, I welcomed the rain as a metaphorical speed bump (except for that time I was cursing it, walking through torrential downpours on my way home from school). Miraculously, Sevilla's normal weather has been transplanted to Pittsburgh, where 85 degree weather and sunny days were the norm last week. Who says climate change isn't a thing??

But I'm not the only one confused by weather. It's evident that everyone's a little unsure of it by the way people are dressing. If you were to stand for one minute, (no more, no less) on any random sidewalk in Sevilla, you are guaranteed to see a nice mixture of people wearing short shorts and tank tops, while others are in long pants, boots, and jackets. How is this possible??

Well, to be fair, the girls in short shorts and tank tops are probably American, while the Spanish are pretending not to sweat in their jackets and long pants. All stereotypes aside, though, it's rather impossible to figure out the weather by watching what people are wearing outside.

I just wonder how long it will be before everyone stops asking whether or not we're cold without our sweaters on.

The End is Near

Well, the flight has been purchased. That means that the end is in sight -- the date is final. I'm going home.

And more than likely, for good. Or at least for a while.
I always thought that at some point, I'd know when it was time to go home -- that I'd feel like I was ready to leave and be done, and move on to the next phase of life. I suppose I did feel that, some time around December, amidst the troubles I was facing with my apartment and with my residence card. But the spring has been much better to me than the winter was, and now that my departure date is approaching, I find myself wishing I could stay -- if only there was a way.

Life seldom turns a page when we want it to, and never as cleanly as we want it.

 I think part of the problem is that I don't have anything lined up. I don't have a job to return to, or one to stay with either. I don't know what comes next. What is my life going to be like when I get back to Pittsburgh? Will it be the same as when I left, or will it grow to match who I am now? What's the next dream?

The part of me that wants to stay knows that life can't continue like this forever. The important thing is to move forward -- I'm just not sure what that includes yet.