Part of a day in Bellagio, and views of Lake Como

Bellagio inspires chivalry in men and adoration of their men in women. It moves couples to hold hands. There are no singles here. Even on motorcycles, there are pairs. The riders walk the esplanade, helmet in one hand, lover in the other.

Big honeybees are an orangey yellow which match the pollen weighing down their interflower flights. I amble back from a walk through Villa Melzi’s gardens, sit under a nearby magnolia tree set back from the path, and inhale. As always, I have a book. My brother always chides me for reading whist surrounded by natural beauty—“you’ll surely miss something extraordinary with your nose buried in the pages.” I lift my head from time to time, always lucky enough to see a small sailboat pass picturesquely or a mother kiss the top of her child’s head.

A bench opens up on the water’s edge, and I scurry to claim it and its unfettered views.

They take off awkwardly, as expected—ducks seem to do nothing, save float, with grace. As they turn away from Bellagio, their underwings flash white as the sun I seek comes out. A small sigh escapes me, a rare acknowledgement my brother was right. I read on, distracted only by a gelato craving and a rotund brown Dachshund fascinated with my feet.

Swallows undulate above and below the alley’s plane trees with increasing frequency as dusk approaches. Some would say I’ve once again wasted the day.

Snow sounds, angry birds, & the silence you want

The ancient trellis behind me, heavy with snow, suddenly and for no reason dumps its bounty. The sound is the swish of a full skirt made with yards and yards of fine silk. As I awkwardly turn, bundled tightly as a toddler sent out on days like today, I see the angry jay who’d been screaming all morning. He sits alone on the lowest branch, hard to miss in the white winter wonderland formed in mere hours. Below him flutter nervous, dark juncos snacking on the nearby feeder’s refuse. I will them all to be silent so I can hear the dense snowflakes cut the air, one of the few reasons I like returning to my grandfather’s farm outside St. Louis. Snow falls with uncharacteristic aggressiveness here.

As the jay is not cooperating with my request for silence, I thread my way between broken-down farm implements down the hill to the catfish pond. Here, childhood summer days were spent tossing dry dog food onto the pond’s surface with as much quiet as children could muster. Then we waited, fishing pole at the ready, for those huge catfish mouths, surrounded by slick, thick whiskers, to emerge from the pond’s depths, silently gulp the food, and return to the cold bottom waters. Today, the pond was frozen over, as it likely had been for weeks, ice rough from winds stopped by the nothing surrounding the farm.

I continue past the pond, heading into the thick woods where childhood Me had found arrowheads and deer scat and geodes waiting to reveal brilliance or dullness. I move with less certainty than l‘d like. I pass my grandfather’s favorite tractor, now rusted and nestled in leaves and snow, which he placed here with a slightly jovial announcement so we could all visit it after it failed to start one fall Saturday. His small attempt at comedy didn’t fit with his normally sad, humorless demeanor, and it left the cousins and I confused and a bit scared, as children become when steady adults act unpredictably.

I stop in the woods expecting silence but instead hear the rattle of birch leaves, like my grandmother’s old, ill-fitting windows during a storm. I shift to the left to peer at the stream below me but stop as my parka’s whispery rustle drowns out the faint rattle of the leaves. The ivory birch leaves are thin, and a narrow scrap of sunshine lights them from behind as they sing in the wind.