sidewalk scribbling

Fields of green spotted with fluffy white sheep, the clouds hang low, teasingly low, if you go half way up a ladder, you can touch the soft cool underbelly. Eyelashes feel heavy, drop low, flutter open, close for a few minutes and open again. Now the windows are wet, small rivers streaming across, cutting the pane into diagonals, blurring the green outside, turning a quaint old-fashioned painting into abstract art. And my eyes close again, lulled by the even rocking motion of the bus, legs pulled up, knees pushed against the back of the seat in front of me, and a few minutes later, the sky has changed again, the sun breaks through like heaven’s trying to say hello to the world below, misty streaks of gold cutting across the gray in four, five, many rays.  The colors are suddenly vibrant, the rolling hills a bright sunny green, and the trees lit up, even the sheep seem more alive. The sky kept changing on our ride to Edinburgh, with sudden swift and short-lived b...

I enjoy penning my thoughts down (what, really, what a shocker!) especially when planning a trip, and yes I’m slightly abashed to say that I like details – so if our bus is supposed to reach Manchester at 2:30 pm I’m going to be optimistic and hope that it ends up getting there earlier and since our budget inn with its sweet purple moon is just a 16-minute walk away, we should be all checked in by 3… Listen, time is short and there’s a lot to see in Manchester! So ideally I’d like us to be sharp about it and march on straight to one museum, then maybe sneak in the art gallery before the city shuts down all museums and galleries and churches and switches on its orange streetlights to guide the way to nightlife (except, what nightlife starts at 5pm?). Of course, sometimes, alright, often, the best-(detai)laid plans go awry. So the bus we were on left at exactly the right time but then sort of just slowed down and instead of the motorway/highway we seemed to be on a sights...

July 7 I’ll tell you a secret. For a couple of seconds, we were all asleep in the car – except Kate (I hope), who at that moment was driving. We knew the last stretch from Kingston to Montreal was going to be difficult: we’d been up before dawn, on the road and about, and we had eaten a great meal at Reem’s surrogate parents’ house in Kingston. We didn’t really need to be in a lateral position to fall asleep. It was, however, part of our unwritten code to stay awake together while we were in the car. And I had the smug pleasure of realizing first that we had all dozed off. “Reem!” I poked indignantly. “What an awful co-pilot!” And as usual, the GPS fucked with us when we were most vulnerable: fifteen minutes away from our weekend home and visualizing our beautiful beds. A wrong turn here, and another there, we almost ran over some enthusiastic night bikers. I don’t know if it was our almost-delirious states of mind, but it seemed like we were driving in a surreal town wh...