The Wake-Up Station: The Kind Of Trees You See In Rome

We are preparing to travel back to Rome again for a few days. This will be a complicated trip. Athens, Rome, then back to Greece to The Skopelos Foundation for a month. In a flurry of cleaning up and packing, I searched for the moleskin notes from the last trip to Rome and found forgotten sketches and notes. I used to have a cheap office supply pen, a ballpoint with ink that ran when wet. The pen had a nice solid line that could be made into a semi controlled wash or a blurred line, and still allowed for the holding of the structure. Structure is much of what Rome offers to the eye.

I found a few sketches worth sharing, tiny and minor, not works of art in any way, but offering the seeds of such. They are worked on tiny two page spreads in the smallest notebooks. I was looking for the name of a good restaurant we went to with dear friend five years ago. On that same day we saw the starlings in wild waves of murmuration right outside the Pantheon. Maybe we will go back there. Notes are incomplete. Why write or draw if you can't even record the names and streets of one of your favorite cold days in winter, in Rome? Maybe fingers were frozen, maybe you thought for sure you could find your way back through narrow streets and blurred lines, forgotten stone landmarks. And probably it is true that you could, or will, or else you will find something else. But I would love to find that pen, but alas, many things are lost.