Drawing the Heat

 Back to the park, paper, brushes, pencils, and that damn little water pot, that has a passion for falling on marble floors and making an obscene amount of noise, without even having the decency either to smash into a million pieces, which would justify the explosion of sound, or - I don't know - use its superpower to make the earth open up and swallow me?
But out here, it's demure and silent. You can just make it out, to the right of the paper. Bastard.

The park is gently steaming. Let's not go there about the bike today, but that saddle owes me dinner and a movie. I have come back to my place, looking towards Mirabellino. It's not got the structure and the interest of Mirabellino, the other summer palace that faces it across the great field of the Hippodrome. But Mirabello is busy with people and cars, and offers no shade, no perch for passers by. This is a photo op, not a painting place.

 And anyway, it's almost too easy to draw a place with so many shapes and edges. Mirabellino hides in the woods, only bits of it are visible, even less when you drop down three feet, and sit under a tree. I put on my hat and paint it again, draw it, paint it, on curious uncomfortable half sheets of Bristol weight paper. there are ants. I move, and paint some more. none of it is right, but I don't care.

A horse strolls by. It's too hot to do anything but be.
That's the curious thing about this park. I expect to be the mad dog, the englishwoman out in the midday sun quite alone. But there seems to be no hour of the day when it's considered weird to be in the park; walking, riding, even jogging. I'm sorry, jogging is weird. Hot or not, if you are over 30 you look like a dork and when it is like 90 out there, running is just uncalled for.

But they have avenues for it. Lines and lines of limes.

Up at the cascina fontana, someone got up early and cut the hay, but they're all asleep now. I wish I was, but it's a long walk home still, in the hazy early afternoon heat, sigh. Kind of comforting to see that I'm not the only one.