A Street with a View

This is a "piece" I had to write for my literary travels class - bear with the fact that it was dashed off mere minutes ago. I told you homework was not on the agenda.


It was a first-view. Came upon for the first time in the dark of night. I saw it only as a flash, while we clambered up the marble steps, luggage making us into flailing toddlers learning to climb. Now it sends me off every time I leave, and welcomes me back every time I return. The cream-white face of the home, with the grey framed windows and dusty red shutters; the darkened olive gate, clicking open and clanging shut; the wide marble steps - always damp as of late, and strewn with discarded petals and leaves from the bottoms of shoes: these, the first markers of home. I have favorite pieces of this view, of course. The gnarled, stoutly pruned tree just before the gate, arthritic in its bend, looking raw and exposed like a fresh shave; the recessed view of a cluster of pastry-crème homes across the street, their red-tiled roofs all slanted in the same direction, the laundry always draping ceremoniously on slack lines. I like that the homes are guarded on either side by towering trees. The ultimate sentinels. Trees that rise up from behind tiled roofs – vast needled tufts of foliage atop spindly trunks. I always like to see what the sky is doing behind these trees, beyond the pastry-crème houses. On mornings where the fickle sun decides to make an appearance, the patch of sky is a fresco: backlit with rose, melon, frosted blue. On mornings like this one, all the color has been drained, like old bathwater down a tub. Pale as a starched sheet, the backdrop leaves all the hues to the dampened plaster and slippery brick. I don’t mind. Makes the hedges wrapped around our little plot pulse with their own greenness. Even in the rain, people hurry by – flashes between the greenery. I wonder if they admire my view. I wonder if they say “what an odd little tree.” I wonder, too, if they look across the way at the vaulted mahogany doors of the cream-white house. They say the doors in Florence are really something to see.