a walk home from the american consulate in milano

i gathered these leaves during the walk back to our hotel from the u.s. consulate in milan where we had gone to apply for new passports. i gathered them from the sidewalks in the urban center during a persistent drizzling rain. we had just survived a fairly major setback. it’s not every day that you get your passports stolen in a foreign c0untry by a street thief, and as a result can’t really return to your second home (in france) in order to arrive eventually in your primary home (in the u.s.) until you move through a heavy gauntlet of bureaucracy. and yet, the artistic habit had me looking not at the sky to lament my fate, but at the ground to sort through some pretty interesting fallen leaves. still blog is not just a daily habit, but a distraction from some of the ways that the world tries to redirect your gaze from the important, by presenting you with the urgent.

autumn leaves from one walk in milano