Soft Radiance

The long way home is sometimes the only way home. The friend you call every Sunday even when nothing has happened. The walk after dinner even when it is cold. The detour past the building where you used to work, once every six months, for no reason you have ever explained out loud. None of it is on the schedule. All of it is the schedule.

One of those detours, in central Italy, in late January, on a road that runs along a ridge twenty minutes longer than the direct way. Two cypresses stand on the ridge with a small wayside altarino between them. For three weeks of every season the sun goes down exactly behind it, the snow turns a colour you have no current word for, and you sit in the car for ten minutes longer than you need to.

Sits well next to Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes, A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, or any book read in the last good light of a winter day.