Walking to lunch today I stepped into a shallow strip of gravel in the parking lot where the asphalt had been pulled away. Somehow it reminded me of the cinder blocks and mortar present at construction sites in France that we (my brothers and I, being boys) would climb over, like houses next door that were going up. I saw the sky again on a spring day, eerily half-covered with impeding storm clouds, and felt the first gust from the knife-edged cold front. I remembered closing the shutters outside the downstairs windows before the Mistral blew through the valley, flipping the painted iron catches, pulling the shutter to, and latching it. It was the first time I’d ever had floor lamps in a living room, and I remembered how they lit up the terracotta-colored walls and the blocky tiles in the floor. I remembered the sharp, white stone of the wall by the driveway and the grasses in the unkempt yard next door, big tomatoes in Dad’s garden and bottle rockets in the backyard, Sundays watching the parasailers drift down the mountainside as we ate on the patio, and the brittle, earthen tiles on the roof…<\/p>\n
Then I walked into the restaurant and ordered my food.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Walking to lunch today I stepped into a shallow strip of gravel in the parking lot where the asphalt had been pulled away. Somehow it reminded me of the cinder blocks and mortar present at construction sites in France that we (my brothers and I, being boys) would climb over, like houses next door that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}