Momentary Blindness on the Aventine

The air smells clean, cool wind skirting over the skin of my left arm, my face, and my neck, bringing goosebumps to the top of my flesh as I sit amongst the gravel. The tree at my back is curved enough so that I can recline against it and stretch out my legs, the stiff bark biting at certain angles and digging into my lower ribs, but nonetheless comfortable as I rest my head against it and listen to the soft scritch-scratch of my hair catching on the wood. The gravel grinds under my feet as I pull up my knees to rest my notebook on them, crunching all around me as passersby take the straight path to the parapet that overlooks the city. There's a fountain to my right, filling the air with the sounds of trickling water, as the steady stream splashes against the ground.

The sounds of many people fill the Aventine, including the chatter of an Italian woman as she pushes her stroller around in a circle, the jingling clatter of the wheels bouncing against the uneven ground. As they pass by in front of me, her child babbles nonsense words that grow louder and then fade into the distance, muffled by the crunching rocks and the soft conversations of the park's inhabitants. High up in the trees the birds twitter and sing, one with a musical trill, another with a grating caw, a third with a single chirp every few seconds, and still another with a jackhammer-like cry that jars the air. A bird comes to rest in a flutter of wings around the site of the fountain, its feet silent on the gravel and its beak mute. A muffled laugh and low-spoken Italian pass by, a sneeze sounds behind me and attracts a "bless you" from somewhere to the left, and in the distance the low rumble of an airplane grows steadily louder. The garden is mostly free of the sounds of traffic, the cars below the parapet swallowed up in an ocean-like roar of white noise, though that peace is shattered twice by the siren of an ambulance and the snarl of a motorcycle speeding away. The birds continue to sing from the tree tops, the wind plays with my hair as the shade makes me colder, and from both left and right shared conversations—in Italian, German, and English—float just barely above the rattle of jostled gravel.