The Palace

I must have lost some photographs, really.  I remember taking more than I have.  Better ones.  I will have to remember, and perhaps that is best.

We stayed in the palace of a long-ago Archbishop.  I think it not so much as far as palaces go, but I am jaded now and should not compare this place with all the others I might have known.  This one was lovely.

When we arrived, the air was gray, the light flat.  A slight drizzling.  Weather effects my moods disproportionately, a rainy day away from home the cause for a deeper than normal melancholy.  After storing my luggage in the room, I walked the grounds, the gravel of the walkways softly crunching.  Sculpted gardens, flowers now in bloom, algae-covered walls and decorative statues.  The famous mountain beyond the lake was shrouded, invisible.  "When the weather clears, you will see--it is beautiful," they said.  For now, though, there was only the gray lake reflecting a gray sky.

Days of meals: breakfast, coffee, lunch, tea, dinner, drinks.  A friendly staff.  A luxury of food.  Bottles of wine on every table, a bierstube downstairs, an indoor cafe letting out onto a garden terrace.  I linger on couches, in quiet corners at hidden tables by small windows where I write.  Or strive to.  Mostly I sit, trying to think, not thinking but feeling the light fall, imagining things, trying not to remember.

Through the big iron gates, across the park and up the hill, I go to town.