Bone-tired from nearly 12 hours of travel between Bozen in Italy and Graz in Austria, I took advantage of the extra bed in my hotel room to lie down and work so that the glare of my laptop didn’t disturb my sleeping six-month-old. He was a trooper who took four naps through the day and remained in good spirits throughout, smiling at other passengers, reacting to their gestures of ‘peekaboo‘ with laughter and delight, and looking with unfiltered curiosity at everything in the immediate vicinity of his being — the grooves at the bottom of the window, the texture of the table mat in the restaurant car, the feel of the seat, my face — and everything beyond — the green of the Alpine meadows rolling by, and the density of the ubiquitous fog. It’s officially autumn in Europe, but we’ll have to wait at least a week for the golden light. This week is mostly wet, and the farmers are unhappy — there are apples and grapes to harvest before the co-operative deadline. They may have to work through the rain.

I’m visiting Graz perhaps for the fourth time in my life. It’s odd because I never imagined that might ever be the case when I first arrived in 2018 on a press trip for the autumnal arts festival for which it is known. I was invited again, perhaps two years later, and I have a memory of coming here to review an exhibition at Camera Austria during the pandemic. That’s when I got to know some people from the editorial team who then invited me to publish my original writing in a subsequent issue. In late 2022, I was asked again if I wanted to send in a piece that was about parenting or motherhood, which is how I ended up writing a nearly 5000-word essay with my ink pen on index cards in between bits of free time I would find when I had put our firstborn (then only child) to sleep. I enjoyed writing so much that after I was done with the essay, I decided to continue nonetheless, using the same mode — writing on index cards with ink, whenever I ‘found‘ time. I ended up with a manuscript, one that is being translated into German and Italian as we speak and will be launched in South Tyrol next autumn.