Trafika Europe 3 - Latvian Sojourn

Unyielding, riding days through blizzard, squinting, eyes frozen,

teeth rattling six months in a cottage buried under snow, yet her hair was restless, longed for a more exotic wind. So her comb fell across Japan, China, Vietnam, Korea, Singapore... She sketched and wrote it all down, all the seven hundred seventy-seven histories of each snowflake, and every date. Royal Geographical Society’s first woman fellow, alone in every curiosity, no warm shower of courtship kept her kitchen-bound; rather than candles and tablecloths she spread out maps, photos, natural history books. Settling only briefly in her best sister’s backyard garden, her heart craved only a diamond, for one single deep human relationship. She married only after her sister fell to typhus, but Dr Bishop soon died as well – her husband, beautiful, ephemeral as a mayfly. It was as if the living were supposed

to all clear from the path of that Bird's eye, into a new wasteland

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