Another Sunday: cleaning the apartment, hanging laundry that won't fully dry because it's a constant 52 degrees and most days it rains a little, in the evening or early in the morning. But it's February and the lemon trees and orange trees are bursting. Palm trees green. The sky very blue when you can see it. Some flowers in bloom. And today there is sun, so I'm going to the sea. I haven't been since late summer. Ten minutes on the bus — Quartucciu through Quartu Sant'Elena to Poetto.

A mile to the bus stop. The ride through Quartu Sant'Elena: the chaos and beauty of it, the way it looks like Latin America, the improvised commerce, the noise, the broken asphalt and sidewalks choked with cars and color. Then off the bus and across the long straight road that runs parallel to the beach. The beach appearing. Pristine. The Devil's Saddle above it.

Umbrella in the sand. Headphones on the whole way — Madman Across the Water, Elton John, the whole album. Then sitting. Headphones off. The sound of actual life washing over instead. I try to understand what a seagull is doing and why it's sideyeing me like a pigeon. And then I realize that it's not a seagull. It's a pigeon.

The sea is calm and blue and constant. I think of the summer and just floating and coming up and seeing Pearl under her umbrella reading. We spent a week coming here and doing nothing but read and float in this impossibly clear, gentle water. We also destroyed the restaurant once a day, eating like summer eskimos. Before you google that -- I'm just guessing they eat more in summer.

Somewhere in here my mother calls, as she does on Sunday. She tells me how far offshore my brother was today. She always has him a little farther out than last time — as if his mythos is proportional to his distance from shore. My brother is a fisherman in Maine. Big guy. Good fighter. Takes me out when I'm there and enjoys laughing at me when the smile freezes on my face, teeth chattering, and I huddle in the bow hiding from the blast of cold while he steers the thing like he's driving his cart onto the 18th hole with a five shot lead. My mom has him thirty miles out today. Does she want him lost at sea, I wonder?

That sea and this sea are not the same sea. My brother would say the Gulf of Angels is bathwater.

He'd had me send him a picture of a lobster from the Cagliari market.

"That's a shrimp!" he said.