I haven’t written for awhile because things happened, and things happening have a way of interfering with writing. First, my apartment, which had seemed too good to be true, proved too good to be true. One day I noticed the telltale marks of bedbug bites. Triplicate red bumps — breakfast, lunch, dinner. I’ve suffered them before on other literary pilgrimages, most memorably in an inn in the Lake District, where they so ravenously fed upon me that that very night I was awoken by them and had to step out into the rain after leaving an indignant note on the front desk that must have been smiled at. I walked for hours in the predawn darkness along Windermere, looking in at the windows of dark hotels, hoping for coffee, secretly glad to be suffering for my heroine, Dorothy Wordsworth. And then there was the hostel (hostile?) in Berkeley where, dimly aware that they were at me, I swaddled myself in the blankets, thereby warming for them my delectable blood. This time I was in Assisi when I had to accept that there were bedbugs in Rome. So I texted my landlady, who left me on “seen” for a concerning minute or two before responding that she wasn’t surprised, she’d had this problem last summer, too, they were in her place as well, etc. Could I call her? I called her.
So is making generalizations.