A Pocketful of Weather

Three cups, one umbrella, an open sea

Lu Cia sets down coffee while Mea Zen and Colombine sit beneath the stepped gables of Bruges

I packed a notebook, a scarf, and a rather optimistic idea of the weather. Colombine packed pencils. Lu Cia brought an umbrella. We teased her about it over the first coffee. She placed it beside her chair and let us finish.

The northern pages began with rooftops and water. By the end, they would also contain a damp corner, a hurried drawing, and a little sand that refused to leave.

An imagined travel story with Mea Zen, Colombine MichelangeLove and Lu Cia, inspired by original Travel2City photographs. Shared moments, dialogue and weather belong to the fiction.

01—04

Three cups, one umbrella, an open sea

Lu Cia points toward plants on an Amsterdam houseboat while Mea Zen and Colombine walk beside the canal — 02
Amsterdam
Along the canal, a small garden floated at the edge of someone’s home. Lu Cia noticed it before the grander things I had marked on the map. A breeze caught my scarf; Colombine caught the moment in a laugh. I wrote down the flowerpots. They had earned their place beside the monuments.
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Lu Cia holds a terracotta umbrella over Mea Zen and Colombine beside a shuttered window in rainy Middelburg — 03
Middelburg
At the first drops, Lu Cia opened her umbrella without a word. We shuffled close beneath it beside the dark-green shutters. I rescued my notebook; Colombine rescued her pencil. Then all three of us laughed at the careful packing that had left just one person prepared. The wall became our waiting room.
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Lu Cia, Mea Zen and Colombine rest on a bench beside the sea in Zandvoort after the rain — 04
Zandvoort
By the sea, the umbrella had become luggage again. We sat with our shoes in the sand and let the wind turn the loose corner of my page. Colombine kept her sketchbook closed. Lu Cia watched the little sails move across the water. I wrote one line, then joined them in looking.
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One last line

Later, I found a grain of sand caught in the notebook’s spine. I left it there. The umbrella dried by the door, and the three coffee rings on our first page looked surprisingly like the beginning of a map.

“The weather changed. We made room.”

Mea’s notebook · A Pocketful of Weather

More pages together

The notebook keeps growing.

Follow another small story with Mea, Colombine and Lu Cia.

Lu Cia, Mea Zen and Colombine with a map outside the Bratislava theatre

Three companions, one notebook

Where our shared pages begin

Colombine, Mea Zen and Lu Cia climb a shaded stone passage toward sunlight in Granada

The Long Way Round

Spain · Four illustrated moments