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CROISSANT TEARS
Travel Kate Peterson Travel Kate Peterson

CROISSANT TEARS

The idea of leaving Lyon didn't feel real—so surely it wasn't, right? I'd been in the city for four blissful weeks, and the thought of not being there anymore felt like a vague concept that I couldn't quite put my finger on. It felt like something that might happen to some other unfortunate soul, on some other day.

As an artist in need of a jolt of inspiration back in January of 2020, I'd applied for an Alexa Rose grant before the pandemic began, having no idea how much I would need it by the time I was able to use my funding. When I finally arrived in France—more than two years after submitting my application—it was as an easily-startled shell of my former self, shrunken from two years of pandemic life and, even more so, from the shock of losing my beloved world-traveling dad to the virus in October of 2021. It was March 2022 when I arrived in Lyon, and on my third day, I was stunned to notice I was subconsciously ceding the right of way to pigeons as they pecked along. The realization made me stop short on a street corner, reeling as I came face to face with just how small I'd come to feel over the past two years.

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THE WHOLE LOAF
Travel Kate Peterson Travel Kate Peterson

THE WHOLE LOAF

On my third day of solo travel, I realized I had been subconsciously ceding the right of way to pigeons as they pecked by in their search for crumbs.

I’m a traveler by nature, and a relatively brave one at that—I’d lived abroad for a year after college, ridden in tuk-tuks through massive cities halfway across the world, and traveled solo for much of my twenties. But over the course of the previous two years, along with everyone else, I’d watched helplessly as the pandemic shrunk my world until it was made up of just me, my husband, and our dog, hiding in our basement and binge-watching really dumb TV. Those early days of quarantine and fear and sadness were awful enough, but as time wore on, things just became harder as the virus took more and more away from us all.

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