29. Sizzling hot
June 30th.
Sizzling hot and I walk up the hill. The path is grey-yellow dust, the cicadas harmonise, the nightingales compete with their exotic, rising bubble and jug. Not even midday and the heat is searing. Emile`s white van is coming over the ridge, bumping and jerking, one door is almost off its hinges and fixed at an angle to the cill with a blue rope. He is never in shirt sleves; always a jerkin of sorts over long sleeves. It makes me sweat just to look at him; but I have freckles and sunspots all over my arms and he probably hasn’t.
Now I am at a higher level, where I can survey the grand plan, the lay out of my infant garden. I’m on the ledge of one plateau, looking critically down to the next to see if my field is taking on some shape and design.. I have planted one C. leylandii, that hated, suburban, hedging tree ; so that as it pushes up to the sky it marks the southernmost corner of the plot. When I’m dead and pushing up, I hope , another sort of tree, somewhere, this Cypress will be far less than a quarter of the way to its full and magnificent stature.
As I scramble down, Emile’s van is still there; he is checking fencing and knocking a few posts straight after the great livestock migration. Marie is huffing and puffing after her walk up to join him. She is in a bright blue pinny again and her knees are purple.
“I'm going home to have a cup of tea”, I grin, “very thirst quenching.”
“Phtt! Cat’s piss”, Emile grunts, “you’re welcome to it.”
Marie waves me down the hill, shrugging her shoulders and tittering.
Friday, July 11, 2008
28.
June 23rd. TRANSHUMANCE
June is the month when the animals move from the middle pastures, way up the hills and mountain slopes, along ancient tracks into fresh, high grassland.
Emile puts a patterned leather and wool collar around the lead cow’s thick neck, along with her important bell. The half grown calves amble, stumble and butt each other. Columns of cattle teem up the slopes, bellowing and lowing like a cello and double bass orchestra. They leave trails of partly eaten grass and scents of sweet, fermenting breath. When we cross a lane, the waiting car inmates are already out with their cameras. This migration has gone on for year after year, century after century. Read Graham Robb’s wonderful book, THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE and you will get some idea of the immense age of these disparate, rural practices. ‘ A century ago, some of these journeys lasted for weeks’, he writes. ‘These are probably the oldest routes in France.’
He describes those long lines of cattle, dogs and humans as ‘caravans’, ‘land-going ocean liners of livestock’. Now, of course, quad bikes and trucks are often used in the drive, but Emile is walking, with several of us helping, along rutted, hard tracks. Marie is in the van, way behind on the metalled lanes, which curve up to the col.
June 23rd. TRANSHUMANCE
June is the month when the animals move from the middle pastures, way up the hills and mountain slopes, along ancient tracks into fresh, high grassland.
Emile puts a patterned leather and wool collar around the lead cow’s thick neck, along with her important bell. The half grown calves amble, stumble and butt each other. Columns of cattle teem up the slopes, bellowing and lowing like a cello and double bass orchestra. They leave trails of partly eaten grass and scents of sweet, fermenting breath. When we cross a lane, the waiting car inmates are already out with their cameras. This migration has gone on for year after year, century after century. Read Graham Robb’s wonderful book, THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE and you will get some idea of the immense age of these disparate, rural practices. ‘ A century ago, some of these journeys lasted for weeks’, he writes. ‘These are probably the oldest routes in France.’
He describes those long lines of cattle, dogs and humans as ‘caravans’, ‘land-going ocean liners of livestock’. Now, of course, quad bikes and trucks are often used in the drive, but Emile is walking, with several of us helping, along rutted, hard tracks. Marie is in the van, way behind on the metalled lanes, which curve up to the col.
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