46 January 30th.


That date again; the gathering smaller. The mayor reads from a journal recovered after the war. He speaks hesitantly about the lost and stolen lives, the families stripped and bereft. Holocaust Memorial day, the 27th. January. A bomb explodes somewhere on the Israeli border.

It is raining. The snow melted away several days ago and is a memory of luminant softness and wood smoke.

Seven of us eat next to a great brown hearth. Two tables run together with plastic, yellow table cloths.. The meal has seven courses, each one small. I eat the meat, saying nothing. I cannot bring myself to. The conversations and family anecdotes dart to and fro like machine gun fire. They are not shouted but shot loudly.

Sylvie has cooked and I have placed the table. Her brother chews his bread slowly, tearing nuggets. Her cousins have come visiting from the central Pyrenees and speak of retirement, cattle and food. They will stay for three days and nights before going on to visit other family remnants near the Med. They are friendly, mostly incurious, very short and dark skinned. Stephan has huge hands with arthritic knobbles on each of the middle fingers. He does ask me a question about the food I grow in my garden and he tells me that the old pear tree was planted there when he was a child and lived with his aunt here. Good for cooking, he says, with lots of sweet wine and cloves, baked slowly and then eaten cold. He then finds it difficult to understand my plans for wild flowers. Prairies are everywhere in the Pyrenees, he scoffs and you cannot get the orchids to grow anywhere but where they choose. Quite right, I can't help but agree with him, but I`m not just using native seed. I`m mixing in American prairie seed. He sits up hard and stares at me. How is that? I explain in the best way I can and earn a quick couple of nods. Is that just a little less than approval?