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?

45.

January 15th.

The wood, the wild place, der wald. It can only truly be viewed from a clearing, a glade where the light streams. This day the snow lies in heavy silence and even the depths of the forest are backlit by reflected sunlight. A red squirrel scoots along a diagonal, from one tree to another and vibrates a fringe of snow which drops then in a long, tremulous shower. The ditch is frozen in splinters, the moss banks, sheltered from the snowfall show intricate patterns and webs of multiple hues of green. The wood holds its breath while I stand as a living mark amongst wraiths of past lives imprinted in the undergrowth and in the tree barks, in this forest that has been worked, cut and replanted over the last 3 centuries.

England seems a far memory already. It was odd to return to the house here, see it for what it is, constructed out of an earlier workshop or barn. Its 18C origins jolted me into a scurrying fervour of small renovations until the snow fell in soft, flat flakes for 2 days and to resist the call of the outside would have been a wasted chance. The house could wait: as it often has.

I watch two starlings take the hoar frost from the undersides of twigs, as drink, as I return along the lane. Sylvie is cracking the ice at the base of her downpipe drain, outside her house. Bonne annees have been exchanged days ago and the new year creeps on fast. Soon the village will remember the dead from the concentration camps once again, while in Gaza the rubble of an ill balanced conflict memorialises the future.