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Nightingales at last, quietly, unassertively in the slow April drizzle. Sparrows wait for their breakfast on the barn window shelf; toasted breadcrumbs and grains of soft cheese. So cheeky they practically cross my doorstep threshold.
Emile is continually puzzled by my kneeling work in the meadow. My knees are wet and muddy.
‘Still weeding?’ he asks. I explain that I am lifting out some wild weeds and sowing others. This baffles him further. A bevy of buzzards circle and wail overhead so I point to them and tell him they are observing my work too. A shrug of his shoulders, a stretch of his neck and a pushing up of his lower lip but not a ‘Wisshtt’. This means he is curious and not dismissive, I think.
When I go in for my bread and cheese lunch the post woman arrives. Here, all the post people are so proud of their yellow vehicles that they rarely get out of them. She drives down my dead end alley just to put a few bits in the end post box; then she reverses back up. I ask her if she has a copy of the urbanisation plans and enquiry minutes. Looking surprised, she finds a box of them and gives me one leaflet.
‘I didn’t think the English would be that interested’, she comments.
‘ If the chalets and mobile homes creep any nearer, I’ll be really interested!’ I laugh.
Money comes to the villages and hamlets mostly through the summer tourism but a new mixed housing estate is planned in the main village and there is a lot of talk, talk. We’ll see.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Friday, April 17, 2009
ON BATHING MY MOTHER
She steps over the edge of the bath, heaving the left leg slowly, bending it at the knee, gripping the rail when the right leg follows, to sit then on a high stool while I squeeze warm water over her. Her back stirs me a memory. It is the same back, her back, in a navy blue swim suit with low, scooped straps, the slight lean forward, the bow and curve, the moles and freckles. But now there are many more with vivid sun mottling and there are folds, drooping between the arm and the breast. The shape, the hue, it is the same back as I, a child, remember on a thirty ish woman; calling out with pleasure as the cold, Welsh sea came up to meet her.
BEATING THE DOGS
The black dogs had been threatening again, like an inevitable February mantle. When they come it is as though I see and hear the world with heavy wax in my ears. Sensation or experience become distant, earplugged. And this affliction I have passed to my dearest son who suffers like a male; unwilling to share his anxiety and misery with his friends. He pretends and then opens like a wound amongst this close family.
Now that the worst is over, for the time being anyway, I have travelled south by train from London. Via Lille, Lyon, Valence, Narbonne I watched the spring speed up from the train window. Memorable were the swags of violet Wisteria climbing up a tall Cypress. As were the deep magenta flowered Judas trees, the Cercis. Here in the foothills of the Pyrenees, mine are yet in bud, waiting ….But a small tree, a Sophora that I planted nearly 9 years ago is in full yellow flower. Exotic, hanging clusters of golden, whiskered, bell like and lipped blooms have braved the late, sustained winter and are covering the stunted, wizened branches of this Chinese miracle. The plums and pears and cherries blossom anyways, mindless of the unappealing weather.
She steps over the edge of the bath, heaving the left leg slowly, bending it at the knee, gripping the rail when the right leg follows, to sit then on a high stool while I squeeze warm water over her. Her back stirs me a memory. It is the same back, her back, in a navy blue swim suit with low, scooped straps, the slight lean forward, the bow and curve, the moles and freckles. But now there are many more with vivid sun mottling and there are folds, drooping between the arm and the breast. The shape, the hue, it is the same back as I, a child, remember on a thirty ish woman; calling out with pleasure as the cold, Welsh sea came up to meet her.
BEATING THE DOGS
The black dogs had been threatening again, like an inevitable February mantle. When they come it is as though I see and hear the world with heavy wax in my ears. Sensation or experience become distant, earplugged. And this affliction I have passed to my dearest son who suffers like a male; unwilling to share his anxiety and misery with his friends. He pretends and then opens like a wound amongst this close family.
Now that the worst is over, for the time being anyway, I have travelled south by train from London. Via Lille, Lyon, Valence, Narbonne I watched the spring speed up from the train window. Memorable were the swags of violet Wisteria climbing up a tall Cypress. As were the deep magenta flowered Judas trees, the Cercis. Here in the foothills of the Pyrenees, mine are yet in bud, waiting ….But a small tree, a Sophora that I planted nearly 9 years ago is in full yellow flower. Exotic, hanging clusters of golden, whiskered, bell like and lipped blooms have braved the late, sustained winter and are covering the stunted, wizened branches of this Chinese miracle. The plums and pears and cherries blossom anyways, mindless of the unappealing weather.
APRIL AGAIN.
The ghost harrier loses its own silver in the rolling, rippling, silver underside of the meadow, on the slopes ahead. He is there daily, sometimes dropping and vanishing in the long grass, other times rocking on the wind just above, sweeping and checking, head down, elegant dark wing tips on such a wide span.
Larks rise and trill in the warm sunshine but are silent when the clouds gather and a typical April day turns grim and shifty. Plenty of swallows swoop in and over the slopes and roofs, chattering all the while. Nesting time not yet started so I can leave the windows open. A cuckoo or two sound out the territory but the grey, cold days silence them. When the sun comes out, it is suddenly warm, hot even, and the song of spring begins again.
Carrots, onions, lettuce are all sown or set and I am painstakingly removing, one by one, the rank weeds from the flower meadow with a nifty tool that will twist out each deep root while not damaging the crowding other valuables. Echinacea, Rudbeckia, Aster, Corn Marigold, Cosmos, Corncockle, Liatris, Flax, Cornflower, Sweet William, Oxeye Daisy and Toadflax - all mingle with grasses, Yellow Rattle and Nigella - to make, or to begin to make a thick sward. The list is here, named, so that you might try the wild look garden yourself! I've mowed it once over, last week when it was dry, and now I won’t cut again until September. I have to know exactly the look of the leaves of the desirables, so those broad leaved, pernicious ones can be taken out now. And I do know them all, like I know the backs of my hands. Meanwhile my lower back gives me pain and my legs ache as I crouch; such is the ageing process, especially cruel to those who have always been so active.
I am re reading Primo Levi’s IF THIS IS A MAN. If one wants to talk about physical strain and pain, look there. The indifference of one sort of man to another is clearly there: ‘every stranger is an enemy’. ‘For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager’. The concentration camp. Or a different genocide.
I have spent the last 3 months back in Britain, giving my time to my mother and son, who for very different reasons have been more than low.
The ghost harrier loses its own silver in the rolling, rippling, silver underside of the meadow, on the slopes ahead. He is there daily, sometimes dropping and vanishing in the long grass, other times rocking on the wind just above, sweeping and checking, head down, elegant dark wing tips on such a wide span.
Larks rise and trill in the warm sunshine but are silent when the clouds gather and a typical April day turns grim and shifty. Plenty of swallows swoop in and over the slopes and roofs, chattering all the while. Nesting time not yet started so I can leave the windows open. A cuckoo or two sound out the territory but the grey, cold days silence them. When the sun comes out, it is suddenly warm, hot even, and the song of spring begins again.
Carrots, onions, lettuce are all sown or set and I am painstakingly removing, one by one, the rank weeds from the flower meadow with a nifty tool that will twist out each deep root while not damaging the crowding other valuables. Echinacea, Rudbeckia, Aster, Corn Marigold, Cosmos, Corncockle, Liatris, Flax, Cornflower, Sweet William, Oxeye Daisy and Toadflax - all mingle with grasses, Yellow Rattle and Nigella - to make, or to begin to make a thick sward. The list is here, named, so that you might try the wild look garden yourself! I've mowed it once over, last week when it was dry, and now I won’t cut again until September. I have to know exactly the look of the leaves of the desirables, so those broad leaved, pernicious ones can be taken out now. And I do know them all, like I know the backs of my hands. Meanwhile my lower back gives me pain and my legs ache as I crouch; such is the ageing process, especially cruel to those who have always been so active.
I am re reading Primo Levi’s IF THIS IS A MAN. If one wants to talk about physical strain and pain, look there. The indifference of one sort of man to another is clearly there: ‘every stranger is an enemy’. ‘For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager’. The concentration camp. Or a different genocide.
I have spent the last 3 months back in Britain, giving my time to my mother and son, who for very different reasons have been more than low.
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