Common Treasury

99. Mid April. Gerrard Winstanley as a TRUE DIGGER declared that the earth was a 'common treasury for all.' This was in 1649 in England.  In Languedoc, on a curved wall, edging a mountain road, is presciently written large  ' Le monde n'est pas un marche'...the earth is not a market place.

Bertrand has cut his ancient white Renault van in 2. The back part has become a covered trailer and he tows it with a 'new' old blue Renault, rattling through the square and trundling up the hill to deposit garbage beside his fields. This pile grows rapidly and is a cause for local concern and a few shaken heads. The centre of this heap is  the  engine & bonnet end of the original van.

Yesterday he and Sylvie passed me in the van, as I toiled up the lane towards the village. They passed and then slowed. Their heads turned to each other as they must have spoken.  I approached and saw the back seat piled high with groceries and rubbish, but the  derriere van  trailer was empty. Ah ha,I said, No thank you, I like walking; not far now, thank you again. They drove away grinning, trailer bumping and grinding!

Snow has come and gone. Up high there are still  snow pearl necklaces, shimmering in the cold sunlight but they too melt and the line rises hourly through the blue ranks of firs. Swallows come in low, scooping up the growing numbers of insects but the chill in the air surprises.

98. Wild cherry and pear blossom billow up the mountain sides. Every day the colours change, grey to white to cream to pink. After temperatures of high 20s in late March the days have turned grey and blowy. Plenty of rain. Daffodils have faded, tulips bounce in the winds and the cuckoos call. The first I heard in mid March. The rusty trills of cirl buntings and yellow hammers. Yellow brimstones, tortoiseshells, speckled woods and clouded yellows fly when the sun comes out, which it does between the giboulees. Eagles come in from the southern countries. A short toed one pale & glinting in the light and followed always by crows. The harriers skirt over the grass blades, twisting and sliding on their air, tacking and jibing like sail boats in a wind. Swallows passed around 20th. March and on the 25th. more stayed. E. has ploughed his potager and planted his potatoes. Sylvie has managed to kill all the rose cuttings I gave her in the Autumn so I`m potting up some more. Finally a plaque is erected in the square on a wall just above the lavoir. A grandfather and uncle to M. are memorialised at last. But she shakes her head and says she`ll have to keep watch. Things might happen to it apparently.

97. Very early April again. For two weeks in March the thermometer reached daytime temperatures of 26 degrees. But the skies are grey and sodden now. 10 degress it is outside. The cuckoos call, the first few swallows arrived on the 25th. March and today, in the blanket of drizzle I see a hoopoe in twirly flight. It moves as if tethered by some invisible thread to something more fixed. It flutters and pauses, twists on and back showing off its blacks and whites.
Tractors lug manure to the fields and new calves are out in the yards.

Talk is of a theft in the nearbye village, an opportunist sort of one when the householder disturbs the intruder and nothing is taken. Heads nod and shake and if the police are mentioned there is a cackle of derision. I hear this story over several days but can get no further or interesting information. I lock my back door slowly and carefully before I go out for a short walk. This is the first time I have bothered to do this.

April 2011.


96. About living in another land, Colm Toibin says, '.....it hits you that all the things you use to keep going are missing - friends, habits, spaces you`ve made, all those things are gone. So you are absolutely down to zero.` *

I'm beginning to feel this now so it is time to leave this spectacular spring and head for England. When I return the grass will be knee high once again and some flower shows I will have missed.


* Interview with Susanna Rustin in the Guardian Review pages, 23/10/10.