March 27th. Return.

Returned from a two week stay in England. The grass appears to have grown enormously and for the first few days back I felt like a real stranger again. Not that I didn't want to get back. I had arrived in Britain during storms and an arctic chill. Plastic bags decorated the bleak trees and verges, signage had sprung up and through, like the council knew it was supposed to be spring. Friday and Saturday evenings still sprouted their bunches of lurching blobs; a gross animus pervades. Is this just me?

Yet on return to the mountains I know that I will never be truly at home here, that the traces, signs, faces and features do not share my recent history, that I am a visitor, an escapee from the shades and clouds that drove me here to focus inwards and to the land that might give me motive and sort me out.

If you manage to get up very early in the morning and go out into the snow that fell, just before the full night began, you may see the tracks of animal traffic. These are untainted, as yet, by thaw or new snow. The passers by leave their signs. Here is a hare, two prints in front, with just a trace of hock or thigh. These first are the hind feet, passed under and through the fore legs, which print themselves behind. I follow them alongside and find scrapes where this hare has found tasty shoots. The hills are silent, no birdsong, no cursed dogs. I'm almost ashamed to sully the cleanliness. It's not that cold, just white, but the trees up the mountain have already shed their shawls and the thorn blossoms are like dirty handkerchiefs. I can hear the river clearly; the water sounds are exaggerated, framed by the muffled landscape.

Being a poor gardener one gets excited by very small things. And they are here, the tips of ruffled daffodils around the well. The snow lies like a skirt around each prima donna. In spite of the snow, the season is changing. Molehills are lumped in a diagonal across the field, like big brown mushrooms. I watch a greater spotted woodpecker shin up the bare trunk of a beech. 'Pchikk, pchikk!' Its call ecoes its French name: 'pic epeiche'. Its loopy flight gives it away before the sound.

In the house, ash from the fire fills a metal bucket and fills me with pleasure too. The simple and repetitive routines I indulge in, riddling the stove, collecting the wood and ash, are profoundly satisfying. Yesterday's despair has lessened. Nature might be waving at us frantically, her imperatives obvious, but, as James Lovelock says: enjoy life while you can; and that is why I am here, lucky, in this wild and abundant place.

8. March 9th. Pyrenean Journal. Oaks.

I'm off to plant a red oak, whatever the weather, before I crumble into an elderly bigot.

The wind howls, the sleet streaks and drives and hail tinkers with a tin roof. The broad beans are just miserably proud of this thin blanket of snow. Garlic, too; erect points of bright green hope. No optimistic blackbird pipes up this time. But I am out; winding up the wind, slurping over the field, to dig a hole for the oak. Emile has told me not to plant it too near the fruit trees, as its root system will eventually be unsympathetic to them. That is, the fruit trees will not prosper. Now that is interesting because I also know that oaks planted near other oaks ARE mutually conducive. They can, in a way, share each others' root systems, and, so to speak, download nutrients to others in their group that are perhaps struggling to survive. Ah trees, what magic is working there!

7. Pyrenean Journal, March 8th. Here and there.

After a forgiving February, sleet and hail are sweeping across the plateau. The pale blossom of the blackthorn/sloe is torn from tree and twig by a vicious wind. I'm trying not to let the weight of depression measure my days. I watch the TV, read books and newspapers, write my journal, fiddle with paint and listen to the weather. Outside in the wider world, [because that's what it feels like here; like I'm in a removed space, a world separated from the real, political, conflict strewn planet that does exist], platitudes are breathed, wars are conducted and managed, habitats are defiled, ecosystems lost or interrupted and profits made there. Here, because I'm not outside, because the weather is persistently atrocious, I find myself lost in a mind rant on the corruption, ineptitude and irrationality of the human species.

If we were living at the tail end of human existence, with environments either degraded or lost, what would we dream of? Our lost landscapes? The dust deserts and skies of Ulan Bator? The soft fields and water mills of Suffolk and the Cotswolds of little England? The crusted crags of the Pyrenees or Rockies? The melon slice of a beach or the enveloping forests of our childhood, when trees were no surprise? Or a palingenesis, a new space,a rebuilt paradise?

6.Pyrenean Journal, Some Place, Feb. 22nd

Two booted eagles, with seagull like cries and chatterings pass down over the roofs of the village, coming in from the mountains, followed by two complaining crows. Later on they are higher up, hovering almost motionless, silent, wing edges blurry and fingered, so high up they are difficult to discern, against the azure light, but I can see their pale legs, dangling, angled forwards.

"In the garden again, Alees," says Emile, peering through the hedge, put there to hinder the peepshow.
"Yes, Emile, I'm making a garden that's a bit different, with enclosed compartments to bluff the wind and lots of climbers around them. A wild flower meadow, too, down there, nearer the well".
"Hmphhh, there will be plenty of wild flowers out there, soon". He indicates up the hill towards the early orchid prairies. He has a point, of course, but has missed my stealthy mention of enclosures. I didn't have the heart to include the words: 'more privacy'. I'm not deterred, however, not yet. The welcome sunshine and drying soil are too great a temptation. I grin at him, turn my back and get on with my labour. Did he smile too, before I turned?
Labels: February 22nd. Eagles and sunshine

5. Pyrenean Journal, Feb. 18th.

Marie is back at my kitchen table. She says she likes the coffee and the chat, for a change. We've talked of the emmerging wild daffodils and now she has veered back to the shootings. I'm waiting, holding my breath. "The German soldiers came knocking on the front door there, asking for the two lads. They fled by the back door, just there, where there used to be a corridor, into the alleyway, but soldiers were waiting for them there, too. Oh, they had some information, for sure". "Were they Maquis?" I can't resist asking. She shrugs and her mouth turns down. "Whatever,...they took them over to the Lavoir and shot 'em. And now what do they want to do, the old veteran's committee?" We wait and sip, and sip again. "They want to put up a memorial. Is it going to be straightforward?" We sip once more and wait again. Marie appears to be enjoying the silences. "No! We say around here that those who talk behind backs have several faces. Hmphhhhh! Well, there are multi faced people around here, I can tell you, because the next we hear, there's a disagreement, a debate, even. Somebody doesn't want that memorial. " Her head bends again and jerks in the vague direction of the square. " We'll see."
There are simmering feuds in these hamlets. Who knows when they originated. They are usually unmentioned but ever present, affecting everyone in insidious ways. I'm learning to pass the time of day with many in this small place and I've come to interpret a sudden averting of eyes, a refusal to say bonjour and a swift turn of the head as sure signs of these old wars.

4. Pyrenean Journal, someplace, February 14th.

Emile's wife Marie sits opposite me, drinking dense, black coffee from the tiniest of cups. Her eyes are misty and pink, but this is normal. She's not upset or ill, just rheumy and reminiscing. "I remember my mother in law telling me that two of my husband's brothers were shot, shot right by that Lavoir, there, in the square." She says this with no precursor, no entree atall. "And it all started in this house." In this house? My eyes widen but I`m afraid to prompt; the moment feels too precious and I'm afraid she might lose the thread..No one has told me any histories, any stories of the village, as if they were theirs to keep close. Or maybe they just didn't talk about their wartime past. Or perhaps it's me, the foreigner, who stops up their voices. One thing is for certain; though they appear not to gossip, they know everything going on around them. They have long ears, perhaps even peep holes through the walls, and a village telegraph for sure. Every so often, in conversation, one may nod sagely and tap the side the side of her or his nose. To hear of something as dramatic as a shooting, and connected to my house, now that is worth waiting for. Marie bends her neck and points with her head in an indeterminate direction. " Yes, well, they wouldn't have been caught but for someone betraying them". She pauses, I wait, I say nothing, and she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and says that another time will do for the rest of that story. The coffee was good, though, and the log fire has warmed her up, but she must go and check out the cows.
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3. Some Place, ..........Pyrenean Journal, February.

A grey green covering of lichen, like a burdening of blossom, emerges from the old trees as the snow patches diminish. The grass appearing seems too bright, too intense. A grey, Irish mist sort of day frames the fuzzy orb of the sun. In full light the little owl bobs up and down on the barn roof and makes a cross patch sort of cluck, chuck. Later next month the first swallows will sail in and my spirits will soar. I`m in the field, sinking the last posts into the sodden ground, each barrow load of cement mix aching my arms.
'You'd be better just burying those posts straight into the ground and tamping them in with the soil and stones.' Yes, Emile is peering over the nascent hedge. How does he manage to pop up with advice at every turn? Since the crowbar reaches what appear to be the roots of the mountain at a 15cm. depth, I feel I can't do this.The sun is trying but the wind, amongst other things, defeats, so I plead cold hands and sulk indoors

2. Some Place ... end January.

This was to be the year of making a garden. Well the snow has been down for 2 weeks, newly planted trees are leaning horizontally and the trunk of a young cherry has snapped raggedly at the stake tie. Stored onions freeze in the barn. 'It`s the season', says Emile grimly. 'Nothing to be done.' He pauses. 'It's not always like this.' I'm learning.
'Tie the tree at a lower angle next time,' he shrugs.. I cross the alleyway where the wind shrieks, clump out into the field that I try to call garden. I test the wind as it thumps me, gulp the air, appreciate the razor chill, avoid the mud sumps that lie at the base of my little trees and force my hands to struggle with a fork, levering up a few leeks for the pot. Will it ever be spring?

1. January
The snow is piling up on the window frames and the pear trees are straining against the stakes, holding them against the wind. Chaffinches, like cotton wool balls, fly from stacked bales of hay to barn ledges, hoping to find something to eat in this bleakness. For them it's just a matter of holding out at this time of year. A robin follows me, in & out of a hedge, as I battle up the lane. I have bread in my pocket. He knows it. In a juniper sparrows quarrel over a mystery and Emile's piped music echoes thro' the vast cattle hangar. He says it helps keep them calm. They stare at me, rustle their fodder and rattle the metal barriers. Emile is there too, bucket in each hand. 'Warm eh?' he says. 'In England too?'
'No Emile, in England it's raining, naturally'.
'Ah well,' he adds, 'this cold stings but is prettier, aint it?'

January 27th. and a memorial prayer for holocaust victims was read out this morning in the village square. There was a strong maquis movement in this part of France so they have fewer guilty secrets of their war past to hide. I've been reading Art Spiegelmann's MAUS this week so the speech was doubly disturbing and the weather tends to dampen any optimism, so that's trebly disturbing.