a change of hill

Composing a different tune…

Hello dear readers, writers and new subscribers.

Thank you for returning to my tiny corner of this vast and constantly evolving space that

Substack

has become! Your presence, as always, is much appreciated, your comments also, a joy to read and respond to so please don’t be shy in leaving me a few words if you’d like to. Especially, during weeks such as this one when words have failed to collect in any coherent form. I am diverted by souvenirs of precious moments spent in the blessed sunny hours with my daughter last weekend, which I wrote of here then the subsequent bleakness of being swallowed by dense, achromatic cloud, buffeted by winds and drenched in rain, for the rest of the week. I can’t quite believe how lucky we were considering how short the time slot! 

It was a very different scenario to the weekend just passed…

“Touch is a reciprocal action, a gesture of exchange with the world. To make an impression is also to receive one, and the soles of our feet, shaped by the surfaces they press upon, are landscapes themselves with their own worn channels and roving lines.”

Robert Macfarlane.

In wishing and spending time away…

With the exception of a few seconds where it must have hesitated on its cyclic journey, the sun has not shone its healing light on this little corner of France since Rosie left in us in sunshine filled swirls of sweetest moments after her visit home. Meaning, I have passed far more hours than is good for me—or anyone I live with—gazing out of windows, willing the rain to stop because more than anything else, I just want to walk/paddle/swim—I no longer care—on the slopes of my hill.

We have all had experience of feeling claustrophobic, trapped by circumstances out of our control. We only have to look back at our forced confinement during Covid19 lockdown days. But, we were some of the lucky few back then, mercifully grateful for already living in isolation we felt little of the frustration of the many millions of others less fortunate. Now, as I battle the suffocating constrictions of bad weather induced inertia I feel the weight those days must have placed on their shoulders. It is crushing. I feel the tension playing out its last frayed chords; a guitar string plucked just before breaking sounds spiky. My normally ambient home is rapidly deteriorating into chilly sniping, is too quickly veering towards tuneless hostility. It isn’t my scene, though I am adding to its rhythm.

I leave, I have to, to breathe…

Nespoulières; a different hill, resembling every other surrounding me but I sit in a kitchen with peaceful air, drinking very thick, very black coffee, chatting with an almost blind 90 year old, ex-neighbour and dear friend. I soak up his friendship and smiles, his peaceful and kind persona. His huge and giving—not wanting anything from me—calm heart. He is always calm, so calm! He causes me to question the wisdom and sanity in our need for permanent human cohabitation—we talk of this often, he senses when it is necessary. Sharing these moments of his and my limited time is a soothing balm, for me from fractious hours spent amidst too many minds, for him exactly the reverse, too few.

Roger has gathered wide and far reaching knowledge through his long life, he has a deep rooted passion for history and politics, demographics, geography, sociology, anthropology, archeology also. He can switch from one topic to another without warning or any reference to the conversation we may have been having. He loses me often quoting figures and dates, chateaux and burial mounds, many subjects that are not entirely my forté but I respond where I can, otherwise I’m just happy to listen. And, he too, is happy that I do. Happy to talk and to divert attention from the infinite lack of extraordinary that now make up the days of his life.

I arrive to find him trying to heave a 25 litre drum of heater fuel up steep steps to the ¹secadou. I remind him words I say every week, those he never listens to because the thought of losing his independence is more thought than he can bare, heavier by far than the drum he eventually lets me take from his hands.

Today, he is tired, in a wistful mood of reminiscences, he regales me with tales of his younger days. His life living on the streets of Paris post war but pre 60’s after leaving his family home and violently heavy handed father. He tells me, not for the first time, how he tried to end his life because he couldn’t see an end to the sadness in his future. How he was found by the janitor of his rented room hanging by a belt around his neck from the stairwell over a pool of his own excrement. How he couldn’t abide that he’d failed and was afraid to leave the safety of the hospital bed he was placed in. He tells me how he eventually worked day and night shifts in a café living only on tips and of the unfathomable number of days he went to bed at night without even a single morsel of food passing his lips. All of these stories I have heard before, nevertheless I listen as if it were the first time because listening to his quiet voice is infinitely preferable than returning to the broken and cacophonous clattering of my own.

Inevitably the subject changes. He asks about my work in college and how I find patience sufficient to stay calm every day. His views on the young of today—words probably best not repeated—are shockingly harsh though not seconds later, he sheds tears of grief for every child lost in the name of religious beliefs as we touch briefly—because it is too painful and useless to dwell on—the utter horror of the Israel/Palestine war which he says will never end while religion lives. He is remarkably astute.

Before I leave I carry up bags of nuts for his—exceptionally well behaved—pellet stove, enough to last until my next visit and more just in case of delays unforeseen. As I walk out of his door he is already settled in his huge reclining chair in front of an equally huge TV screen which is blaring noise he doesn’t hear. His eyes already, gently drooping close before I reach the door. I leave with the knowledge that the span of his life has gathered another week of days to its length as it surely dwindles. It is enough.

---

On my way home I stop by the farm in Valzergues to buy extra grain for my hens and sheep but the yard is deserted. Pierre, the same bouncing, smiling Pierre that delivers our logs, does not appear. When I look at the time I realise I’ve spent far longer with Roger than I thought, he is probably out having his lunch somewhere and that I too should be thinking of food and making my way back to my normal.

After making the boys lunch—silently because the notes playing out are still unmelodious—I step out into the afternoon deluge to check my sheep. Their field is now even more of a swamp than last weekend. I need to move them but have nowhere better to move them to so muck out their yurt/cabin, cut armfuls of bamboo, the only green leaves remaining, mercifully they love them. I fill their hay nets and tell them the rain will stop soon, hoping it’s not a lie. My normally happy little flock looks as forlorn as I feel squelching my way back up to the house, a dripping mess of hay, withered bamboo leaves and rain.

I peer up the hill, through the still laden clouds, through trees and branches blown sideways in the wind, watch rivulets of water coursing through the earth, baring its rock and centuries of footsteps beneath, knowing that this landscape, no matter its dark mood of today, is simply in transit with seasonal songs yet to be sung.

Brighter days are beyond, if I care to reach them…

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

― Wendell Berry

On Sunday morning pastel shades of cerulean blue, apricot and gold cling to the edges of fast disappearing cloud.

Rain has halted.

For just long enough.

With love always

1. In occitan secadou, séchoir à châtaignes in French. A small outbuilding used for drying chestnuts.