"I want to be a swallow."

words I imagine being said then desire with all my heart...

Hello lovely ones, I hope you are all cool and collected, calm in your homes doing something you love rather than glistening quietly in a corner as inelegantly as I am?

Yesterday I had the absolute misfortune of having to drive to Toulouse. It was a narrow escape from the alternative; a ten or twelve hour return trip to Banylus-sur-Mer just off the Spanish border on a day considered one of the worst of the year for road congestion in France.

Due to numerous and continuous train cancellations Seth and a friend were stranded on a beach—imagine that… as you swelter and melt and glisten inelegantly, aka, sweat like pigs in your homes despite taking every precaution, are you there? me too, I know what you’re thinking, me too—thankfully he found a train to Toulouse, still a five hour turn around but infinitely preferable to the alternative. So, I bagged up my irritations of having to drive at all on a weekend marked as black on my calendar of days not to drive in France, rose early and headed into the non-existent mist.

The city was a writhing inferno of overheated, dazed bodies in search of a cool place to sit that didn’t already have ten others collapsed in exhaustion, a shipwreck of bodies on streets awash with inescapable heatwaves, meaning, it was not anywhere I wanted to be. But, the city of Toulouse is where my daughter is and spending an impromptu afternoon with Rosie made all that was wrong with the day perfectly forgettable, even sitting on a bench in 42c shade temperatures while we waited for the train, although I will NOT forget being asked if I needed a seat on the bus by a very kind young girl—I could have cried—neither arriving home to my beloved hill at 21h00 to a cool 38c by comparison. It felt like its namesake, Le Paradis.¹

Regardless of its name, the hill is suffering in these too hot, too dry days where all is breathless. It is lifeless… in one week vibrant greenery has curled and crumbled to a dusty burnt umber, then silver-white. the river is a dried up sleeping snake of tumbled stones where stagnant pools have barely a trickle of water flowing into them and oxygen is limited to hopeful gasps…

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“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
― Cormac McCarthy

Once there were brook trout and crayfish and rabbits and squirrels and goat moths and ladybirds and honey bees and cornflowers and butterflies and a cool place to sit in June and summer was a bubble floating in anticipation never to be burst.

Settled in these aging bones are deeply rooted memories of all the summers past. I was a delighted child. The scent of honeysuckle on a warm wind for the first time would send me rapturous and victorious into the thickets wild with excitement to feel my sticky palms wrapped around wilting bouquets of their drooping pale-yellow scented heads whose sweet honey-nectar I would suck from the the ends with a child’s abandoned relish while watching the first ladybird of the year stretch her wings in spring sunshine and knowing there would be thousands more just like her gather her up as a friend to take home to live with the caterpillar I found the day before which would have been placed by various bottles of petals in water because, of course, perfume was made that way when you were a barefooted child grown of dandelions, dragonfly wings and dust.

Sitting in the intense heat of this current canicule² grasping the euphoria of my childhood has become a distant hope with a sad tendency to fold the joy of summer anticipation away. Now, as I type—still glistening inelegantly—it is an abandoned nostalgic pleasure resting silently in my pocket, not forgotten exactly but tattered and limp and wan, the ghosts of ladybirds hidden in the dust of dragonfly wings, and, I wonder; what will disappear this year? What tiny beauty of my youth will I never see again?

When I walk up the hill today—or any other day—in the contours of bleached colour before me I see the absolute truth of this world, the gluttony of self-service, of always wanting, of having no restraint, empathy or concern. There is still astonishing beauty, panoramic breathlessness, the forests—some—still stand, their whisperings still carry in the wind; Psithurism isn’t just a word added to an Instagram post with a photo of a tree, it is as tangible now as it was back when the sky was filled with the high pitched trills of a thousand swallows. I didn’t know the name of it then but I understood the sound, how it wrapped around the trees, how, if the wind came from the west rain would surely follow, if it came from the east the sheep would all huddle under tree canopies and hedges. When you have no needs other than to pay attention to the sounds of the trees, the animals that live in the shelter of both their branches and roots, the mycelia that support their entire living breathing lives—and their demise—and the colour of the sky and all its feathered songs above, the words become less important than the understanding.

Today there is a breeze, it is slight, it arrives hot and wild from the west, everything it touches is heavy limbed and breathless. It is the harbinger of a storm. Wild grasses and barley now lay flat in the fields, all shimmering along the lane has halted, the white-gold disc hanging sultrily in the sky is hidden in voluminous smokey-grey clouds, the silence in the wind is deafening. A golden oriel streaks past my window followed by the two remaining kestrel babes, they are in a hurry to hide from the violence that is about to erupt. This too I understand.

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Here, where air hovers hotly… where breathing is not a certainty but a hope

Briefly — this heatwave is ending. I and all that have lain breathless and lethargic can breathe again without gasping in great lungful’s of scorched air, a temporary respite, a short-lived ecstasy, like a piece of gossamer thin, white silk thread caught on a briar, soon it will be blown away again by a different wind, equally scorching, equally breathless but right now it is exquisite. I wait, grateful for the pause, breathing.

I think our planet is no longer just crying in pain it is screaming in agony. I think we who are not wealthy in monetary terms all agree. I also think those of us that are not wealthy enough to actually do anything about stopping the agonising pain of the only home available to us also agree that we should be doing more but can’t because of said lack of wealth problem. And, I think those who have no such problems simply don’t care; one trillion dollars… I can’t stop thinking about that.

I also can’t stop gasping back tears of horror at the tragedy of two children who died of hyperthermia in their mother’s car in the Vaucluse last Monday.

I want to tell you, a field mouse I carried home in my useful-things-while-out-on-a-walk pouch is now living in my woods, healthy and happy with the tiny pipistrelle found by my youngest, most tender-hearted student the day before, that food and water and a cool box lined with softest wool saved him. Alas, I cannot… neither survived despite the most gentle of care. I hope only that both left this mortal coil with full bellies and happier hearts knowing that someone tried. Kimberly and Emily I cried…

I don’t know how many more small creatures I can watch while they—and I—fail to keep their poor parched bodies alive this summer without my own body being permanently and irreparably broken hearted. I hope my skin will hold in that pain.

I realise much of the silence is because hundreds of thousands of baby crickets have dried to skeletons in the meadows.

When I walk out of school to deliver a message to the church opposite, a gulp³of swallows flies around the steeple, I watch them disappear. Before I step in through the two vast holy oak doors they return joyfully noisy on the same flight path, I watch them disappear once again around the steeple then return again and disappear again and again. They repeat this thirty-four times.

Later, outside the barn, four young birds are perched with a wobble on the telegraph lines, three face me, one is looking away shyly as only a scruffy starling babe would when finding itself seated amongst elegance. I can hear its thoughts… ‘I want to be a swallow’. I whisper back, I know sweet soul, I know…

“A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.” ― John Steinbeck

I tell myself it is fine to lay on the silvered grass, to gaze up at a sky that is too beautiful to ignore because tomorrow holds secrets yet to be known and that is a good thing.

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With forever hope of becoming a swallow, I send each of you love, also and incredibly importantly, from the softest place of my heart, for your endless support and belief in me, I need to say I am humbled and ecstatic, thank you, thank you, thank you. ♥️

1. The French for heaven is Le Paradis…

2. The French for a heatwave.

3. A gulp is the collective noun for a group of swallows. There are others like a flight or a richness but a gulp is the most commonly used.