Saudade; from my desk.
wistfully I watch hills kissed by morning mist and too many years drifting...
Hello lovely readers, friends near and far, curious passers by.
My heartfelt thanks to you all for sparing a few moments of your precious time with me. Welcome to A Hill and I. For those who’ve visited before, as you have probably noticed I’ve been updating — make that faffing — with my website, I would love to know your thoughts… the hare or the daisies? Don’t be shy, I love both which is why I’m asking you to decide! While you’re thinking about it tell me where you are you sitting, right now, on this great and beautiful slowly turning sphere we call planet earth? Please, I would love to know.
Many dear old friends have passed through over the days since I last wrote, leaving the all the warm feelings they evoke, the memories and the hieroglyphs of a life only such close loves understand.
Todays writing, I feel already, will be a missive tinged with melancholy, it cannot be anything but. It is a strangeness to think of it as so when the few days I am gifted each year in the company of such loved ones are filled entirely with laughter and smiles but, as I sit here at my desk looking out on the hills, watching while they are kissed good morning by both sun and mist, I cannot help but feel just a hint of ‘tristesse’.
From my summer writing place on this late august morning…
My summer desk faces west onto three Ash trees and several, smaller Elm (Ulmus minor Mill.) One of the Elms is dying but countless more are showing surprising determination to reproduce from its roots in a communal attempt to replace it, to continue their genetic line. Their sweeping elegant boughs are believed to give more cool shade than most other trees. Greek folklore believes them to be the trees that sprouted to life when Orpheus played his harp for his wife Eurydice while rescuing her from the Underworld. In Celtic folklore the Elm is linked to the god of sun and light, Lugh, and said to symbolise wisdom. I can believe a fact like this as I sit watching leaf-light shimmering through the window.
If I skew my chair just a little to face northwards, double windows look out upon hills rolling gently away into unknown (to me) distant others, then, onward still to the Cantal Mountains. These mountains are glimmering beauties to the eye on mornings like these. They breathe in the sharp freshness of autumn days to come, then, breathing out again through the river mist make it curl, wavelike and ephemeral along the rugged tops until there are no more and in billowing iridescence, it tumbles down to fill every valley. No matter the position of my chair the sounds, the colours, the scents on the wind that ripple the curtains, the mist ebbing and flowing, all are tangible, all give me a sense of complicity in natures wildness.
Just a few minutes ago, or perhaps more, time loses importance as I sit here, I peer through the glass and the elm leaf-light to see more clearly a raucous dispute between a jay and a woodpecker. I cannot see if the woodpecker has greater or lesser spots, an irrelevance as the squawking abruptly ceases when both fly off in their divergent way. I wonder briefly, wishing I too were aliferous1, what they could possibly have been arguing about; an unsuspecting, summer worn cicada perhaps — yesterday I heard a straggler high up in a line of beech trees, surely a last song for this summer, or one of the many Capricorn beetles I have rescued from the lane despite their destructive nature because I hate to find their almost majestic form squashed into abstract road art at a later hour of the day.
The squabbling leaves me in the hush of dissipating mist, sunlight touches the tops of tall trees, fields take shape in the contours of the hills and the morning is once again alive with sounds, all in perfect harmonious tune with the flux and flow of the day ahead. As if to herald its beginning two Raven, their shadows landing first from the great span of their wings, swoop from nowhere to land on a sturdy branch. So swiftly and adeptly they land, as if they are performing a daily ritual and yet I have never seen them so close to the house. If I didn’t know better, I would swear they were looking straight at me, the thought makes the fine hairs on my arms stand on end anyway.
“The only thing old about you is our friendship, which makes us ancient...”
― Nanette L. Avery
Le Barry - for the love of the gift of old friendships.
In my heart I am still far from my hill staying with my dearest friends, their children and their dogs…
Every summer, since moving to France, I drive the two hour journey from the Aveyron, along the winding road through Les Causses de Quercy which is often, frustratingly, slowed by tractors and tourists, into the back of the beautiful city of Cahors in the Lot, turning right under a tunnel, onwards towards Montcuq and finally, always with a sense of relief, just a few kilometres from my destination, I cross the border into the Tarn et Garonne adorned by its fields of sunflowers, heads turned to the sun, to another adored rustic home owned by beloved and beautiful people I have known for almost all of my sixty years.
My son has accompanied us every year of his life, my daughter for two-thirds of her own. These few days we spend together have become sacred days to us all, they are those that we anticipate with the longing of a lifetime of memories replaying in the single hope of creating more. There are no edges or sharp corners and we try, as we age together, not to think of endings. They are days rounded and full with laughter — lines too, now, playing endless games of scrabble (I was not champion this year) of walking and meal preparation. Beautiful hours filled with reminiscence and the hilarity of more aged reenactment of the many thousands of other hours passed, always with the belief that we are the same, that the years in between happened but changed us very little. We believe for a few, too short days, that our minds and bodies are timeless. We are not, they are not, we know this but it adds to the love as much as it adds to inevitable fears.
The ancient Portuguese word Saudade has no translation in English, I will try to explain; think of a vague and constant desire for something that is most likely impossible to achieve, a nostalgic melancholy for something that exists outside of the present but pulls desire towards the past or the future; Not a sharp sorrow or deep longing, but rather a gentle, wistful daydreaming. This is my feeling as I sit here at my desk writing whilst watching a languid morning light awaken. This is the feeling I carry for all the days in between those we spend together.
If we are fortunate, our collective age will grow and eventually, flow into the generations that follow, to continue flowing on the never ending river of life’s calms and rapids that will form our children’s own memories, the sequel to our remaining and enduring friendship.
Thank you all for being those people, you know who you are.
Always with love
Perhaps, and I hope it is so, these words will make you want to call an old friend of your own, one that you know will not remark on long absences between conversations, one that will make you feel as though you saw them yesterday, that barely a day has passed in-between. An old friend that knows, without hesitation, your hieroglyphs!
Something(s) I have loved this week;
’s Endless Yellow begins like this; have you ever had so little free time
that when you finally get a sliver of it
you literally have no idea what to do
because there isn’t actually enough time
to do anything particularly meaningful
I think he might have been watching me…
This haunting story - haunting because it is mesmerisingly beautiful more than that it is an actual ghost story, by
has settled in my bones and won’t leave me be."There are a million ways to die and they are all the same as each other."
Feel something…
And I cannot leave without mentioning again
’s new serialised novel Departures, you’ll find Ben here and ’s Fall Out, here, both very different stories but are faultless and masterful works in audio and word. Praise for both!aliferous (comparative more aliferous, superlative most aliferous) Having wings; winged. Etymology - From Latin ala (“wing”) + -i- + -ferous.
Your words, photos, reflections, once again leave me resting in a silent fullness. And though saudade is perhaps a nostalgia for the unnamed, I feel a sense of saudade whenever I read your offerings—your ineffable grace is part of that longing, but another part is more tangible, a simple longing to be on your hill, to join in friendship in the flesh, to laugh and reflect our days away. Your walk with beauty has forever marked me Susie.
In gentle, wistful daydreams. Your letters are always so beautifully written, they transport me from the rush and hustle of mundanity and to the hills and mountains of France, to the winding drive along a road to friends and to a desk at a window where jays and woodpeckers bicker and ravens grace with majesty. Utterly transporting 💛✨