The slow(ish) days...
Notes of December - week 3 (ish)
Hello to all my dear readers, friends and family—actually you all feel like family here so I hope you will forgive my delay in writing week 3 of Notes of December. I have a feeling hope you understand.
I thought; writing once a day, just one paragraph of words, easy-peasy, I can do that! I did, for the first two weeks, even the first day of the third week, then free moments began drifting off into the fathomless necessities that make up the days before Christmas and my promises to both you and myself with them…
So here we are, you and I, mellowed in the slow days after the day that was the cause of such delay and finally—a little breathless—I have a few of those lost moments gathered into one place, free of festive obligations to catch up and write to you of those days past before…
December 15 Filled with a childlike joy for an ethereal golden mist greeting me as I open the shutters on my last free-to-be-alone day before Christmas, I walk for three hours. I pass hunters stationed in every field, most lying, propped up by damp grassy hillocks, weapons beside them no doubt cocked, ready for their prey to be flushed by others with dogs from the forest—though I wonder how ready they will be when they are so intent on looking at their mobile phone screens—they neither look up nor acknowledge me as I pass them. I’m grateful; I could have been the beast they were hunting!
The disappearing copper pot is a mystery we are destined not to solve, it is gone, vanished into thin air. Two of us know we saw it, my husband thinks it is I that placed it outside the door ready for its seasonal planting, I though, thought it was he… though neither of us remember doing so. Baffled, we find another
The day ends, the mystery remains and with it another…
Bells are ringing—not church bells—from the valley, though curiously they do sound like sleigh bells…
December 16 -19 Tuesday morning under a last glimpse of blue sky. For a short distance in the morning my singing friend follows me, each time he alights, he sings a few notes—perhaps to let me know he is still close—then carries on. I am delighted by his company, a rare friend who can keep pace with mine while walking.
These three mornings are brightened only by his songs.
The days ahead roll out in slow-motion scenes from a movie any one of us could have written the script for. Nightmarish and ineffectual last lessons infused with an ever accelerating cacophony of anticipation for the days to follow. Cut!
Once again there is the scent of snow blown from the mountains in a sky that threatens snowflakes but none fall.
December 20 Friday—the last day of term—a communal, if silent, sigh is visible in four pairs of exhausted eyes as the day begins. We have organised an easy day knowing that attempting normal lessons would be a futile exercise for all concerned. Helped by their families, prizes are donated by the children for1La Quine which takes place in the canteen, the only room large enough to hold the entire school seated. We don’t consider bad sportsmanship, neither do we have a clue how to make hot chocolate in the urn provided by the 2APEL or torrential rain forcing us to return to classes afterwards using the stone steps of the ancient tower—usually prohibited from use—causing even more frenzied elation than the game!
It is perhaps not impossible to believe that one day could last as long as this one, neither that it could end in tears. Mostly ours…
When the day is over, I feel waves of calm lapping gently over me…
How misleading calm can be…
December 21 - 22 Toulouse beckons; I have agreed to pick up Rosie, her best friend and bags filled with gifts and food, excited as a child to see her despite trepidations of making the journey in my ageing—recently3injured car—and Christmas shopping on the last weekend before the event! Added to this the forecast is horrendous; three times heavy traffic slows to crawling pace on the busy motorway, visibility zero. Curtains of torrential rain sweep across all lanes in a violent and unforgiving wind. It is relentless. Excitement rapidly turns to fear, trembling—unaccustomed-to-driving-further-than-the-local- village—hands clutch the steering wheel , I pray for the ordeal to be over; both the rain and the journey.
Toulouse is drenched. Ever persistent rain and late Christmas shoppers a merciless obstacle course; as we cross a bridge—I’m not sure which one—we lose the umbrella into a churning mustard coloured La Garonne when a gust of wind, too strong for the flimsy metal frame, turns it inside out and whips it from hands too frozen to hang on, eat a late, much needed, delicious lunch behind steamy windows in a tiny Italian restaurant hidden in back streets, end the day—as planned because neither of us can face it before—on the fourth floor of the busiest department store in the city and leave, congratulating ourselves for not passing out in suffocating heat of an almost riotous Christmas hubbub.
The journey home the following day is worse!
December 23 For two days it rains, non-stop. A news report informs me 2024 has been the second—only the second—wettest year of the century but Monday morning bounces brightly through the shutters and a wintery sun makes an essay of the clouds as they sashay across the sky and we walk. We have mistletoe to find and I know of the perfect—accessible—ball near the river.
A pair of curious cormorant fly over meadows transformed into sparkling turloughs as we drop into the valley, wild boar and deer tracks skirt the edges, I smile, not surprised by their number, vowing to be polite to hunters with mobile phones! The land is saturated, walking down the slope takes ten minutes of slippery hilarity. Climbing up again while dragging a ball of mistletoe—four times the size I remember—is an hours laborious workout Rosie and I almost give up on. Suspending it from the ceiling in the only place it can be—without knocking anyone out—another!
December 24 There are days that hold a deep sadness from the very beginning…
I will not subscribe to the idea that we must know another being in order to love it. Love is not reliant upon familiarity, it forms many a varied and shifting shape.
I find one tiny red feather outside the barn door. It is all the evidence I need to know why the morning is silent, why my heart is broken.
December 25 Christmas morning is shrouded in the sort of dense impenetrable fog one might expect rolling in from the sea. In the silence absolute of an ocean of droplets I imagine a fog horns’ mournful wail from a passing ship on an invisible horizon, or the distant call of gulls in a murky grey blur of chalky cliffs. The fog sits motionless, ghostly and uninviting, an invisible threshold on the side of a hill.
Rosie and I make fresh scones for breakfast, delighted when we find a forgotten pot of damson cheese and apricot jam in the cave to serve with them, set a festive table with instructions for the boys to wait our return and walk into the eerie gloom. We walk the entire circumference of the hill, returning without having seen a single living soul, to the same colour we walked out into when we left.
It is a colour that remains outside for the whole of the day, while we make a most beautiful rainbow indoors…
From a broken heart with love and rainbows always in the making
Susie xx
Week 1
Week 2
The French for Bingo! ‘Quine’ is rare a word that can be both masculine and feminine. I love that! No faux-pas!
APEL - Associations de parents d’élèves de l’enseignement libre - PTA in English, though perhaps this has changed, it is a long time since I was a student!
I have owned the same car, a VW Golf, for twenty years, bought new when we arrived in France I adore her and she runs well, I refuse to change her for a younger model when the need is purely superficial but after ‘une petite bêtise’ (you will have to look that up) on Tuesday evening in a blur of mouse induced fatigue and an unanticipated set of traffic lights, I was worried about hidden damages…
I grieve for your fallen feathered companion Susie, and I rejoice in your rainbow. I am in awe that you navigated the Christmas rush on 24th in Toulouse and I’m glad your VW is surviving. Another week of freedom and (relative?) calm before it’s back to work. Sending love and wishes for a peace filled time xx
Susie, I am always transported reading your work. Thank you for reminding me of all the wonder, the beautiful and the fragile.