It’s raining in the foothills of the Pyrenees. It’s been raining on and off for a couple of weeks and the trails through the woods are deep with squelching, slippery mud.
High up on the road towards the Gorge de la Frau, higher still up a long trail by a stream, concealed in the woods there’s an ancient hameau, two or three stone houses joined together with a big stone and wooden barn. If you sit on the bench made of three big rocks to the side of the door of of the main house, with the view of sweeping green hills and valleys, limestone outcroppings like sentinels here and there, a peace overcomes you like the sense you have when you’re settling down to sleep under a down comforter on a cold night. It settles deep. And on a clear night in summer, the stars cover the blackness so thickly that you yourself become star light.
In that biggest house lives a woman who raised children there and saw them have their own children in the house next door. The other house and barn are now abandoned, falling a bit to ruin. In another time, when the was life in all the buildings, the children went to the school in the village three kilometers away, down the steep climb in the morning and up the climb in the evening. The woman cultivated a large vegetable garden and she and her husband and the children grazed cows and sheep. Over the years, she planted beautiful rose bushes and fruit trees and flowering trees, and each year the perce-neige, calendula, columbine and poppies thrived in the southern exposure on the hillside.
Her husband died, her grandchildren left and her children went to find work and maybe are now dead themselves. For many, many years she has lived there on her own, healing herself with plants from the forest, drinking the spring water, cultivating the vegetables and fruits and living in peace. Her great-nephew, it’s said, brings her groceries once a week.
She’s approaching a century of life. In the quiet, her spirit has spread gently. Only a few know she’s there. While the chaos of the world gains energy every day, her peace exists like a well .
I will imagine her life. There is nothing of what we count on in modern life. No computer. No cell phone. No television. Maybe a radio. I imagine she is connected with the layers upon layers of women who have known these woods, who have endured through wars, through famines, through long winters, through deprivation and through the bounty of good years. How does time go by? Does she read? Does she dream? Is she busy with household chores? Is there a cat to sit on her lap and dream along with the rhythm of their breath?
She came when she was young and walked strongly up the trails. Her husband was still new to her when she came. It was a time when mills and little textile factories dotted the villages, before it all began to disappear, the mills sold off to China.
I see her, standing in her vegetable garden, shovel in the earth, stopping to gaze out over the hills in spring, the forest cherries blooming like tufts of white fog, wildly here and there. She thinks of the red rose bush she planted the week before next to the stone frame of the front door that will climb and surround them as they walk out on a summer morning. She dreams. She hears the voices of her children, coming up the trail from the school down the valley. She knows they’ll be hungry. She drives the shovel down into the earth to turn and walk up through that same door to the dark kitchen, passing the patch of daffodils, where she’ll give them a piece of the croustade she made yesterday from the last of the apples in the cellar and a cup of the milk from the cows that graze the hill.
She lived, I’m imagining still, an ordinary country life there in the 50s and ’60s, with the rounds of early mornings that began in the kitchen where she lit the wood fire in the cold of winter and even on the cool mornings of the spring in the Pyrenees. There was always plenty to do getting the children off to school, milking the cow and maybe a goat or two, tending the sheep, weeding the garden, preparing lunch. After lunch perhaps a brief rest or a visit from a neighbor from Pelail, the next hameau up the hill. Then more chores and the return of the children from school in the village, a light supper and early to bed.
In the 80s she became the grandmother of the now two households. The prosperity of the region was fading fast. The meadows full of sheep were vanishing. These sheep kept for the weaving of wool, a tradition for hundreds of years and a thriving industry for the last century, with the countless textile mills, big and small, driven by the power of the running river, l’Hers, were disappearing as if erased. The meadows were being gradually replaced by plantings of pines and spruce for the timber mills converted to use the same power of the water of that green, mountainous domaine of the Ariège.
Sometime in the intervening years, her husband died, leaving her to make her way with the help of whatever family remained nearby, splitting and carrying her own firewood as long as she could, then perhaps warming herself with a gas heater brought up by her great-nephew or a friend.
I hear that last month she somehow fell and broke her leg. She’ll move to a residence with other pretty independent elders in an old stone house bordering on the open fields of an old farm. It’s been converted to a few small apartments with visiting nurses. It’s down in the valley, but still in the foothills of the Pyrenees, only about six kilometers from her home, as the crow flies.
All those flowers up there will begin blooming soon. Maybe my imaginings are skewed but I think her gardens will yearn for her as the rose bushes go untended and the fruit trees drop their ripeness, ungathered, uneaten. But I’m sure she will drift off nicely, remembered by the fields and the stone bench by the door which will all carry forward the imprint of all she was as she passed through life.
