Here we are. What are we doing between the coming in and the going out?
Stories about wanderings here and there and across the oceans both of time and distance.
There are those who are focused on summits of things
The very highest points they can find.
They must somehow get to the top
No matter how hard the grind.
But in my mind (and my heart)
There is only the urge
To glide without weight to the start
Of that place where the surge
Of the light
Fills every last cell
With delight
And joy is as open as the vast June sky
Where, weightless,
The body takes flight.
Since we live in the countryside and work in our huge vegetable garden, we see the effects of climate change in all the little bits of nature. The apple trees are blooming earlier, alongside the cherries, who traditionally sing their song along with the pears and after the early wild plums in a dependable succession.
The lilacs, even here at 500 meters, are now in full bloom, a sight usually seen in May. Olive trees that typically don’t survive the cold winters in the Ariege have begun to assert themselves. The flies started multiplying vigorously at the end of February, gathering by the hundreds on the concrete window ledges. People living close to nature everywhere have been noticing signs for years. Cyclical patterns are no longer cyclical . They have begun overlapping, never reverting back to the patterns of change people have recognized for the hundreds and thousands of years of years since the ice sheets receded here in Europe.
Two years ago, after the two or three canicules (heat waves) of the summer. I noticed the non-native pines that were planted two generations ago were turning brown. These were the trees planted by the local farmers when the wool industry truly collapsed and the sheep disappeared from the foothills of the Pyrannees. They were the new road to prosperity. I pointed out the large patches of brown in the forest to several locals who replied that they weren’t worried. It was part of the normal way that trees protect themselves in the heat. They would come back to life the following winter and spring. They never did. After the third summer of prolonged periods of extreme heat and two years of dryness, their normal defense mechanisms failed. There are now huge swaths of dead pines through all the forests. The region has come to depend on its forestry and the growing tourism centered around the incredible hiking and the beauty of the villages and the mountains. Foresters are working overtime to cut and mill the wood from hectares of dead trees before another summer of heat sparks dreaded forest fires.
But for me, the most telling bit of observation has to do with a tiny seasonal pond up along one of the trails into the hills nearby. It’s really no more than a largish puddle. Beginning each February for the five years we have lived here, I’ve watched the progress of the clutches of toad eggs deposited by some mysterious mother forest toads. They have somehow learned to count on the fact that the water left there by the winter rains lasts long enough for the eggs to hatch and the tadpoles to mature and hop off into the leaf mold of the forest floor, a process that takes till early summer. It must have been this way for countless seasons, there in a moist part of the forest above a mountain stream.
I take a walk there every few days during the spring to watch life develop. As we all know from the ecology classes of our youth, each form of life in each niche has an important function in keeping the whole system healthy. Although toads contain a poison which discourages predators, there are some birds like the herons that fly over our vegetable garden that have developed an immunity to the toxin and seem to consider toads a delicacy. These forest toads in turn eat many kinds of insects, caterpillars, slugs and worms. Here, In the foothills of the Pyrannees, they may help keep the larvae of some invasive insect species in check.
Last February, the puddle was minute, but then a good rain came and filled it enough to allow the toads to drop their eggs. I saw good clusters of transparent eggs, each with its black center. There was just enough water to allow the egg masses to be suspended.
The next few visits confirmed they were still there. The black centers were getting bigger. There had been a couple of fairly decent rains, but not enough to fill the puddle to overflowing as it had been in the two previous years.
There was no more rain after that for quite some time. My next visit revealed that only one smallish cluster was still wet. A few tadpoles had made it out and were sluggishly moving in what water was left. The next visit, the puddle was no more than a bit of mud. The egg cluster and the tadpoles were no more.
A week or two later, we had a few days of rain. Miraculously, another egg cluster appeared. Sadly, the puddle dried again in a week or two and the second attempt was done. That source for new toads was no more.
This year there wasn’t much moisture in the indentation in the forest floor when I first walked up to inspect around the end of the first week in February. When I went back a little after the middle of the month, there was a bit of an ice-covered puddle with what looked like round crystal globuoles, each with a black dot in the middle. Tenuous situation, but hope springs eternal. When I went back on the Ides of March, they were just barely hanging on, enough ice-circled water to surround the maturing egg mass that was left. Three days later, a bunch of tadpoles were swimming around in the waters made by two days of warming rain.
When I finally made it back three weeks later, the puddle was no more than a dry, leaf-covered hollow, indistinguishable from the rest of the forest floor. All the tadpoles that should have been swimming around in the puddle, about half way to getting their front legs, gone.
In nature, there are many redundancies to ensure survival, but if this reservoir of life didn’t make it two years running, how many more?
We are confronted day after day with the evidence that living our lives as we have is not sustainable, yet we do everything we can to create the illusion that our human lives will go on and on pretty much as they have forever. We believe in the illusions woven around us since our birth. We don’t see much of the detail down on the ground.
Now I am wondering how I can somehow teach my two granddaughters how to survive in a world where their puddle may be drying up more quickly than the grownups are able to imagine. I wish I could teach them how to plant a working vegetable garden, but they live in a tiny apartment, far away. I’m glad Disney switched to more of a Warrior Princess model around the time my first granddaughter was born. We’ll need all the brave, wise, compassionate, fearless, undaunted women we can get. I’ve got two coming up. They’ve survived a heck of a lot already, buoyed by love.
The wind blows hair
Across my face
as I walk the country road
And in its trace
There is no self
But that self which I have known
Since wind first
sent those strands
To dance across
The the blank screen of my mind
And set some delimiter
Of space and time
In vastness undefined.
The who that sees
This dance
Is neither young nor old.
This who has no containment,
No set of aching bones
No heavy worries,
No sorrows in a storm
No glances set askance
To see some form
That blocks the light–as solid
As the stones
It seems to be the light itself
That witnesses this flight.
This luminescence shining
From the flowers in the field
Has nothing it must yield
To learned impossibilities
Or sticky sensibilities
The who this is
That fills with soft delight
Is all there is.
I’ve known it since a child.
The other who with edges tight
Has vanished
And will only come to take a seat
When once again demanded
by love and life’s
most irresistible commandments
Before fading
into night.
There he lay
on his back
No breath,
so still.
The chill that spread
To my touch of fingers
on his neck.
Blue around those lips
Which had spoken to us
With such joy,
such anticipation
Of things to come
A friendship just begun
As we’d climbed
With bubbling sense of jubilation
Through dry oak leaves
Along the trail.
The feel of his cold jaws
between my still warm hands
The small face
With eyes
Closed tight
Gazing nowhere.
The smell of morning breath
On such insensate tongue
Such intimacy
With what had become
A rigid object
containing nothing
But what was like the ground
Where he had dropped
That life he had been living
With such spirit
Such flights of choice
Having gone from this place
Of flesh and bones
Of minerals and stone
Freed from bounds
Of cells and voice.
Pressing the chest above a heart
So still
Again, again
Pounding on the door
Of a room
Emptied of all
Its personal effects.
All family photos, letters
Rugby clothes
Lettered tee-shirts, shorts and pants,
Even rumpled bed.
Nothing there to mark
The warmth of all he’d lived
Just empty chambers echoing
With all he‘d sensed
All he’d become
Since first breath
Filled his lungs.
Hearing voices calling out his name
I called out to all I hold within
To bring back the breath
Of this body that had contained
Such spirit, those words that
Promised more to come.
My own breath now
For moments
Came in gasping gulps
Set with tears
And strain.
No answer came.
Just murmured words
and breathing
Of those whose love
Had intertwined with his
And who will still be hearing
Echoes of his name
This is the summer I learned how to breathe. No, it’s the summer I learned to be breathed. Well, actually it’s the summer I discovered I AM breath.
I think that’s it.
It’s been a summer when the universe itself was breathing so deeply and so slowly that breath seemed suspended for longer and longer moments. The fire of breath spread and wafted here and there. Water went deeper and deeper into the essence of the breath until, dispersed so finely into the hidden molecules of breathing, there was no longer enough moisture for even mosquitoes to reproduce and thrive, despite the heat they love.
I chose a pretty challenging summer expedition even though it involved no planning, no added expense. I had only to remain at home and bear the heat. The trails were too hot and too filled with biting flies to go on pilgrimage through the woods and over the mountains. I worked from time to time in the garden in the cooler air of morning. There, my thoughts broke free and brought me news of all that our species is facing: the droughts, the floods, the hunger, the sorrow, the dying, the strain. I pulled the weeds and picked the beans to give us food. To feed our friends.
But my travels took me far into all that space that’s contained inside. I needed no ticket, paid for no accommodation. The fuel for the journey was the fuel of emotion, burning more purely than when I was young. It was often a hard road but the view was worth every bit of dust and bump and discomfort.
Towards the end of summer, having seen all that, I got into my old car and drove through the gorges and countryside, past Cathare castles and spreading vineyards to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. There I joined my daughter, my granddaughters and my son-in-law who had , together, made a truly grueling journey of thousands of miles of flights, and lines and taxis and hotels. Like a miracle, we were there together, in each other’s physical presence, there where the watery breath of the planet washes back and forth , touching the body of the land, transforming it with each coming in and going out.
There, by the incredible blue of the sea, I watched the emotions my life has engendered. I saw them plainly, heard them, smelled them, tasted them so poignantly in the way one’s experience of everything shifts when one travels. We bathed for hours in the glorious healing, huge water, riding the gentle waves. In those moments in an unfamiliar place, the beauties shine like gems, the lens of the soul breaks free and both the wide scope and the fine detail are somehow simultaneously in focus. Then later, I hugged my family goodbye in the sweaty marble streets of Montpellier, my breath breathing the enormous ache.
Now the season is changing. The heat has dried the leaves on the trees. There’s more zucchini to make into fritters or chutney or bread. There are apples in a box in the basement. The winter squash is coming on. A bit of rain here and there has given the grass a bit more green and will bring out the Cepes in the forrest. The last flowers of summer are fading, their stems beginning to brown, their green blood slowly withdrawing, back into the breath of the earth.
My body seems to barely exist. I think it was finally washed away by the pure, clear, warm salty waters of the sea, the same fluid where it was created, molecule by molecule. I know it’s still there with some sense I can’t name. I can feel its outlines when I try. There are things that prick and ache and itch, but it all seems to exist in the breath. I watch as emotions come and go, in all their colors, sometimes becoming huge without warning ike bursts of fireworks, expanding into the void forever and then fading away ever so imperceptibly, until each spark is finally extinguished and the moon returns to rule the night sky.
That’s where I went for my summer vacation. Now, as the air begins to finally cool, I sit at my desk in school to pay attention to what comes next. I wait for the rain and feel breath going out and coming in. I smell the sharp smell of pencil shavings. I hear the ticking of the classroom clock, the scraping of chairs. The new teacher is here.
It’s been two months since I’ve returned from my trip to the States. The summer here in France, cool and wet much of the time then suddenly very hot and dry before retuning to rain, has now turned the corner into fall. The time has gone by as if it were a heron on it’s flight home. Today, looking back through a lens, I can just make out the whirlwind that swept me there and back.
I prepared as best I could for the trip. I had waited for a moment when Macron had clearly said that Americans would be able to travel to France if they were vaccinated. I should be able to get back to my home in the Ariege. I bought my round-trip tickets. For weeks, I gathered presents and thought about what I would bring to each of the people I would see. It seemed so very long since I’d put my arms around any of them.
I packed carefully, unpacked and repacked the two suitcases I could now take. It was allowed as part of the ticket package I had to buy in order to anticipate yet another border closure. I made sure I could access the Covid-19 vaccine certificate on my smartphone. I printed out a copy, just in case. I checked and double-checked the other requirements for entry to the US from France and for my re-entry. I contacted all the people I hoped to stay with and those I’d visit.
My daughter had used up all her time-off from her job coping with two young children in a small apartment. She had patched together expensive child care for the summer but was missing a week, so I chose that time. I felt a pang of deep regret that the US doesn’t care enough about its people to provide such basic services as care for young children. Most other relatively well-to-do countries see such things as human rights. I looked forward to taking my granddaughter (who I’d seen only in two dimensions for so long) to the parks of Seattle, getting to know her again in her eight-year old form. What transformations would this unusual time have produced in her developing personality, in the expanse of her mind? How would my three year old granddaughter react to someone who she really only knew from a computer screen.
The day arrived when I would begin the first stage of my trip. Thunderstorms were predicted for the afternoon. My plane would leave early the next morning from Toulouse. I’d booked a hotel room near the airport for the brief night I’d spend before launching myself into space. We left plenty of time to drive from our village to the castle town of Foix so I could catch my afternoon train to Toulouse. I had scheduled a taxi to take me the few blocks from the motel to the airport the next morning, knowing from my last trip how sudden downpours could keep me from walking the few blocks.
On the way to Foix, the skies opened. Rain poured down so hard I could barely see to drive. Winds gusted with such force that big branches were falling here and there on the road. When we finally got to the autoroute, the storm had almost ended but, somehow, as happens unexpectedly, something had blocked the tunnel that diverts traffic around Foix. The traffic jam to get through Foix would delay us at least another hour. I might barely make it to my train.
The delay got longer and longer. By the time we arrived, frazzled, at the station and I ran to see if perhaps the train itself had been delayed a few minutes, the people walking back from the platform told me the train to had been totally cancelled. No one knew why, but it was uncertain whether any more trains would come through that evening. Someone speculated that branches had fallen on the tracks. We would have to drive to Toulouse and Walter would have to drive back alone– without a license. “Trust to the Fates and let it go,” we agreed.
We made the trip, I checked in and we said our good-byes. I found a hotel restaurant within walking distance, had a decent meal and tucked in for the night, checking all my papers and passport before falling asleep for the few hours I had before my alarm went off. Walter called when he got home to tell me he’d made it back without incident. The back roads had been quiet and clear. I could now turn off the lights and drift off.
Waking with a start to my alarm, I got dressed quickly and wheeled my bags down to the lobby, empty at 3:30 am. A man, dark-skinned like so many in the hotel trade in Toulouse, was preparing the croissants and pastries for the breakfast that wouldn’t be available for another hour. I said “Bonjour” and asked if I might have a croissant to take with me. He smiled, wrapped one in a napkin and handed it to me. I turned to walked through the glass doors to start the long, long day travelling across an ocean and a continent.
In that enchanted time of day, the air was dry, dark and silent. I could be anywhere in the universe. I grappled with the parking lot gate, feeling dopey for not getting it, read the sign again, tried the directions again–no luck. The nice man from the lobby had fortunately stepped out for a cigarette. I motioned to him that I was stuck and he sprinted over to help me. I slipped through the gate saying “Merci, Monsieur. Vous êtes si gentil”. He, smiling indulgently again and saying “Pas de tout, Madame. Au Revoir!” went back to his duties in the dark motel.
I stood on the sidewalk waiting for my taxi. I waited ten minutes, called the number I had and got no answer. Another five minutes passed. Worried, I figured I’d better start walking. Turning on the GPS on my phone, I began to walk towards the airport. The instructions became more and more obscure. Was I really supposed to walk through this back alley? Couldn’t be.
Beginning to imagine various disasters, I turned around and started again, my heart starting to race. Before I could get back to the beginning, a taxi pulled up beside me. Was it my taxi or some random taxi looking for rides? It was my ride, come looking for me, cross that I hadn’t waited. His last ride had taken longer than expected and he had come as quickly as he could.
I made my plane easily. The woman who checked me in verified my negative PCR test. No one ever asked again. No one ever asked at all to see the vaccine certificate that had caused me such anxiety.
It seemed that I had chosen to travel in the window of time between that time when it had not been possible to fly from France to the US (except for “essential” reasons) and when a real onslaught of bookings were made. The plane was only about a third full. Anyone who wanted to stretch out on three seats was able to. I won’t say that it was actually comfortable, but it was so much better than sleeping fitfully almost upright, fearing that at any moment you might fall over on the person next to you or drool on their shoulder, that it felt like sheer and unanticipated luxury.
I arrived in San Francisco airport a bit earlier than scheduled. The airport in Toulouse, although busy even in the early morning, had been quiet. You could hear conversations here and there around you, but the general noise of human activity was subdued.
Here in San Francisco, as I walked out into the big hall, it was as if the volume had been suddenly turned up by some unseen hand. Groups of people went by, masked but still managing to speak loudly enough to be heard for a good distance. The men were particularly loud–their laughter was loud, they gesticulated broadly and spoke as if addressing a group in a bar full of music and chatter. The background music was loud. The announcements were loud.
But not everyone was loud. There were the older couples sitting quietly together, just as in France. There were small families with a child old enough to be looking at their phone or Ipad sitting quietly together. There were lots of individual adults of all shapes and sizes, walking aimlessly or determinedly, a small rolling suitcase following behind. But then there were the groups of young people that looked like sport teams off somewhere for a meet, talking continuously, laughing giddily, unmasked for the most part. I was overwhelmed by the activity and the noise. I found my gate and sat for the hour or so of my waiting time, looking at my phone like everyone else, creating a little shell around me, drawn every few moments to peer sideways into the lives of the other humans around me. They were all going somewhere different from the place where they usually found themselves, each now having arrived on a new stage, some easy with their lines, some searching for direction.
The plane to Seattle carried the same noisy little groups, their members calling out to the flight attendants for this or that. Things seemed quite amiable. People were enjoying the opportunity to travel again. They were light-hearted. I thought “I actually like this about Americans. We don’t tend to put a lid on things.” I began to remember what it was like to be in this place, to be so accustomed to it that it really was all that existed.
When we arrived in Seattle, I was still feeling pretty fit, despite only an hour or two of sleep here and there for about twenty-eight hours. I had been drinking lots of water during the flights, and eating only fruits and a bit of vegetables and bread. It seemed to help. While I waited for my bag at the Seattle airport, I turned around once clockwise to reset my body’s orientation as instructed by my learned friend . No one stared. I found my way through the fairly familiar landmarks of the airport and walked the long trek to the light rail station. It seemed like miles.
The train ride gave me time to settle into the now-strange atmosphere. A country with myriad cultures I have lived a life in, a city I have come to know over forty years though never my home, now they are places that dwell only in holograms in my mind. Being present in them again gave me the sensation that I had suddenly been sucked through some hole in the universe into an ongoing film. And I hadn’t been hired to play a role. I had to figure out where I fit in the unfolding screen-play.
At the first stop, a young woman covered in tattoos, her blond hair cropped close, skillfully lugged her bike through the open train doors, shifted it around and slid it into a space reserved for bikes. She sat down across from me and at a slight angle as not to intrude. Looking ahead, a wisp of a smile played briefly around her lips, an acknowledgement of my attention. As we pulled out of the station, she turned her head towards me and asked,
“You coming from the airport?”
“Yes” I responded. “I’ve just arrived from France.”
She nodded.
“You must be tired.”
I remembered my line in the script. The tenderness between us had awakened it.
“Yeah, that’s true. It’s a really long trip, especially now with Covid.”
We were done. She lapsed into silence, her eyes unfocused, gazing at the other side of the car. We traveled together in a kind of satisfying peace until we reached her station and she reversed her deft actions with her bike. As she paused for a slight moment to wait for the doors, she looked over her shoulder towards me and said with a warm smile,
“Have a good stay. It was nice to meet you”.
“Thanks! You have a good day, too.” I replied, returning the little wave of warmth in my own smile.
The next stage of my journey had begun. I was a long way from home, but home.
Remembering the Big Obsidian Flow, Newberry Caldera, Oregon
The black stone that is not stone but
a piece of earth’s mysterious bowels
Astonished by its appearance in the oxygenated landscape
Its molecules frozen in that millisecond of emergence.
We, the humans, see what it can be.
It is the knife that cuts both ways
Slices atom from atom
Parting astonishment from astonishment
So that we can slice so thin
That even flesh does not pause in its production of cell upon cell
And has no recognition of the parting.
It is like the bird,
Cutting the air for such a brief moment that
Air needs not know its passing.
From where has this blackness come,
From where this sharp flight?
What can we do but find it
Somewhere in the inventory
Of the soul.
It’s windy, wet and cold and for the first time since we’ve moved here to this village, for several days I had no urge to go out to the forest to walk. Yesterday I had the same feeling of disquiet and lassitude. Yesterday, I indulged the mood as a grace period for New Year’s Day. Today it just feels like giving up.
But the day before yesterday, the day of New Year’s Eve, I began by saying I’d take a short walk and ended by climbing up the hill to the path that leads up to Montségur. I only went up to the top of the hill, a good pull, just up to where it levels off before it begins the real climb.
The sky was grey, the light flat, but the smell and feel of the deep layer of oak and beech leaves under my boots still filled me. The trees along the way, some with roots growing out of the old stone walls, still spoke to me. On the way down, the view of the orange-tiled roofs of the village against the snow-dusted hills made me stop in my careful descent over the muddy, slidey track, to breathe in the feeling of living here in a place where our species has been rooted for so long. Today I am just disgruntled and, though I want to sit and read, nothing really eases my spirit except writing.
Most of the people of the village have closed their shutters and lit their wood stoves. Unlike the old days, many are watching their télé or are planted in front of their computers. I will leave the shutters open like the American that I am. I want to see what’s happening out there. I want to see the light, even the dim, grey light. I don’t care who sees me as they drive by. I don’t even care if the woman who is “the-repository-of-all-village-knowledge” (for whom I have real fondness) peers up to try to find me through the second story window where I sit typing and glancing at the road. She can tell I’m up here through that keen sense we all have when eyes are focused in our direction–a sense of something furtively flickering deep inside our head. I turn away to release the magnetism and go back to my typing.
And then, today, the sun came out, its brightness felt only for a couple of hours around mid-day. As it was beginning its descent down towards the mountains, I made myself set off for a walk up the hill into the forest, deciding to wander as far as I wanted. I had to get back to the trees.
I reached my sitting spot as the light was pulling away into the further valleys. Crystals of icy snow stuck to moss here and there. The light here, deep in the forest, was at an exquisite tipping point, grey, flat as if one was breathing ether through one’s eyes.
My sitting stone is like the back of a horse. I straddle it as if riding bareback. The tree behind me grew around it, embraced it. They have become one being. I feel the cold granite between my legs and I let my warmth expand into its slow atoms until I am a bit colder and it is a bit warmer. I sit in the silence.
There is no breeze. The earth slopes dramatically down away from me, the trees riding it like the trough of a great wave. I let myself be carried by its silent, still motion. The force of it is cleansing, like the great pull of the ocean. Everywhere I look, I am moved to stillness–by the brown of the layers of wet leaves, by the brilliant green of the moss shining in the dimness, by the flecks of crystalline snow delicately riding on top of the moss’s fuzzy miniature forests growing on part of fallen trees, the patterns of the bark on these vertical beings that have ranged themselves all up and down the slopes of earth, breaking apart rocks, turning them, as they stretch out their roots with such patience, into the very earth that feeds them.
When I finally get up from the rock, feeling the cold as the air abruptly chills with the draining away of the sun’s rays from the last east-facing hillside, the silence, the presence of the trees and the soil and the moss has become me, replacing all thought, all noise.
It is now the next day. The silence of yesterday is still with me. With snow starting in the night and falling through the morning, I have climbed up to see the woods decked in all that glorious whiteness. With the big stick I had found in the spring to help me over the slick rocks and have kept hidden in a spot under some brambles to wait for my frequent return, I am making my way down along the muddy and snow-covered track. Breathing in the silvery, dim light, I alternately watch my feet as they place themselves on ground where they won’t slip and look up to observe all the exquisite detail of limbs and bark, lichen, dark and red leaves here and there clinging to bare twigs.
Suddenly– a large bird, barely perched on a branch piled delicately with snow, barely displacing any of the crystals held together by their mutual cold. And suddenly, I recognise it as a hawk. Without thought, I know it by its size, the upward sweeping of its wings as it lifts, somehow remaining still. But now, for some incredibly small instant, there is a flash the color of the sun at the base of a wing, a flash of an orangey-bronze patch under a strong uplifting feathered limb. a sudden revelation of hidden beauty as stillness and movement are somehow combined. Deciding that my presence disrupts the flow of his life’s movement, he is flying in a trajectory through the trees, up and over, gone.
My whole being vibrates in response, tasting this moment, absorbing it like the nourishment that runs in the blood, like the air that seeps into the lungs and is drawn up by all the cells and moved out by the lungs once again, a different substance. Filling to emptying, emptiness to fullness. That brief moment had become the whole universe inside me, rising up and out forever.
Teddy, the way I remember it, just appeared one day. But maybe that’s not true. There may have been discussions and plans. When I came to visit for the first time he was established there on the land that nestled so beautifully between the breasts of the Vermont hills, so fragrantly colored in autumn, so dusted with white on bare branches in winter, green and soft and flowing in the heat of summer.
He was not in the old sugar shack they had converted into a home, but off at a distance. He had built a tiny log cabin, chinked with moss, roofed with scrounged shingles, where he lived on his own. It was a beautiful little place, everything neatly done with a kind of meticulous care. At first it was very simple, I was told, a single layer of logs,a bed on a shelf on one side, a small old wood stove in another, a small pile of books and some blankets and cushions. Perhaps a stool for the rare visitor. He came for super with the group most days, cooking in his turn, his two long braids dangling over his shoulders, tied together in back to tend to the beans or the soup or to cut into the huge wheel of Vermont cheddar.
It’s hard to remember his face. It seems it was tanned, even in winter. His eyes were dark brown and settled rarely on human faces, preferring the focus of trees, earth and, while cooking, beans and fire and pans. When my eyes did settle on his in the moments together, sitting for a break after cutting trees for our winter wood , they were steady, intent, clear, dark, yet shining gently from the interior. But that was later, when we had a few more precious conversations as we worked together in the woods, I learning he had been, unbelievably, an Eagle Scout and he learning, impressed, that my father had been an editor of Boys’ Life Magazine and had written responses to the “Letters to Pedro”, the mascot donkey of the Boy Scouts. Incongruities.
It’s the way he moved that I remember most. His slim body glided across the paths, his feet silent on the leaves and earth. He was neither tall nor short, but straight, erect still when climbing up the rocks on a trail, the presence of his form always held quietly. He might have been an old man, but he was not. There was patience about his movements.
He spent much of his time in and around his cabin, tending to the world from his position in its center. The rest of his days must have been spent out in the forest, exploring, looking, finding, mostly solitary.
One day when I was sent to find him to see whether he wanted to join a trip to town, he was gathering moss from the circle around his cabin and pushing it into tiny holes in the insulation of the cracks between the logs of its walls with a small stick. He was squatting on the ground as I approached, saying,
“Hi, Teddy.”
He gracefully stood, pushing himself up without effort, and turned to come towards me. Stopping a few feet from me, in seeming respect, he said,
“Hello.”
“I’ve come to see if you want to go on a shopping trip to town.” I said.
“No,” he replied. “I don’t need anything.” He paused for a long moment.
“Would you like to see my cabin?”
“Oh, very much!” I said, feeling greatly honored as a newcomer by this offer. He gestured with a sweep of his arm towards the wooden door.
As I remember, it was late autumn, the brilliance of the leaves mostly gone, some orange and bronzey-brown clinging to the trees lower on the hills where the sun came late in the day. A trail of smoke came through the metal pipe on the cabin’s roof. I ducked a bit to go through the door and entered into an enchanted room that seemed somehow larger than the tiny cabin could contain.
The small wood stove to the left of the door filled the space with heat. A bed on a platform to the right was covered with two woolen blankets, one a dark red. To the left on the other side of the stove was an alcove with a small window looking out towards the hill behind. A round of a very large log was set under the window with a green plastic basin on top. A black cast iron pot and pan hung to one side and a plate, a bowl and a handmade ceramic mug sat on a shelf on the left-hand wall of the room. He showed me how the hook for the round cover on top of the woodstove hung on a convenient hook. He took it down, and inserting it into the small square opening in the cover, lifted the round cast iron piece and set it to the back on the stove top, revealing the glowing logs underneath. He reached behind us for the cast iron pot and put it over the hole.
“This is how I cook.”
“Have a seat.” he said, motioning to the stool. “I’ll make some tea.”
He took a plastic water container from the side of the makeshift log sink and poured a little into the pot.
“That will heat soon.”
He stepped past me and reached to a wooden shelf carved from a split of a log and took down an old book. Opening it, he showed me a page with pictures of several kinds of trees.
“I found this in a shop in town this summer. I’m studying the types of trees.”
He handed it towards me, and I took it from him. “Look through it. The pictures are beautiful.”
He busied himself getting tea leaves from a small metal tobacco tin, a strainer and the mug. I looked through the book, exclaiming to him over one tree or another and asking a question or two about whether or where a tree was found in these woods around us. The water soon boiled and he poured it through the tea strainer into the mug, setting it on the stove. He carefully took down a small basket which hung on a hook by the opening side of the door, away from the heat of the stove, and brought it to me.
“Owl and hawk feathers,” he said. “I find them from time to time up on the hill. Feel them.”
As I gently reached out my hand, he tipped the basket toward me and my fingers touched what felt like the energy of the air, smooth and soft and without weight.
When the tea was brewed, he handed it to me. “None for you?” I said.
“No. It’s for you.”
“Thank you,” I said, sincerely grateful and feeling a bit guilty and suddenly shy.
I took a sip. It was lovely, a bit minty but smoothed by some green, slightly fruity tasting leaf.
“It’s so good. What is it?” I asked.
“Wild mint and verbena I planted in the garden.”
He showed me other small treasures as I sipped my tea. A piece of wood that seemed to have the head of a duck, A large piece of quartz with a rose streak. An owl pellet. A fat, long, oblong seed pod. A big piece of birch bark, so smooth and white with its black markings. “I’m still thinking what to paint on that,” he said. He stood over me and we looked at it together, admiring its markings.
He showed me how on the inside the planks were fitted together. “I have the logs on the outside and left over ends of planks from the yard in town on the inside. Between the two are pine needles for insulation. There are no air leaks. I have to open the door every once in awhile, even in the cold, just to let in some air.”
“And, oh,” he said, as if an afterthought, “I almost forgot this. I just finished it.”
Animated in a way I hadn’t seen before, his eyes smiling, he showed me that in the corner behind the wood stove, a kind of small metal wash tub hung on a nail. Above it, hanging from the ceiling, was a large tin can with holes punched in the bottom. Around it on the wooden planked ceiling was painted a blue sky with a fluffy white cloud in the middle just above the suspended can. He demonstrated how the cloud hid a hole, plugged with a piece of wood, painted to match the cloud and large enough for the end of a small hose. He went to the door, opened it and motioned me to come outside.
He pointed to the roof near the stove pipe.
“See. I have a five gallon container of water that I can put up on top. Then I run a hose with a valve down through the hole and into the can. When I’m ready, I put down the basin, get undressed, stand in it, and open the valve. A shower. The water’s cold, but I’m warm.”
Going back inside, that warmth embraced us.
“It seems like a perfect little home,” I said, as I picked up the mug to finish the last of my tea.
At the compliment, he looked away slightly, out the small window at the back.
“Yes. I like it, too,” he said, with nothing but an internal smile, now settled and still once more behind his eyes.
Having finished my tea, I handed him the empty mug, and, putting on my coat, said “I guess I’d better get going. We’ll be leaving for town soon.”
He pushed open the door and waited, standing aside, for me to step outside before following me and closing the door behind him. As I turned to say goodbye, I saw the face of a racoon appear briefly in the bushes at the edge of the small cleared area. It quickly turned and vanished.
Teddy had seen it too. “That’s Ralph,” he said. “He’s a friend.”
“I thought racoons were untamable. I’ve heard they can be dangerous,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” said Teddy. “He’s not tame. He just comes to live near me about this time of year. This is the third year. He hangs out and eats with me. Last year he climbed down from the roof onto my shoulder. Now he’ll sit on my shoulder sometimes and come with me into the woods. He won’t let anyone else come near him. “
“That’s amazing!” I said.
“Yes, but it’s a big responsibility. I have to make sure he doesn’t get into things in the outdoor kitchen. He’s learned to open jars. Their paws are almost hands. And I have to make sure I have enough for us both to eat.”
He paused for a moment, looking out into the trees.
“He came to me so I’m responsible for him. But it’s not just him.” He looked all around us.
Indicating a broad circle around us with his outstretched hand, he said, “I’m responsible for everything in my universe, the cabin, the trees, the rocks, the plants, the animals, the humans, the insects, everything. I care for them constantly.”
He looked away as if the act of speaking this had been a serious decision, a risk.
He followed deferentially behind me down the path towards the main house in the big old sugar shack, where several people bunked together. Just before the garden, put to bed for the winter, he stopped.
“Thanks for showing me your cabin. See you later,” I said, and walked on.
A few steps later, I turned to see him still standing there, contained, straight yet at ease; solitary, in his way. He waved. I waved back, reflecting his respect–for me, as part of his universe with the plants, the earth, the animals, the bark of the trees; for him, as part of mine, still living inside me now along with the paths through the forest, the walks with friends down the road in the snow, and the unbelievable illumination of the blazing colors of the trees for those brief days in the autumns of Vermont. It is living alongside the sight of the dark, furry pine trees that I see through my window in this moment of my life, an accompaniment to the browns and greys of the bare branched trees, vibrating always upward.
The year is quickly coming to an end. I suppose we have a need for beginnings and endings, however arbitrary. The world of people around me seems paused, a bit listless, waiting, relaxed but a little bored.
Here, they are anticipating a feast on New Year’s Eve, perhaps some inebriated viewing of fireworks down by a lake. For me, it will be quiet, one day just melding into the next.
The ground is covered with frost these last few mornings, the sky clear and blue-grey until the sun rises high enough over the foothills to fill it with that intense yet evanescent blue of winter. Last night the moon hung there above the mountains in its most fragile form, the slimmest crescent facing Jupiter, the two sparkling and exerting their magnetism, one towards the other. A concert of such delicacy and jollity that it was almost unbearable.
Things are beginning to hum a bit now as the village comes to life in its Sunday form, some people driving to the boulangerie before it closes at noon, only to reopen on Tuesday. One or two quietly, almost secretly perhaps going to church in the town nearby but more going to hike somewhere in the mountains, their “batons” stored in the trunk. Soon there will be cyclists going by, just one or two now and then, not the chatting groups of summer, coming one after another down the road that lead up to Montsegur.
This is my occupation as I sit, not disturbing too much the bone that is mending itself stealthily with new cells somehow, deep inside, blood carrying the materials where they are needed. Who knows?
This afternoon I lay down for a nap in my study, the sunlight streaming in the southern window, a chill still in the room. In the moments of waking, the great luxury of it bathing me, the little memories of a Christmas some sixty years ago floated in on the particular quality of the light.
When I was some eight or nine years old, my father gave me a box of candied violets for Christmas. What else he gave me that year in the usual extravagance of his Christmas giving, I can no longer remember. There were certainly marzipan figures of Santas and snowmen and apples and peaches in my stocking and expensive toys under the tree, but it’s the beautiful little hat-box-like container with a violet colored satin ribbon handle that captivated me.
When at first I unwrapped it, I remember only the delight of how pretty it was, violet and cream with clusters of painted purple violets strewn around on the label. The words on the box were in French, a language I’d already begun to learn in my enlightened school. My mother spoke French and taught it sometimes in the schools where she worked. She read aloud the writing on the box as she pointed to the words, “Les Violettes de Toulouse”.
Entranced by the evocation of a city far away, I gently worked the top off the cylindrical box. Inside, cushioned in violet-colored tissue, were the purple violets I knew from my days of playing near the stream where they grew up in the grass and between the rocks. I picked them for decorations for my tiny rock villages. But somehow these had been transformed into fragile-seeming crystal rocks. A fragrance of sweet flowers and sugar, somehow a bit musky like the leaves of the forest floor. Pulling back the tissue, I inhaled and inhaled again, sitting cross-legged in front of the Christmas tree, The light in the big windows of the living room warming my cheeks, I touched them, all packed together, crunching a bit against each other. With my thumb and finger, I pulled one from its nest and put it in the palm of my hand where I could study it better.
“Eat it!” said my father.
“Really?” I asked, aghast.
“Yes,” he chuckled. “It’s candy made of real violets.”
I put it in my mouth. The sugar began to melt, carrying with it a flavor on the tongue of that fragrance of the sweetest of flowers, of spring forest and sunlight, of gardens from picture books–a revelation. I crunched it a bit between my teeth, a delicate crunching like nothing else, a little explosion of a flavor sweet and touched with the slightest acid of green stems. A treasure from France.
For the next month, as school resumed and the days became ordinary once again, it sat on the dresser in my bedroom. Each day, going to my room to change out of school clothes, there it would be, that exotic box, waiting there. I’d hurry, and half changed, eat just one, letting it melt on my tongue like that first moment under the Christmas tree, recalling something extraordinary, something of another world.
I wanted to make the box of them last forever, but, of course, well before spring, they were gone. The empty box with its tissue paper sat on my dresser for years, a hiding places for treasures, preserving just a small whiff of the fragrance of France–violets.
Now this memory transplants itself to the Toulouse I am getting to know, a city of rosy red brick buildings, of a beautiful tea shop, a cozy restaurant, a beautiful square, parking garages, spreading banlieus and streets filled with university students and demonstrating yellow-vests and police barriers. A place where, at a Prefecture in an office building, we got the Cartes Sejours that allow us to continue to live in France. Now I remember it is also the city of violets, the city of those transfigured flowers.
The light recedes onto the eastern hills, rosy. Another day is passing. There will be a fire in the woodstove and dinner with vegetables from the garden. Somewhere in all of this a transition must be happening, a movement of one cycle into another, spiralling onwards.
