Across Rue Abbaye Paul Mouton, in the garden of Clos Ste. Devote, laundry is pinned to a line: lime-green towel, lavender towel, yellow napkin, aquamarine washcloth. Beyond that, bamboo. Beyond some bamboo two candelabra’d plane trees–or are they sycamores? Red tile roofs make a crazy geometry up to a line of pine trees beyond which rise terraced vineyards. Beyond which lie more pines & limestone cliffs, the pattern of which, in the complex play of shadow & light, resembles cuneiform.
If places are always communicating with us, maybe the ways we inhabit them indicate the quality of our listening…
The bell of the church with three names strikes four times. 16:00. Four pm. The first quarter moon has made its journey half-way across the sky, east to west, white shadow in a blue desert.
There are so many doves, & they have so many things to do–or maybe just one thing they do over & over. It is dizzying to listen to them, three notes coming from every direction at once or in succession. Then to have one, two, three of them burst across my field of vision or its periphery. The whistle-hush of wingbeats, that close.
Here the way of living seems gentle–an impression which may have to do with the fact that I have little to do but sit & watch the birds, the sea, or to walk to places with spectacular views.
Yesterday we traipsed up to Cap Canaille, a limestone cliff which is the highest point along the Mediterranean coast. You simply walk up from the town of Cassis. Up & up alongside vineyards & villas with tennis courts & swimming pools. About the time you think you can’t go up anymore, you come to the road that says you are almost there, at the foot of the real trail. Which winds among rosemary, feathery broom, & other shrubs I sadly can’t name…
At the top, or one of the tops–there seem to be at least three–I lay eye-level with the gray & golden lichen, wanting to be as flat, as old, as they, just long enough to peer over the edge…
Feeling instead a sudden rush up, a dizzy dimensionality, a forgetfulness–or was it a remembering?–that made me back away.
Headiness I feel even here, on the terrace of the place I will call home just another week, birds winging by.
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