Time and place

While wandering around Collioure (absurdly pretty and touristy French coastal town) yesterday, I stopped at a certain point and looked across the bay at the buildings opposite. Something about the view prodded me emotionally; then I recalled it was exactly the spot where I'd taken a photo of our son about five years ago and then written a blog about the future - what he might be doing in say, five years time, where might he be? art college? music school? And there I was standing on the exact same bit of concrete, lad, not in picture, but at art college in Bordeaux. Funny thing, life, as Mark and I (husband) say to each other fairly often.



View without lad

I felt quite wobbly all the rest of the afternoon and resisted the temptation to call up said son - not true - I did once - and reminisce soppily, and at length, over that particular stage of his and our lives, and what he might be doing in another five years time, etc.
Maybe it was the anonymous crowds surrounding me, or just some residual bit of menopausal hormone stuff but I felt more emotional about the empty nest thing than I had done for months.
Back home now it seems a little foolish, but maybe us parents are allowed to feel sad from time to time . . . maybe it's even good for humans to experience a bit of melancholia, to allow in the memories and dwell on them a little.
It's all good. He visits often, is happy to be here and then he's happy over there in his art and guitar-filled shoe-box - just as it should be.

Beautiful insignificancies

if that last word is a word, and if it isn't, it should be.

Most of my dog-walks around this part of France incorporate vine fields (vignoble) as we are surrounded by them, and quite often the tiny 'houselets' or cabanon, (or casots, if its a walk in the coastal wine-growing areas). They were built as places to hide away from the sun in the grape-picking season, or places to shelter from wind, rain and frost at the vine-clipping times.
Sadly, most of these characterful little buildings have been abandoned over the years, even the ones that had obviously been more than just shelters, the remnants of gardens, benches and climbing roses often still visible.
One of my regular walks features a particularly intriguing cabanon on the top of a hill, usually inaccessible, a rusted wire fence, gate and padlock keeping inquisitive people like me, out. Today the gate was open, so it was my duty as an amateur investigator, 'flaneur' and story-concoctor to look a little closer.
The overgrown garden had obviously once been loved, the clumps of lavender and rosemary still stragglingly visible. A slatted bench still faces the mountain view, although now partially obscured by rampaging poplar and fig.



Inside the cabanon was the usual collection of junk: bottles, broken chairs, collapsed shelves and the blackened trace of a fireplace, but the walls, unusually, held more interesting history - drawings and memos from the 1940s, particularly this quietly arresting pencil sketch that I felt could have been done by Chagall if he had happened to be in the locality and doing a spot of grape-picking.