L’Aude is a river that houses three main regions here down south, Salelles d’Aude being one of them along the canals in the South of France. The canals are one of Napoleon’s bright ideas for moving trade through the southern country. That big idea and expanding Paris boulevards and thoroughfares wide and far-reaching were revolutionary, practical and enduring.
Today, after last minute shopping in a quiet mall outside downtown Narbonne, some to-go sushi from the supermarché, and an espresso in the cafe by the mall exit, we ventured to a small hamlet close to Salelles called le Somail, one of the three divisions resting on the Aude. The sleepy port town boasts a tea house and ancient book store, the former closed for Christmas and the latter open for our roaming eyes and feet. Much of the tiny town is closed for winter.
The ancient musty chill air inside the book store reminded us of winters, many of them passed through, wind and rain soaking the stone walls of this tiny librairie tucked alongside the river of moored houseboats, cacophonous ducks and romping dogs–just before the stone bridge. The cool wind hurried our leisurely walk.
The town, abandoned by tourists and inhabitants alike, stood as contrast to bustling downtown Narbonne with its courtyard restaurants a-brew with ale and crepes, narrow boutique-lined lanes, stately cathedrale de Narbonne, and street music. We spent a fine-weather, blue-skied day sightseeing, shopping and eating crepes, croque monsieur, and macarons along the outside booths and stands of the market. Inside the farmer’s market, we crammed all five of us into a tiny tapas bistro of four long bar tables, where we ate duck and scallop brochettes, planchas drenched in olive oil and garlic, and grilled aubergine and courgettes, washed down with local white wine for us and orangeina for the kids.
We are gaining weight in kilos but will be losing it in pounds when we return, so it should be easy. Right?
France Again
Paris
The French. So cool, so unconcerned, yet not really affected. They just do their thing.
We traveled heavy, 8 huge pieces of luggage on wheels yet wholly unwieldy. And lugging that shit through the train stations, all in a line, cramming the already small corridors even smaller. But confused as we were, a passerby gave as an unsolicited direction or tip, all while zipping along, pace unthwarted by our unsightly clogging of the turnstiles and escalators.
It’s a rapid-fire city, yet I don’t feel the anxiety or aggression I find in my suburban hometown. My country is ravaged with anger and hopelessness. I’m glad to be away to de-steam and gain perspective.
Food. That’s all there is to say. Even the ordinary corner brasserie offers the finest. I had cod in a buerre-blanc sauce with sautéed spinach after fresh oysters with mignonette sauce, so fresh and gorgeously good, rounded off nicely with pear Creme brûlée. The pinot was soft and lovely, and the espresso brilliant not bitter. Pure coffee.
I dream of French espresso at night in my beach town US home. Small pleasures.
After a bustling, crowded brasserie scene, we ventured on Rue San Michel, passed the Pantheon where Napoleon lies buried spying on his beloved city, the one he masterminded. It’s the Latin Quarter, full of students on their last days before holiday. The night is crisp, probably low 50’s but still and clear. The old gibbous moon casts a striated glow across the tip of Norte Dame’s buttressed topmost spiral. Our lady peers above the city telegraphing disapproval of burgeoning modernity–and us tourists–clear across town to the tomb. I feel her.
And the 16th century church featuring Bach every Saturday stood eerily sandwiched between stone and masonry, dwelling and commerce. On a brisk night, throat to boot warmed by French Pinot, Paris welcomed us aimless wanderers soaking in the hate sanctuary.
Montpellier
The south threads vineyard to the right to oyster farms to the left as we travel the country road tracking miles of cordoned sea, rhythmic cages to the tide. Down the road thirty to forty minutes from the airport, we stopped at a petit village paper napkin restaurant serving fresh oysters, mussels, cod, clams and conch. Plateau de fruits de mer. Fruits of the sea, so fresh. Farmed local oysters keep the region’s salt locked deep inside the shells. Paris oysters frown upon their peasantry, I’m sure.
We’ll stay in a Spanish red tile roof and white stucco house facing acres of vineyards, dry now in winter. They belong to the nephew now, my children’s great aunt having cuddled up next to her husband’s burial plot. When the children were 3 and 6, we spent a few weeks in summer here when the swimming pool was a chicken coop next to the German Shepherds’ pen. And a pig too. My oldest wondered at a brown pig. Aren’t all pigs pink?
We had fresh laid eggs, brown and imperfect, but full gamey flavor, and we rode bikes and horses along the canals. We opened the loch for one huge sloop half moon house boat of fine resin pine shellacked to shine. An American woman piloted it and invited us on board for a slow-going mile or so. We folded up the stroller and boarded. She was supposed to be spending six months with her husband navigating these canals throughout France after his retirement. But he died instead. The 17th century Canals du Midi persist without him.
The winter before that summer in 2001, we spent a Christmas reunion here, the three brothers together again after twenty years. Three families, the grandchildren from 3 to 21 years old. And mamie cooked a feast as is her wont: oysters and lobster and foie gras and lamb, gratin, frommage, chocolats, table wine unending from the local vineyard, local muscat for the foie gras, and rich, aromatic coffee and creme brule to finish. We laughed and ate.
I see the pictures around the house from that winter. Everyone smiles broadly into the camera, even the brother who disappeared directly after that event, never to be heard from again. He does that. Just disconnects from the family he loves but mostly hates. No one can explain it so I can understand. My smile, as ever, is only half formed.
And now, looking over the land, lush green as ever, only now it’s punctuated with commerce and industry where only horses and cows peppered the open fields. Now there’s a supermarket walking distance where only a ten minute bike ride away tiny corner market serviced this small stretch of street just inside the borders of Salelles d’aude. It’s rural–but not as isolated.
Inside the house, I smile at the pastel green stools lining the green, blue and white tile counter where I once fed my little one in bib and baby seat gripped to the tile to float that nearly 20 pound near toddler at our first Christmas visit. Her mamie planted a Christmas tree, a sapling then. It towers above us stately now, twenty years later.
And six yeas after her first visit, she and her three year old sister, perched perilously atop those high stools, snacked on la vache qui rit cheese and yoplait yogurt. The house looks the same as it did then, only more cluttered. Because its owner has finally slowed. I thought it would never happen, this whirlwind of endless hyperactive cooking, cleaning and chattering. She’s been dying since I know her, 37 years now, except when I see her. She could outrun me in a foot race, I always imagined. But she’s 82 now, and moves slower, like a 68 year old.
I’m older too. The travel is no less painful since I don’t sleep on planes, upright and cabined tightly. But now I feel the aftermath of the struggle in my back and neck, having desperately tried to drift at angles suspended in air. I ache. But somehow I’m less grouchy than those other times. Perhaps it’s the growing up, my kids, now adults, and me, seasoned with too much obligation and not enough appreciation. My kids have taken up the grouch mantle. My mother in law blames me for their grouchiness when they’re tired. No one’s good enough for her son. As it should be.
A humble meal of vegetable soup, brown grainy, country bread, ratatouille, lamb cutlet (for the carnivores) and frommage paired with a young Saint Emilion filled us to sleeping, even after our late hours long naps. Hopefully jet lag lags a little less tomorrow. The chef and her son watch Miss France beauty pageant while the children suck up the wireless they’ve been missing for far too long, at least a day.
Fall of Us
That familiar hum inside and out.
The thrumming TV static-snow blustering my brain
like when I slid down a steep mountain backward on my ass,
the board strapped to my boots kicking up torrents of snow
coating my eyes and nose as I plummeted blindly
facing only where I came from.
That happened then for this very day–teleported.
Today’s that cold-faced day.
The snap-to-it chill smacks mightily,
your face-skin taut with expectation,
braced to ward off the front,
the sting of knowing you could trip,
lose your step and your knees buckle,
your bones splinter and your ankle crack.
Something tragically foretold unbeknownst to you,
the usual chaos lurking out there along your life’s line.
To feel that approaching crisis is to live.
But only on days like these,
wedged between enough and not enough
and itch and scratched.
Our clothes are fresh but our visions stale, our breath coffee rotten.
These days smell like winter kill.
But it’s only the dying fall when crockpot lamb-stew and mulch
pepper muddy moods built for cutting,
crying into dust and hanging amulets.
Her neck exposes naked-ruddy latticed vines,
burnt and creased in spider legs enfolded,
smothered and feathered like aortic-bony leaves,
en-sleeving jugular flush–
as if the world pumped incessantly
in syncopated gurgles,
muffled to the dull roaring hum.
Soccer College Showcase in Vegas
The sun and wind, whistles and screams.
The engine roar of passing planes muted by vast, absorbent sky and grass,
dirt and plastic.
Baby chuckles and exasperated sighs,
“Oh God” and the like,
reactions to the terror of play,
a mother’s fear,
a father’s glory.
And the ice cream jingle floats atop the astro-turf swelter,
a complementary note to children at work.
The song sings of promises and earned rewards:
ice pop, pat on the back, handshake and a wink,
and maybe a letter, informing
“We accept your excellence this day,
this very warm, breezy winter day on the playground of risk and fortune.”
It was just a dream…
Credit: http://s3.amazonaws.com
Softly now a wind swept plain threads the dusty sky
in tapestry’d landscapes open wide in an endless eye,
for who comes a’spin trailing cyclonic tear stained anger?
A dream, it was, a dream and only a dream.
The bone rumblings nauseate my awakening.
Fist pummeled popping despair explodes in fracture;
my joy is hiding, darkened in a webby cervical corner.
I awoke to the morning’s whistling words;
my feet were cold, fallen free of blanketed body heat.
Spring came early, opened prematurely, and so left; now
the returning cold deceives, rankles a ramshackle house,
its half way adults of changing complexion, doors open wide.
They pass and return like the shoreline soaked sand,
intermittent, persistent and constant synchronous rhyme.
The words of my awakening were mere warnings.
Almost over, I squeeze between staying and going
come and gone, keeping me presently here, now by the by
jammed in by the leaves that fill my window’s blind view.
The green bleeds through me and approves noddingly,
quivering its reply in jittered tenuously ticklish goading:
Come out to the world, connect and extract its comfort.
I am a lonely laughing over it runner.
My feet, bare, exposed, never but lightly touch the pavement,
their steps imperceptibly driven past the crowds’ avoidance,
padding by in silent wide eyed stare, solemn mouthed,
a hasty reproof in the reading for the uninitiated.
I told him I never once felt enough a part of this world,
not enough out of it either and I meant it then as now.
Running steamed skin trails scents of the night’s visions.
Those words–never…enough…–circulate behind my shades,
blinking the sweat from the lids into the skin crease burn,
not remembering if I said them, actually uttered the words.
We were just talking or texting, smoke in the sage room,
grainy air or fog or hail, obscuring our voices in gassy ice.
There I told him, I never once…never…felt…, it was a dream.
A Misty Mother’s Winter Birth Song
On a Winter Solstice morning I carry wood to the fire
and stoke the arcing flame’s urge to obliterate night.
Borean breath burns those bones of trees slant ways
fueling gulps of scorching air borne to the sun’s rays.
Mother-child squats and stares her eyes pierced red
wondering where the winds have taken off the dead.
Her child-mother speaks no more of willow branches.
A baby gone old too, a sooty, sallow skinned witness.
Sheltering arms of her wisdom’s rock a bye morrows
I miss, her torch words of smoked images we chose.
Mother mine of childlike mind your birth was foretold.
Alit on Winter’s day, a searing blame to mothers cold.
With spoken mind’s hibernation, a wintry song is nigh.
Buried deep in fiery sleep is sensor twitching sunrise.
Yet a love surrounds her misty eyed daylight slumber
as Elven sprites spark shards shot of ember’d lumber.
She is my meadow lullaby cracking the icy pines now,
a cataract covered window pane framing a faint brow.
The pitter patterned words of incantations made flesh
are a witch’s brood of progeny, a sweep of stony ash.
The shortest light of the longest night brightens a sky
she never sees anymore in wheel chaired walk a bye.
Maternal flickers of the northern lights in babies’ arms
is left the love encircling a stormy eye’s chaos calmed.
On This Winter Solstice Morning
On this Winter Solstice morning, wishing you and yours powerful peace in the short sunlight hours and a good, long winter’s night sleep.
There’s a Certain Slant of Light – Emily Dickinson
There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons —
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes —
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us —
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are —
None may teach it — Any —
’Tis the Seal Despair —
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air —
When it comes, the Landscape listens —
Shadows — hold their breath —
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death —
In the gaze of the other 