Sometimes you search for the land - 19 March 2011
Saturday, 19th March 2011.
Today we set off for Bar sur Loup and Grasse. I decide to give my boots a rest and wear my little pointy-toed kitten heels. I want to be French. The road to Bar sur loup is vomitously winding and I keep searching for “countryside” that turns me on. I’m having a hard time finding it. We both are and have to keep letting go of comparisons to Tuscany where the land just kept coming at us all the time. It’s not like that here and we’re trying to get beyond expectation and accept what is. This is tough terrain. Mountains and gorges. There is no horizon it seems and isn’t it the horizon that gives us the sense of expansiveness and possibility? So how do we find our way in here? What is it we are not willing to see?
We arrive in Bar sur Loup famished. Park the car and climb up and up and more up, to the top of the old village where the sole restaurant is closed. A nearby statue of Admiral de Grasse looks to be admonishing me for my ridiculous shoes.
I take them off and we wend our way down like mountain goats to the parking lot and voila, ici il y a un bon restaurant! We sit outside in the boiling hot sun and eat fish and shrimp and then the sun is gone and the rain starts and off we go to Grasse.
This is where I feel we begin to feel our way into the country
and into a work of art at the same time.
Now it’s pouring. And cold. Bloody shoes!
But we do manage to find the Musee de Fragonard.
And a pair of new jeans for me. And a little café for tea and pastry and a sweet brocante shop that has a tiny, old glass bottle which I purchase to add to the collection on our kitchen window ledge in NY. Grasse feels good to us, authentic, unpretentious. Joel finds a bookshop - one of those Dickensian places. Who is the French equivalent of Dickens? Joel asks the owner if he has an original edition of Robert Frank’s “The Americans” Puh, he says, Non. Il est tres cher. But he shows Joel another book, a collection of master photographers and there Joel is! Four pages of him. The owner is most impressed. We will return. But now it’s time to go home to TSL. On the way back this happens:
Sometimes you search for the land and
Just when you have given up hope
You find the sky
And the evening pours down on the land
You couldn’t see before and
It doesn’t matter that it is populated
Beyond your desire for what the land
Once was: what is, in nature,
Will always be beyond us.
