Sailing Through The Countryside - 15 April 2011
Friday 15th April, 2011
We sit in the sunny courtyard of this 13th Century building, which now houses, Les Trois Sources, the B & B where we are staying. The day is clear and still and I’m hoping this clarity will find its way into my mind and enlighten me. The truth is, I’m feeling road weary. It happened yesterday, the feeling that enough is enough: too many beds, too many restaurants, too many towns, too many roads and too little inspiration.
Yesterday morning was as gloomy as my mood: The sky glowering, the mistral still at its malignant play, the air cold down to the bone.Yet in spite of all this, it was a day filled with color. The shades of mauve and purple from wisteria, lilac and iris – shades I always feel reflect a little of Mother Nature’s irony in that we associate these colors with death, and here she is flaunting them in the season of birth. Fields of newly tilled earth the color of sand here, and over there, close to rust. The backdrop of ochre hillsides setting off a field of rape, its yellow creating a color field almost vicious in intensity, and next to it a field of robust young wheat, so green it vibrates. At the far edge of the field, a line of bottle green pines. And how to describe the shiny new green of the grape leaves all a-twitter on their ancient stumps of vine? Or the near black- green of the cypress? The grey-green of the olive trees? And then you round a corner in an old hill town and are hit with a shock of magenta from the flowering Judas tree.
These living colors create their own light, a light which is all the brighter beneath the grey tarpaulin sky.
We stop at a couple of hill towns and in one discover a small shop that is all about honey: we taste chestnut, acacia, thyme, lavender and linden and settle on the latter two, along with a honey spice cake.
In the next village we find a tiny Salon de The and order pots of green tea which we drink in the company of the owner who speaks no English. Five minutes of inspired French arrive on the tip of my tongue and we talk of the peace of the village, of Cartier-Bresson, who took a famous photograph here one which Joel has just unwittingly taken himself! We buy a tiny bottle of wild lavender oil and say goodbye until September.
And so we sail on through the countryside, through the late afternoon, through rain clouds and sunshine, through fields and villages and just before Bonnieux we see the tree that took our breath away this morning. It is an enormous tamarisk, decked out in her spring crinoline, a tattered chiffon of the palest pink slightly grey with age. She shivers and shimmies in the breeze in full glory against the gunmetal sky and we can only behold her in silent admiration.
Back in Bonnieux we shop for cheese and fruit to supplement breakfast and make a dinner reservation at a local restaurant. It’s 6:30 by the time we get back to Les Trois Sources. The mistral is dying down, the evening cold and serene. We take a hot bath and deciding we cannot face yet another restaurant spread our picnic cloth on the bed and dine by candlelight on the spiced honey cake, runny goat’s cheese, lavender honey, pear, almonds and ginger tea.
It is a moment of utter peace and contentment. The moon, almost full, shines in our window and when we step out onto the terrace the sun is setting over the valley.
We lie in bed and soak up the peace that is both in the room and outside of it. In the morning we will learn that our bedroom was originally a 13th Century church and later housed silk worms munching on mulberry leaves. Blessed by centuries of prayer and silk, we fall asleep.