LAVENDER BLUE - 2 July 2011
2nd July 2011
We're back in Provence and suddenly time has collapsed like a punctured concertina and all those weeks of pleated angst? Gone with the first whiff of lavender.
We arrived here at Les Trois Sources in Bonnieux about 1 o'clock on Thursday after an easy flight; easy, of course, being a relative term when it comes to the modern-day experience of travel. I hate to admit it, but I'm of an age when I can remember the romance of flying back in the early 60's. Then you dressed for the special occasion it was. Your loved ones were allowed to come to the gate and hug you good-bye or hello and as the place taxied toward take-off you could see your friends and family waving as if to royalty.
When we arrived our room was not quite ready so we picnicked under the mulberry tree in the courtyard, a lunch of baguette, brebis and banon cheeses, apples and best of all, cherries from the orchard. Then our beautiful room freshly prepared, we unpacked, set the alarm for a two hour nap and disappeared into the depths of exhaustion. When we awoke, if that's what you can call it, really it was more like being bludgeoned out of a coma, the best we could do was stumble to the pool stopping under several cherry trees for juice laden fortification.
Oh, these cherries: black ones whose skins are as soft as the flesh, orange ones that pop in the mouth with a tang. The place is literally dripping with cherries and as I wrote to a friend yesterday, surely it was cherries that got Adam and Eve into trouble. It couldn't have been a Granny Smith.
I think we managed two laps apiece in the pool without drowning and maybe ten minutes in the sun before realizing we were too fragile for the heat. So we drove into the village for some dinner supplies, serrano, more cheese, 3 types of tomatoes and some apple juice and sat out on the terrace with our feast gratefully free of menus, waiters, music and chatter.
These simple moments in life, when you really pay attention to your needs and realize how little you need to feel sated are, for us, moments of utter joy and wonder. To sit on this terrace again, with an evening mistral at play and look out to the wild side of Provence, sipping on juice and feeling the burden of the last few weeks begin to lift, was almost too much to take in. The sun was beginning its lazy descent and we decided to take an evening walk on the property. And so it was that we rounded a corner of the building and came upon our first field of lavender.
Oh lavender. Bring us to our knees. That gasp of perfume-laden blue, lit by the low sun, a million stems frenzied by the wind in spite of its calm and soothing properties, seemed like a metaphor for the period we had just come through. How easy it is when we are whipped into our own frenzy by the mistral of negative circumstance, to forget our own essence. How far we come from our center of well-being when the slightest of fears raises a specter of doubt, the doubt then spreading like a shroud over our lives, weighing heavily on faith and leaving us bereft of trust.
Not so the lavender. No mistral can rob it of its essence. We walked into the middle of it, bent low to touch and smell it, picked enough to season our bath, to press on our skin and to place under our pillows letting its gentle spirit waft through our dreams.
