SUPERIMPOSITION - 27 November 2011
Dear readers and friends, thank you for all your recent emails and letters of support for us and Flying The Coop. The problem of the last month of no blog alerts was something that happened within Blogger and we have finally found the correction for it.
It seems that the last blog you all may have read was on the 17th of October, that means there are 10 blog posts that have been missed by most of you, and they are among the most interesting of the Provence experience. If you care to catch up then simply go to the Blog Archive on the right hand side and click on the October and November links and all the blogs will be available. We hope you have fun catching up and that you should know that we are keeping the blog going and will be posting 2 or 3 times a week. So, if you do not receive a post after a period of 2 weeks, please, do NOT assume we have stopped but instead, send us a quick email letting us know. We treasure you all and don't want to miss you anymore than you want to miss us!
With all our gratitude,
Maggie and Joel
27th November 2011
We've been back from Provence for 2 weeks now and know that the subtitle of our book is well chosen "Lasting Impressions." This morning when I awoke I saw the big window in Bonnieux and looked through it to the crest of the Petite Luberon, to the lavender field with its 7 cherry trees under which, when we left, lay circles of golden leaves.
I look through the trees and find myself wandering amongst the stone bories and then further up, to the crest itself, I see us walking through the cedar forest, can smell the damp pine-needled earth.
These, and many other lasting impressions surface everyday, the depth of them immeasurable when pitted against the all-encompassing events of these last 2 weeks. Weeks of quarantine from family and friends as we both recovered from sinus infections. Weeks of worrying about Joel possibly needing a medical procedure and the constant worry about my dear brother undergoing surgery, the daily wait, sometimes hourly, for reports from England via my niece, weighing the urgency to catch the next plane over.
Sometimes I will the images of Provence to balance the reality of this gritty city. The subway cars filled with what, to my eyes, seems to be a glaze of worry and hopelessness on the faces of its citizens. Or all the way out there to the urine-drenched madman whose singular odorous statement, while breaking my heart a little more, has me rushing into the next car at the next stop.
And then we're in Soho, that place that once housed industry and then artistry and which is now choked with shoppers. The chic and the wannabe's. And is it anarchy or disregard for life that causes pedestrians and traffic to ignore the red lights? As panic rises in my throat I put myself in the car with Joel and drive a back road through the Luberon where the colors of autumn will remain for us all winter long.
In Dean and Deluca, shopping for our Sunday morning baguette, stifled by an overabundance of hyper-food, I return to Les Trois Source and hold 3 ripe persimmons in my hand, their satiny skin against mine, the ripe flesh slightly pulsing in anticipation of the joy and nutrition it will soon yield along side a piece of cheese from Patricia's goat farm.
And then we tuck ourselves away in a friends' loft, their faces, as the elevator door slides open, so very dear and precious to us. They are our New York persimmons. We lunch on salad and leftover turkey; we talk of each other, our ailments, our concerns for the world and try to think of somewhere warm to go this winter that we can afford and that isn't in Florida.
Back on the subway platform we cling to each other, overwhelmed and saddened. But we have our baguette and a pumpkin muffin. At home we light the fire and cozy-up on the couch, grateful for what we have: a home, love, family, friends, food. Today we have these riches.
We gave thanks on Thanksgiving Day for my brother's return to his home and my granddaughter chose me, her Nana, to be her favorite person for the day. There is nothing like being the chosen one by a 3 year old who has so many great choices in her life. But another relative has a broken heart right now and there is no pretty Provencal image to lay over that.
In the evening we go to the theatre with dear friends in from Paris. 5 short pieces by Beckett, directed by Peter Brooks. We laugh. We cry. We witness the brutality we are capable of inflicting on each other, the loneliness of searching for another soul, and the choice we all face upon awaking as to whether to joyously accept the limitations of the day or to despair at life never measuring up. I rock back and forth the between the two, doing my best to keep the energy flowing and when I can't, I simply superimpose an image from Provence or the farm in Tuscany where in both places nature takes up more space than man.
Perhaps this is the thing that makes the most impression on me: that I am more comfortable with fewer people and a larger landscape. The silence. The emptiness. The arc of the sun. The amble of the cows. The warm eggs in my hand.
