VAUCLUSE DIARY

Saturday 11 April

In the space between first and second sleep, to quiet my anxious mind and the fear that I wouldn’t fall asleep again, I was trying the remember the beginning of Coleridge’s poem ‘Frost at Midnight’. A line was bothering me: ‘The [something] of this cottage, all asleep / have left me to that solitude that suits/ [suits what? I’d tried ‘meditation,’ which was the idea but somehow didn’t work, anyway I knew it was wrong, and that’s when it came to me: ‘suits/abstruser musing.’ It was the 3 ‘oo’ sounds that were needed. That recovery made me very happy, and I went back to sleep.’

Pacques au feu ou au jeux? as the saying goes. Paul, our 90 year old neighbour, is no longer so sure about the weather. It is again like summer, probably 80 degrees F, yesterday and again today. The forecast is for rain on Monday.

Chocolate Easter eggs? We’re too scared to go shopping for other than the basics.