VAUCLUSE DIARY

Saturday 25 April

As I sit rocking on the two back legs of the white plastic garden chair, feet propped on a stone bench, looking west past the since-WW2-unfinished cinderbrick wall of my neighbour’s garage at the patchwork of fields, orchards, olive groves, vineyards on the Rhone Valley Plain, my eyes stop, over towards Avignon, on a layer of brownish black cloud, which is smog over the Rhone corridor of autoroutes up towards Lyon, points east—the Alps, Switzerland, Italy, Germany…and north towards Paris. There is virtually no automobile traffic, but I assume that trucks are still rolling with food for Europe from Spain, Portugal, France. That’s nice, even essential, but it makes me think that the only way air pollution is going to disappear is if the world returns to some idyllic (I say this ironically) pre-industrial time—or perhaps fast forwards into a future of virtual everything.

Still, to end, for now, on a positive note, it is a beautiful sunny day, not too hot, not too cold, as Goldilocks exclaimed over Baby Bear’s bowl of porridge, trees are fully leafed, but the leaves still look tender and new and hopeful, and if a few weeks the cherries will be ripe.