Paris, 23 May 2022

A few days in London, my first trip since the plague, and back to Paris on the Eurostar last Friday. There had been a weather event in northern France: electrical storms that shorted train lines, resulting in cancellations and delays and, most comically, in retrospect, train substitutions; ‘You are now in car 13, any seat,’ the woman at the Information Desk in the Departure lounge at St Pancras said. A sprint…in short.

Now it is Monday and rain is falling, making rain’s lovely street music, a lyric accompaniment to the jackhammers, trash collectors and whatnot of everyday. Zinc roofs shine. Unsure what to expect weather-wise for the rest of the day, I have opted to remain for now in my red nightgown, which, anyway, could be a dress. Mornings are for writing and reading, today my usual, with the addition of Derek Mahon’s An Autumn Wind, found on my shelf. It looks unread: when, where did I buy it? I often keep the price tag, so I know, but in this case, no tag.

The Vaucluse, 12 March 2022

In the next town south from us, our fruit and vegetable merchant is gathering donations of foodstuffs, bedding, diapers etc that someone with a truck will deliver to Ukraine, or keep until the first refugees arrive. The town hall is compiling a list of families who have volunteered to put them up. That is the town I can see out my small attic window, red-roofed, peaceful, rising to a mound. Between us and them, cherry orchards will soon be in bloom.

I’ve just had two poems published on line in Literary Matters, one called ‘Blackberry Clafoutis’ and the second is ‘Jimmy.’ I hope you enjoy reading them.

Today I bought a pedometer. I am missing biking and I think a pedometer may arouse my self-competitiveness enough to ensure I get out for a walk every day. Today it was down the Boulevard St Germain to the Institut du Monde Arabe and back, past a sporting goods shop, hence the pedometer. My destination was a lighting store to check out reading lamps. When I got home it occurred to me that I could attach a clip on lamp we have to a music stand et voilà! The end of the sofa is transformed into a good place to read these long dark nights.

The temperatures have warmed up 10 degrees (F), but the sky is mostly still grey, with every now and then a perfectly beautiful day, as this past Sunday when we ventured to the suburbs (Ville d’Avray on the edge of the Parc de St Cloud, west of downtown) to see friends who moved from their small Paris apartment two years ago to a luxuriously large fixer-up outside the city.

Dusk. Church bells ringing. As of this week, masks are no longer necessary outdoors, but lots wearing them them. Streets quiet, café terraces populated. I don’t hear any tourists.

Paris

Temperatures have hovered around freezing for two weeks now, skies alternatively blue and the grey of the city’s zinc roofs. When I hear from a niece in Aix-en-Province that she eats her lunch outside every day, it’s hard to believe. It is always hard to believe that the weather is different in the places you are not.

A few days ago we struck out down the Rue de Seine towards the river, across the bridge and through an archway, a kind of tunnel, into the Louvre, and then through another tunnel of buildings into the courtyard with the pyramid. A man played the accordion, people took photos, but there were no lines to enter the Louvre, and almost no languages other than French—an Italian or two—being spoken. We struck out into the Tuileries, down the river side, around the bottom and back up the Rue de Rivoli side where a series of playground spaces—some trampolines, a jungle gym, a merry-go-round—were dotted with children. It was almost closing time, or maybe suppertime for them; their parents were issuing 5-minute warnings. The carousel played its last tune. We walked on, back across the bridge, resisting roasted chestnuts: it was too cold to pick at them with bare fingers.

Back in France

Paris, Sunday

I’ve always thought I lead a charmed life, pinching myself in Paris after growing up in remote Vancouver, city immortalised, well, by Apollinaire, for one, in his poem ‘Windows': ‘Vancouver/where the train white with snow and night’s fires flees winter’ (from my book of translations Apollinaire: The Little Auto, CBeditions, London); I’ll try to remember to append the whole extraordinary poem below.

But here I am again, looking out on a Sunday mid-afternoon at a drizzly sky. Silence in the streets. Paris is subdued, even if crowds of (judging by the language spoken) mostly French flâneurs/euses filled the streets and bridges yesterday, or dangled their legs from the stones on the edge of the Seine on the Ile St. Louis, noses to the sun. They licked ice cream cones or sat in cafes, talking talking talking. Determined to be gay? Smack in the middle of the bridge between the Ile de la Cité and the Ile St Louis, a crowd gathered around a man playing the piano to the back of Notre Dame, its huge toy yellow crane and scaffold like some giant’s jungle gym.

But today, rain. Shops closed. A day of rest. I’m going to sit in a rocking chair, ugly but comfy, between two windows, one facing west, one north, and read a book called Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, by Christof Koch.

Here’s Apollinaire’s ‘Windows’:

From red to green all the yellow dies

When the parrots sing in their native forests

Pihi massacre

There’s a poem in the bird with only one wing

We’ll send it along in a telephone message

Giant traumatism

It makes your eyes run

Now there’s a pretty girl among the girls from Turin

That poor young man was blowing his nose into his white

necktie

You will lift the curtain

And now see how the window opens

Spiders when hands wove the light

Beauty paleness unfathomable violets

One will try and try to get some rest

We will start at midnight

When one has the time one has the freedom

Winkles Whitefish multiple Suns and the Sea Urchin of sundown

An old pair of yellow shoes in front of the window

Towers

Towers are streets

Wells

Wells are squares

Wells

Hollow trees to shelter the wandering Caperesses

The Chabins sing songs to die for

To the maroon Chabinesses

And the goose honk-honks on its horn up north

Where the muskrat hunters

Scrape skins

Glittering diamond

Hello again

I’ve abandoned my blog for many months, finding myself repetitive, but yesterday I felt like posting again. Why? Don’t really know, perhaps it has something to do with reading a collection of journal entries and letters by Elizabeth Bowen, the Anglo-Irish fiction writer and her friend and lover, Charles Ritchie, a Canadian diplomat. Ritchie’s work is less well-known and harder to find, but he is also, from what I’ve read so far, an extraordinary writer. He won the prestigious Canadian Governor General’s Award for his non-fiction, I think his war journals. The collection is edited by Victoria Glendinning, the author of a greatly recommended Bowen biography.

A week or two before Christmas, and we are in California but have just reserved our tickets, Covid-permitting, to return to Paris in early January. In the meantime we will head to St. Juan Island, Washington, for a family reunion of sorts: us and the far-flung children. It is raining but I haven’t yet set foot outside to see if the creek below our apartment windows, which has been dry for x years, except briefly in November, is running. It rained all night, but now the sky has patches of blue, and we might take our chances on a bike ride into the hills if the rain holds off for a few hours. And now I am going to heat up a slice of last night’s (home-made) pizza.

Covid Diary: 'Winter Pears'

Tuesday 5 January 2021, in the Vaucluse

Sun this morning and snow and fog and the hills to the south layered like a Japanese or Chinese landscape. Hard to catch, but here is a view out the window, and a corner of my attic workspace, the vantage point for my poem ‘Winter Pears’ from my 2018 book The Hotel Eden.

Winter Pears

On the road that descends into La Roque,

After the picnic table

And high-perched cemetery, a pear tree gnarls

Up from a farmyard, hoarding its pears.

A sin to let these fat pears go to waste,

This abundance my fingers ache to pick

(Rotting fruit already litters the ground):

I knock at the farmhouse and ask,

Do they belong to the pears and may we pick some?

But the woman drying her hands on a tea towel

Smiles no, not her pears,

They belong – she points farther down –

The house we stopped at yesterday to read

The handwritten warning tacked to the gate

mon chien court les 200m en 10 secondes

si tu cours moins vite

restes au portail et sonnes!

my dog covers 200m in 10 seconds

if you don’t run that fast

stay at the gate and ring!

We ring, the dog comes belting,

I snatch my hand back

And wait for the lady of the house

In plaid felt slippers

Who is just fine with us picking some pears.

Don’t you eat them? I ask.

A few, she hedges,

Adding, They’re winter pears, they’re hard,

Good only for cooking.

This morning, breakfast done, I lift the pears

From the top of the fridge, and I sort them –

The unblemished

And the windfalls. I take the black-handled,

Paper-thin knife that has been in the kitchen

For maybe a hundred years

The knife that brings to my mind

The black-handled knives that Chardin

Places slantwise across his surfaces,

Utensils

That give his paintings their illusion of depth;

And I carve out the bruises, the fine-bore

Tunnels of worms.

I slice the fruit thinly, until the white flesh

Is almost translucent,

I arrange the slices in the new pot from Ikea

(I burned the old one),

Add a trickle of water

And leave them to simmer.

COVID Diary, view from the attic window

Sunday 3 January 2021

We came down here by train a couple weeks before Christmas, and plan to stay through the expected winter Covid surge, grateful that this time (unlike during the spring lockdown), we can go biking. Last spring we weren’t allowed out for more than an hour and no further than a kilometre from home. The rule was enforced with fines. We were stopped and scolded twice.

This time we’ve decided to see if we can survive without renting a car, depending instead on weekly grocery deliveries from the nearby market town and the tiny village everything shop (café, groceries, bakery, post office, newstand), and in emergencies, by borrowing my husband’s brother’s car.

The épi (épicerie)-café changed management over the summer. The new managers are a young couple, who planned to make most of their money on the café side, since under normal circumstances, most villagers would shop for most of their groceries in bigger towns. They’ve managed to survive under Covid, in part by making really great, takeout pizza several evenings a week. In fact, their pizzas have been such a success some evenings they turn away customers. The wife had a baby a couple of months ago—she was back at the cash register a week later, baby in a basket.

Not having a car means we stay within walking/biking distance of home: no long drives to Sault and the north side of the Mont Ventoux with its easy (well, easier) bike route up the Ventoux, and its wonderful honey, lavender and sausage shops. No trips to Carpentras to Jouvaud, the patisserie. No newspapers (the young couple hope to start carrying the local and national press, but for the moment they don’t), except online. No Ikea on the road to Avignon, but with Covid I wouldn’t want to be milling in those crowds anyway. But I really can’t think of anything else we’d miss. My husband has his flute, we have our nice and not-so-nice neighbors (the 100-year-feud and the recent one), local family members, the ever-changing winter weather, and lots of books. Nothing to complain about, yet.