Sunday 27 November

Palo Alto. Home by dark, barely, from a bike ride up Alpine Road to the top, though not all the way to Skyline, the road along the ridge that overlooks the Pacific. Alpine Road used to go to the top, I believe, but a landslide cut the paved road some time in the past. There is still a mountain-bike trail.

I saw my first Christmas tree of the season yesterday. My granddaughter was excited by the remote control that allowed her to change the lights from all-white to redyellowgreenblue at the touch of a button. She may need new batteries before the 25th. In my childhood the lights were red and green and firemen came round to school to make sure we told our parents not to run cords under rugs. My mother was in charge of decorations and she made sure that on New Year’s Day we carefully removed each piece of tinsel from the branches (real pine—the smell!) and put it back in the little flat packages for next year’s tree. My grandaughters’ tree does look pretty with all-white and coloured lights, and brings back most of the magic I must have felt at her age.

We’ll be celebrating this year in a village in the Vaucluse in the south of France with my husband’s family. In France Christmas is all about food (not everyone will agree). A nativity scene of little clay manger figures is traditional, a tree isn’t, at least not in Provence and northerners would scorn the scrawny conifers that pass for Christmas trees in the local supermarkets and garden centres. My husband’s grandfather was a potter, and his mother had at least two sets of Crèche figures he’d made. I remember seeing a crèche she had assembled in an abalone shell we brought from California with about the size of a fingernail. Place St Sulpice in Paris has a shop that sells santons from various potters but the traditional place to shop for them is the Foire aux Santons on the Vieux Port in Marseille.

Time flies...

Already August, mid- or becoming-late August. I have just finished a morning of translation, a new book by Hélène Cixous that I may translate. I have been doing the last section, which struck me as particularly moving, to see whether I want to do the rest. Yes, I think, so far, but I shall have a look at the first section next week. I am working from Gallimard’s pdf of the book which came out last year, and which has a translator’s nightmare of a title: Rêvoir: straightforward if it weren’t for for that little circumflex capping the e…

Also correcting the copy-edited Cixous translation I worked on in the south of France during Covid, one of my Covid confinement memories,Well-kept Ruins in English, Ruines bien rangées in French, first published, by Gallimard, in 2020 and published by Seagull Books in English. Thank you to my (I’m feeling possessive!) excellent copy-editor, Sunandini Banerjee, and of course to Naveen Kishore, publisher par excellence.. It should be off to the printer soon.

A sunny day with cool breezes. Hoping for a bike ride later this afternoon. Now for lunch.

Palo Alto, June 14, 2022

Back in California as of 6 days ago. Yesterday we took our bikes up Alpine to the top—a trail locals call the Green Gate. There was heavy traffic up to the Portola Valley Road, then the bliss of a narrowing, quiet road—hardly any cars, a walker, other bikes—winding gradually up towards Skyline, to the spot where the road was cut off by a mudslide sometime in the past, and never reconnected. A hiking and dirt-bike trail does go on up.

The best is riding along the creek that flows down towards San Francisco Bay. Mostly it trickles, especially since the drought, but it has only ever, in my experience, dried up completely, only in patches, Last winter it raged, modestly, after a rainstorm. Light filters down through leaves, and it is common to see deer—yesterday a lone wild turkey—but it is the music of the creek that makes the ride such a pleasure, uphill in particular, because it is slow going, I keep my head down, and it is my ears that are on the lookout.

Last night I began—or restarted—reading Philippe Jaccottet’s last book La Clarté Notre Dame, a meditation on the sound of convent bells ringing for vespers (and whatever else comes to his mind) somewhere in the countryside under the Mont Ventoux.

Paris, 4 June 2022

Pentecost in the church across the street, which is blocked by men in red safety vests. I believe there was vigil last night, and some kind of a procession this morning but too far away to observe. We live across from the side entrance, which is boarded up, because someone set fire to it two or three years ago - Before Covid - and it is at last being repaired—the door and the rose window.

I walked over to the Centre Pompidou late yesterday to see the Shirley Jaffe show; it is magnificent, a small retrospective consisting, if I read correctly, of works that were left to the French state in lieu of taxes, when Jaffe died, in Paris, in 2016 (all facts subject to correction). Very big, very brightly-coloured canvases, the early work abstract, gestural (think Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell), later work more static, but still kinetic, the eye coming and going between motifs, hard-edged, playful, shapes enigmatic but in the way of riddles. My favourite might have been the wall-sized ‘Boulevard Montparnasse’ of 1968. But I had a lot of favourites.

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.