Ecouté S’il Pleut
An inventory of my desk, the story of an ending in objects. [I am sitting in the roof of the potting shed, in an early morning downpour]
Item 1: A squat amber bottle filled with stalks of honesty, dried to pearlescent cream. Lunaria. Frail moons shivering in a breeze I can’t perceive. Gathered in late October.
Item 2: Sprig of sea holly, picked from the dunes between Glatigny and Surville, mid-November. The lavender-blue flowers faded almost completely now, only the ghost of pigment discernible among the sharp points of the leaves, dun and mean.
Item 3: Bulot shell, large, apricot and white. Collected on a dog walk at dusk, the tide racing away from us. Filled my pockets with sea glass that day, soft and opalescent. The shell spirals inward from its cavernous opening to a law of diminishing returns.
Item 4: A cabbage white butterfly, male, deceased. Cream and yellow with a black dot, like a beauty spot, on its wing tips. It is folded neatly against itself like clean laundry. Found on this desk when I first arrived, shaped to the comfort of the last to go.
Items 5 and 6: Birds nests, two. The first, a shallow doughnut, built of moss, fine straw and dried grass, and the tiniest filaments of electric blue bailer twine. Found the day of torrential rain, when the farm’s drains where overwhelmed and the pumps failed and flash floods cut the village off to traffic for hours. We ventured for a walk when the water subsided and came across the nest in the middle of the path, water still coursing in the ditches.
The second, a sphere with a tiny aperture to enter. Wren’s nest most likely, the structure secured with bands of hay and lined with whisps of downy fur. Found down by the waterfall, walking Inka in a rainstorm, in low green light. I carried it home in my cupped hands, resisted the urge to lift it to my ear like a shell and see what it might say, hear the soft rustle of feathers and quiet click of beaks.
Item 7: The Hanged Man, reversed. A time of suspension, about to come to an end. Up in the rafters of the potting shed, I feel in my stomach the vertiginous drop of a rope cut or snapped.
Seed pods, dried flowers, vacant shells, empty nests. Winter hollows us all out, grinds our bones sharp and keen ready for the promise of spring’s flesh. Already the stiletto points of snowdrops are piercing the bocage.
But winter keeps coming and keeps coming and keeps coming until it stops. Snow of years ago collapsed the log store and so the New Year brings us to re-erect it, ready for filling with felled plum, oak, blackthorn and beech to stoke fires whose kindling is not yet thought of. The year dawned mild and kind but January entering its toddlerhood hardens to caprice, cold, frost. We dismantle a pile of sodden wood stacked in the ruins, sticky with mildew in places, already mycelially connected each piece to each, the logs communicating between each other behind their hands in whispers of fungus.
It is only when we finish our reorganisations that we see her, a peacock butterfly clinging to the bottom of the wood palette, splashes of turquoise blue and yellow, on a backdrop of vivid red and black, incongruous against the lichen cloaked wall. I watch her slowly opening and closing her wings in the icy air, like the eyes of one woken from a deep sleep and dreaming of things incomprehensible. She keeps catching my eye as we work to build the new structure, muddy fingers sore on icy bolts. She opens, closes. Tiny shards of board marked concrete littering the floor like leaves as we remove the shuttering from the concrete foundations. She closes, opens. She is an E. E. Cummings poem. Aglais Io. Beyond the bocage cattle are wandering the world, hock deep in mud, waiting to be transformed back into myth or meat. I glance back at her but she has folded in on herself, closed the book of her life and metamorphosed into a scorched leaf, blackened by frost, by time. I have seen something die I think, with a realisation like the swallowing back of tears, child-like. And yet, reading later, I realise she is not dead only sleeping, waiting for the first pallid nudge of spring sunlight to set her in motion again. And her hivernage is not a place, exactly, but the first perch available, improvised, serendipitous, entirely capacious, entirely necessary.
[In the evenings I scour maps of the area which tell enigmatic stories whose beginnings are obscure. In Saint Saveur le Vicomte, le bois d’enfer, the wood of hell, where mysterious metal deposits have been found. Rue des Oiseaux, the Road of Birds. Chasse des Amours in St Vaast la Hougue, Lover’s Drive, with its echoes of the hunt. And in Valogne, Rue Ecouté S’il Pleut – ‘listen if it’s raining.’ After me comes the flood.]
Yesterday was Epiphany, Three Kings Day, celebrated across France with the eating of Galette des Rois, King Cake, its favour of a fevre, originally a dried broad bean but normally a plastic or porcelain trinket now, allocated randomly. Epiphany, from the Greek verb for ‘to appear’, a celebration of coming into being. And if we have had a hard coming of it, the sucking mud and the hard frosts and the torrential rain, we have also hardened to strength in softness in this time of sheltering. In the vulnerability of having to speak as a child because your second language doesn’t know you as an adult yet. In the grumble and huff of horse breath in the early morning light which bathes us all pink, like Renaissance cherubs, human and animal alike. In the groan and release of a dead tree felled, logged into silence, the hiss and shift of embers already stored in its fibres. There is plenty of winter still to come, says the rain building to a torrent on the potting shed roof. Ecouté s’il pleut.