Back in our favourite spot, on a supremely hot Labour Day weekend, we sit in contented silence. After a stretch where our feet only lightly touched the ground, it’s enough just to enjoy the ocean.
Back in our favourite spot, on a supremely hot Labour Day weekend, we sit in contented silence. After a stretch where our feet only lightly touched the ground, it’s enough just to enjoy the ocean.
Heading out from Rouffignac before dawn on a darkly foggy road, we leave the lights of summer weeks spent with those dear to us behind.
She sits in a quiet garden. The morning is suspended in a cool grey which whispers of a mist hanging low over an ocean not far away.
Resting for a little longer in the land of in between, the time has found us thinking, talking and reading this week.
We walk together through the airport inside the silence. Disorientated after a long flight we move into the customs hall passing through space normally crowded. Suddenly we find ourselves outside, driving through a beloved city in the middle of a sunny day.
I’ve been thinking about disillusionment recently.
This past week happened to mark the passage of ten years since my husband, son and I made our bold move across the Atlantic from London to New York.
With the advent of July it feels like we are knee deep in the flowers of endless summer. One week stretches into another with an aimless ease rather like Duke when he leads me around our neighbourhood on our morning ramblings.
We’re back by our neighbourhood fountain again and the sky is cool and comfortingly grey. The dog’s quietly happy to be beside us and my daughter’s busy with some exercises and her scooter.
I stand beside her at the ocean’s edge. She sits, perched on top of her float, gleefully waiting for the surf to strike. I look down at my feet in the wet sand. Rivulets run between my toes bereft of their usual colourful polish.
As I sit in my chair and gaze outwards, night gradually spreads her primordial fingers across the sky. There are noises outside; tonight the neighbourhood crows have arrived, en masse it would seem.
In these long dog days of confinement, with life before a distant memory and life after an unknown, it is only when sitting beside the ocean that any clarity of thought returns to me. As I sit gazing silently through the waves I hear voices calling.
I noticed this evening, as we drove home, that the jacaranda trees are coming into bloom in our neighbourhood. Their presence with that particularly perfect shade of purple which I’ve written about before, adds a wonderful splash of colour to the streets around Los Angeles at this time of year