I was caught off guard by the heat; 31 degrees in September, balmy t shirt weather and I’d forgotten how much further south I was from Paris. The house greeted me with a hug and a sudden bird flying fast through the sitting room and cannoning head first into the window. I gently laid a tea towel over it as it panted half bruised and awkward caught sideways in the radiator. Outside I expected it to fly off as soon as I revealed its freedom, but it didn’t.
I sat on the swing chair, Yves Klein blue against ancient peeling white, tea towel red chequered, feathers shades of brown, black eye, beak translucent bone with shades of pink and curved like a shortened hummingbird. Gravel grey beneath my feet. Sky like the cushions, palm trees rustling, grandmother Cyprus silent as the grave in her knowing, like the presence on my hand which hopped in a small neat circle, proving it wasn’t stuck.
I stared and she stared.
“You banged your head.”
“You knocked yourself clean out.”
“It must have hurt.”
This conversation, which was audibly one way but visibly mutual, went on for a while until it became clear that she was staying of her own accord and I felt myself dropping like a drug into something inducing splendour. I couldn’t help it. I fell asleep. In my micro-dream there were four people passing something between them and a voice over which I woke to, caught the tail end of, which said passes from Paul to *names I couldn’t decipher* to Emily to Paul and bang, I was awake and the winged poem blinked at me and I felt the weight of her in my hand. Thirty minutes had gone by. And then she flew away. Welcome to Les Aumarets.
On the third night there was a storm. I’d felt it coming. Looking up into that thundering blue my nerves felt the build. In clear skies and heat was written the inevitable breakage, even before I saw the mountains climb and colours rumble and heard the first roar while trying to sleep and failing and wondering, what was that noise? I got up and opened the curtains. The entire valley lit up in theatrical overplay. I put on a dressing gown and slid open the doors, stepped outside and stood on the wall. The urge to open my arms to lightning was overwhelming. I watched the forests squeal in sheet echoes and shimmer in bolts. I heard the rain before it came.
Enlivened by life itself I retreated before I got soaked, and saw on the rug a huge cricket had decided the same. It glistened and glimmered, it looked in that half thunderous light as big as my arm. At the moment I spotted it, and took in my bed, a few feet from it, and wondered what to do, and turned on the bathroom lights and off the bedside lights and hoped I could shut it in the bathroom till morning, at that precise interchange between glory and panic, there was another mighty whiplash crack and the power went out.
I turned on my torch and the giant cricket as big as my arm flew right at me. of course it did. It was going towards the light. I screamed, hurled my phone on the bed, panicked some more and then crept again to the torch where it lay face down, muted. The cricket as big as my arm was resting on the counterpane. The thunder crashed, the lightning hurled, the world was pitch black and lit up and pouring and gingerly I stripped the bed of counterpane and cricket, flicked it over on the floor, prayed the cricket and I could sleep peacefully, separately, and tried to find warmth beneath a single sheet. Deirdre told me later that crickets bring messages of wisdom and connection to nature’s rhythms & spiritual messages, transformation and the unseen forces of the spiritual world. Welcome to Les Aumarets.
Giant Cricket Update: She’s taken up residence on the curtains. Everyday I open the doors and invite her to go outside. Everyday she says she’s happy where she is. I’ve decided she’s keeping an eye on me.
Oh, and the writing’s going fine.
Eleanor
