DOG DAYS

DOG DAYS

Today there’s an exhausted summer sultry feel to the August ‘dog-day’, so named for Sirius, the Dog Star, which at this time of year, rises and sets with the sun.  There are three rabbits in the garden; one is grooming its face the other two are grazing on grass blond as ripe wheat.  A robin is singing in the hedge.  The elderberries are dripping almost black.  

I hear the Pic de la Pluie call of a green woodpecker, said to for-tell a storm, although there aren’t any clouds in the drum-tight blue sky.  A combine harvester is making its way steadily across a field dotted with bales of hay. 

Later, in the evening, Dave and I watch the tractors, their headlights filling the lane with beams of butter-yellow light, going up and down the lane, past La Paperie, harvesting the hay.  As the evening passes, the air becomes muggy.  Tension is building. I have a headache.  I go upstairs and open the windows as far as the latches allow, but I can’t get any cool air in the room.  Then I feel the air shift around me.  A change is coming.    A crack of thunder swiftly followed by a great fork of lightning.  Fat spots of rain.

The next day, everywhere is washed clean.  Mornings are cooler now and the valley is often filled with mist like cream in a deep-green bowl.  There is the plaintive song of a robin in the hedge.  There are clusters of fungi and the scent of slow, sweet decay. The swallows and house martins gather on the telegraph lines in the village.

We will be packing up soon to return to the UK.  I don’t want to go.  The Welsh poets use the word ‘hiraeth’ which means an anguished sense of separation from the landscape one knows and loves, a condition more intense than ‘homesickness’.  It is a sickness.  And the only cure is to return home.  And yet, for the moment, I am at home.  There is no where else I would rather be.

I glimpse tiny twists of lilac-blue tissue catching on grasses: harebells.  Harebells, like swallows, are a symbol of hope.  As Christina Rossseti wrote : ‘Hope is like a harebell/trembling from birth’.  As folklore has it, witches used juices squeezed from the flowers to turn themselves into hares.  Small clumps of frail flowers flickering on wire-thin stems, a last flare of life: bittersweet, signalling the departure of summer and the arrival of autumn.

SUMMER: MOTHER: Lammas: end of July beginning of August

Lammas is the festival of feasting, celebrating the beginning of the harvest season.  It is when the moon is full.  The time of year when energy is at its height when life is fruitful.  A time which is symbolic with motherhood, when the body is fertile like the landscape. Pregnant women don’t menstruate, historically it was presumed their blood was occupied with the female miracle: a new life.  Ancient Hindu scriptures declared that a mother should be honoured far more than a father because she bears, nurtures and teachers a child.  According to Egyptian belief the life-giving devotion of the mother was the quality that united the human mother with the Divine Mother who gave birth to the universe and all its goddesses, those representing Mother: Greek: Leto, Celtic: Danu and Badb.

August is the peak month for butterflies, and moths and bumble bees, a time when nectar is in profusion. Meadow brown butterflies dance above the grass.  On their forewings they have two prominent ‘eyes’ to trick birds into pecking their wing tips rather than their bodies.  The air vibrates and hums with bees drunk on nectar buzzing from bloom to bloom. Plums, that can’t bear their own weight fall to the ground with gentle thuds.  A green-silver lizard shoots up the lean-to. I am nowhere and I am everywhere, amongst the thistles and artichokes, raspberries and lavender, blackcurrants bushes and birds.

ARTISTS

The sun climbs higher in the sky and there is a gentle breeze silky across my face as I stroll, towards the fields of corn, past ditches filled with ox-eye daisies.  The flowers stand tall on slender stalks, white petals and a gold centre.  They thrive on roadside verges as well as hay meadows.  At dusk it doesn’t close unlike the common daisy and it is said to glow like a fallen moon; hence its other name: Moon Daisy.  I’m looking for the dog roses.  Down a little track I discover scarlet hips.  There are few flowers now, pink as bubble-gum with sunshine-yellow, powder puff stamens, wandering wantonly over the hedge, scrambling into trees.  They are the stuff of fairy tales, romantic love and have barely changed in millions of years.  There are saucer-sized, white elderflowers here too, the essence of summer, also associated with fairies.  And I see a couple of sunflowers.

My thoughts shift.  I think of my favourite artists who’ve been inspired by the natural world, especially Vincent Van Gough and Claude Monet.  Their work captures the ephemeral quality of nature.  Van Gogh produced many paintings which convey light, weather, times of day and the movement of wind all with the eye of a naturalist.  For him, nature and art were inseparably linked.  And as a man who suffered from mental illness, he sought, and found solace, in the countryside.  In a letter to his brother, Theo, in December, 1882, he wrote: ‘Sometimes I long so much to do landscape, just as one would for a long walk to refresh oneself, and in all of nature, in trees for instance, I see expression and a soul, as it were.’   There is a Van Gogh print of a vase of Sunflowers on the wall next to the wooden table at La Paperie.  It was painted during a rare period of happiness in his life while he awaited the arrival of his hero, the fellow artist, Paul Gaugin at Arles, in the South of France.  There is another print too, Starry Night which depicts a view from his asylum room at Saint-Remy in 1889.  We bought both prints from the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam when we lived there.

Claude Monet, one of the founders of the Impressionism movement, rejected the traditional approach to landscape painting learning from nature itself.  He frequently painted outdoors, like Van Gogh, observing the fleeting effects of atmosphere, weather and variations of light and colour caused by time of day and seasonal changes.  He painted a series of the same view like the Poplar Series, twenty four paintings of the poplar trees along the banks of the River Epte, a few kilometres  upstream from his home and studio at Giverny.  They show poplars in the sun, with wind effect, grey weather and in autumn. The original paintings depict Monet’s flower garden at Giverny, eighty kilometres or so west of Paris.  We visited the garden and house in 2018.  It lived up to all my expectations likewise the decorative panels at the Musee L’Orangerie, in Paris: stunning.

I feel myself ungluing in the nicest possible way; my limbs are soft and stretchy.  The sun is sedating me.  It is the greatest pleasure in the heat of the day, sitting between the apple and pear trees, the branches and leaves making patterns across the sky-blue-sky, reading.  The peace of it nestles deep in my belly.  I relish the tranquillity, as the day folds into a lilac and apricot late afternoon still I sit there, listening to the wren singing, watching a slow-worm, Anguis fragilis, meaning fragile snake, slithering like quicksilver, near the hedge.  It is bronze in colour and is marked with stripes along the length of its smooth skin.  The eyes blink.  It coils and uncoils, then glides into a tall clump of grass and melts away.  I sit there all afternoon, daydreaming, until the light fades.  And I think to myself already the nights are gradually drawing in.