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.