Monday, January 23, 2012

Mud puddles.


January 22, Saint-Ismier.

Both kids sick, again, but still, mud puddles.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Lives.


January 19, Saint-Ismier.

Fridman left yesterday to go back to Hugo and the circus.
Another life.
I am reminded of the infinity of sad situations we could be facing and I do not feel sad, just altered. My mind wanders to a son dying at the age of eleven while playing a dangerous game of daring, my friend Virginia told me one day, friends of hers left with the pieces of a life devastated, living on for the other child, burdened by the impossible; a brother dying on the road at the age of twenty-nine at the end of a life graced by gentle muses and wasted by melancholy and drugs, and my mother left with a life bearing yet more sorrows, as lives will, lives of pain the world over, and I feel joyful for all there is that is light and beauty.

Looking for dragons.


January 14, Saint-Ismier.

Another try at finding dragons, an eleventh-century fortress in Mornas, then the Grignan castle, where we arrived at night unfortunately, and under a frightfully cold wind.
Nicolas knocked at the fortress door, looking for dragons.

The Grignan castle, once home of Madame de Sévigné.

The Uzès castle.


January , Saint-Ismier.

Nicolas asked where were the dragons?

Sunday, January 08, 2012

Saint-Antoine l'Abbaye.


January 8, Saint-Ismier.

Roman holiday.


January 8, Saint-Ismier (France.)

In France since late December, and this week end, the first since school started, an excursion to the South and the sun, and a step back in time: we began at the abbey in Saint-Antoine l'Abbaye, an eleventh-century Gothic beauty, stern and chilling, and today trekked in the fragant hills of Provence to the Pont du Gard, a Roman aqueduct that is one of France's foremost tourist attraction, not a stone missing in a construction dating back to the early first century. To top off the road trip we headed to the city of Arles to see the Roman amphitheater.
Nicolas wanted to see the dragon in the castle and we had to explain that it was not a castle but a church, a bridge and an arena. No dragons, but powerful ghosts still.