Impressions of a Month in Léran (Aug-Sept 2012)

Having finally arrived by night train in the southwest of France, we feel its allure. Hotel Baures still delicately upright with a few paneled windows, landscaped with palms and grasses. We wait among a few curious passengers in this luxuriantly still, empty arena--the train station of Pamiers at dawn---where one beggar, tall and pretty and scraggly roams the little gare with her long legs. The train ride was relatively painless--well air conditioned with silken little sleeping bags, three stout gruff French women shared our compartiment couchette and abruptly helped J lift our heavy bags--this time heavy with books to read at our leisure. Now, sleep deprived, we wait in a wind that lists palm leaves under a sky with thumb prints of silver.

Patrick, Jacques' nephew, arrives with his son Quentin and kindly drives us home, through farmland and the distant Pyrenees mountains, the tame but mighty trees, the meadows and hillocks of the Ariege. We drive through quiet villages with their landscaped roundabouts, between stuccoed walls of houses that still shoulder the road with mistrust after hundreds of years, to the dry labyrinthine village of Léran with its melodramatic crucifix staring down near the humble Protestant Cemetery, its forever shuttered shops that now include the one boulangerie, where the same well-groomed lady missing her front teeth sits with her cat.

In the morning, under pearly skies, a chorus of mourning doves, near and far, join the baying of a rooster and the gurgle of the pond. A car rolls past outside the garden wall. The morning air is filled with chirping and a lingering cool, then the molten sun flashes suddenly among thick trees. Flow is the defining word here, a flow of thick French I often cannot penetrate, flow of eating heavy meals, of people and cats. Flow of cousins and siblings, ebbing, waxing, cousins with their expressive eyes and pursed lips and exaggerated reactions to life's banalities. In the thatchy garden the family cats find great drama, darting up trees, stalking tiny lizards--and my tai chi practice faces new challenges on dry molehills.

Protestant cemetery

The fact the boulangerie is closed has caused great consternation. And the other great issue of the day is the Protestant cemetery, with its customarily unmarked graves, which is now being challenged. If no one can claim the graves, they will revert to common use, for they seem neglected. The cousins file in to the garden and then the mayor of previous years, and each remembers the ancestors.

Léran is a disappearing world, where the family has gathered since 1947, though the house was built in 1747. Now a summer home, it is in a village where traces of medieval origins can be seen in the circling streets that were once on ramparts. Summer in the Ariege is hot. Now the heavy air is dispersing, the golden haze of a remote, lost world is floating into obscurity. Yesterday I escaped to the lake in the dissipating golden heat, for a little freedom on the road, the bicycle humming past fields and heading up into the cool forest, past the darling smelly horse stable. As cars thinned, as families departed, I roped my velo to a thin tree near the campsite of le Comptoir Déambulatoire (a kind of traveling theatre) next to a huge patient dog with one large blue eye. I plunged into the cloudy water, a turquoise plate among grassy hills surrounded by the ghostly Pyrenees behind forested buttes, pushing away thoughts of the monsters unseen beneath me, my tortoise progress toward the yellow buoy. It is an artificial lake and filled with clay which refracts the sun in the most delightful shades of blue.

The garden is loveliest in the morning, little cyclamen peek, tender red violet, among the dried grasses under shaggy overgrown green and crumbling stone wall. The Loups see the garden as pieces of memory and fragments of tasks. Everything has been sensibly pruned back, and the sun gleams with a less toxic intensity. And it seems that this year the frogs are all gone.

During my jog an old man appears over the hill.  He tells me, this was once all vineyard.  I know, I say, my mother-in-law walked here every day, le Chemin des Vignes.  Oh? he asks.  Yes, he went to school with Jacques and after working in Toulouse he came back here to live.  He says he'll visit, but he won't.  Long years have separated these schoolmates.

The summer is passing. Thunder and lightening at 5 am, now close, now blazing afar, and now the sun blazes promising heat. Magnolia leaves shelter from the infinite blaze and mist. The cooing has resumed loud as a choir since this morning's rain. The poplars are monumental, the fruitiers exuberant. But the rain will continue, cold and steady, large drops slapping down.

We took our evening walk out along the farm that faces the chateau. The little ass could not be seen but the lavendar, just out of reach, was sublime. Just outside of the village the land is broad, of warm golds and browns. Cropped hay filled the old stone barn with its comforting smells. Otherwise the cavernous stone building was filled with old appliances, the courtyard had a trailer in it.

And then, as autumn approaches, the drama is in the skies. Incessant tossing winds move fleets of clouds, pearly incandescent, or gray-lined, across a cerulean sky. The in between moments of sun baked us in ecstasy--the drama was waiting for these overwhelming sunbaths, all awash in clean, intoxicating air, as we read. The olive and gold of the magnolia against the exquisite blue burns the senses. Long locks of gigantic poplars sway. Snowy doves visit now the cats are gone, they swoop just across the window to greet me from the boughs of the magnolia. They skim near, wings whistling, taking off with the cries of a human baby. The adorable honking ass is now my close friend. I'll bring a carrot in case I see him today--preening, then ears back, trotting silently up to accost me at the fence. A man walks his goat who trots placidly behind him.

Intermittent guunshot. The molten orb rises in lacy leaves. It is still cold. It is a misty autumn sun, the air thick, a few birds. I have a recording of Léran a few years ago, much thicker with morning birds. Last year there were herons and frogs. So quickly does even this tranquility lose its life. Morning traffic. But still unlike so much of the world. The sun is radial over the high woolly trees. The magnolia leaves splay in bright green splendour in the prodigal sun, though it is now a cooler, more distant sun. Cyclamen have sprouted everywhere, tender violet, tiny survivors. Our room is golden with the sun. Perhaps it is the season, perhaps that's why there is less wildlife.

Final tingly swim in the thick cold turquoise lake. We stretched on the beach with our books till several groups arrived and the heat began to press upon us. It is an escape from the hard, bleak character of Léran.

I am beginning to love the beautiful red fish of the garden pond and their mermaid tails. They're beginning to know me--as I meditate and my gaze falls over them they nibble at the water surface, their flame-like bodies hanging, they seem to look straight at me. And Piccolo the ass also looks at me coyly through bites of his apples.

I crouch on the hoary tree roots that make a table and chair, waiting for the sun. The cyclamen stand in the sun like beautiful little aliens landed on this crotchety lawn. One little crown, its high petals like pope's hats, has fallen next to me, still so fresh, the tender veins. Calling and crying out and piercing cooing, so much commotion and the twittering nearby. Wafts of cool hit my face like waves of sublimated water. On Sunday rifle report sounds early, hunting dogs yelp somewhere behind trees. I came out to do tai chi at nearly midnight--what stars I am missing in my blindness! Soon

these green green mornings will come to an end, but so will the dismal stone streets of hollowed out buildings, the poor people. So will the garden, both prison and comfort.

The sun bruises the sky with a magenta glow where it rises and the wind lifts a chill over the green shaggy garden. At 2am again I went outside to the hard brilliant glittering glass stars above as the wind blew clouds onward. Now the molten sun winks at me, through the dancing foliage. We are leaving on the cusp of autumn. Picollo trumpets.

The garden has been stripped bare and beautiful and we climb into a cab (he only makes a living because he transports for medical emergencies) to the bus stop at Aigues Vives and sit on the curb in the deep sun till the bus comes, then we climb on with all the schoolkids - first announcement of the denser world out there. We ride for 2 hr past lush green trees over parched fields, the mountains rolling blue to our left, into the burnished violet sun that perches on the horizon, large and brash, before sinking and leaving us in peace.

Fireplace grill, kitchen in Léran

Toulouse is dense, noisy, relatively polluted--our kind of place--with belle epoch blocks of graceful brick and stone--endless frothing architecture. We sit at the Quick with our luggage and watch the happy, excited world meet girlfriends and boyfriends, tiny spikey kids and plump blacks laughing with a smokey affection and drunks bantering half in Arabic and nice clean cut kids waiting with luggage and open faces. We board the train, this time a simple hauling of luggage, not a hot sweaty unbelievably crowded night on dirty asphalt like the night we left Paris. The last two to arrive in our cabin are long haired middle aged pals who seemed to appropriate all our bunks as they comfort each other telling their life's stories. The one sleeping beneath me snores, insistently, especially as the train stops mysteriously at 1:30am. I put on headphones and as the engine rumbles up again I sway and dream as we hurtled onward.