I picked up my new glasses last week. I put them on and the world became stark and bright and close, the points and edges unbearably sharp. I’ve mostly been wearing the old ones, in which beyond a certain distance, I know now, everything’s a little soft, all the textures more plush than steel.
I mentioned the unnerving change to the friends I made while we were at an artists’ residency earlier this month. The object of a residency is to make time and space to concentrate on creative work in a way that’s difficult in ordinary life, though as I used to point out when I had small children and a full-time job, the artists whose need for residencies is greatest are the least able to take them. Be that as it may, now I’m on leave from work and my kids grown, I’m seizing my chances, and this particular chance led to me an old farmhouse in the south of France, where three strangers in residence made immediate, firm friendship.
The other two were on “news and social media fasts”. I’m not prone to doom-scrolling, so I continued my once-daily skim of a couple of newspapers, but I respected the others’ decision by not speaking of what I read. As so often, the news was terrible without being surprising, and it wasn’t hard to keep it to myself.
We often took our work to the garden, which was as idyllic as you could hope of Gascony in spring: cherry and plum blossom, roses in bud, flourishing herbs and salads, and a dawn-to-dusk orchestra of the birdsong that has gone from Ireland and England in my lifetime. I probably spent more time than was strictly ideal watching things grow and shadows play and birds flirt, but we all decided very early that our precious week was not about strictness or ideals.
There was a song thrush nesting in the clematis under my bedroom window. We found ourselves exchanging increasingly frequent updates: her partner was bringing her insects and worms several times an hour. She had left the nest. No, she was back. We gave her a name from one of the paintings in the house, and we were genuinely excited when the eggs hatched.
Over the next days we began to see the nestlings, first just wide beaks and then the occasional fluffy wing. The mother began to leave them alone while she found food which we watched her drop into their mouths, though I had to take some of it on trust because I couldn’t see very clearly at that distance.
In other news, one night I heard owls, thrillingly close. I might have seen them, hard to be sure when you want something so much in the dark. The frogs in the pond began to sing louder than seemed at all plausible, and we went in turn to stand there and marvel. Out running along the river very early one morning, I saw an otter.
On one of my walks I found wild mint and picked some for tea. C made a delicious pasta sauce out of nothing but garden tomatoes, olive oil and salt. It was all breaking news, urgent, fascinating. Events kept distracting us from what we were supposed to be doing.
[ Give me wartime food advice over the maddening dietary diktats of todayOpens in new window ]
That can’t be real life. We’re all grown-ups with responsibilities, including every citizen’s obligation to be sufficiently informed to know how to vote and when to take to the streets, and of course it was anyway, as they always are, an artificial Eden. France has its troubles like everywhere else, and we met some of them as you’d expect. The day I tied a scarf over my head to keep off the sun on a longer-than-intended walk, other walkers seemed to stop greeting me, passed with stony faces, perhaps because in France “religious clothing” is illegal in some places, a law often enforced against Muslim women and rarely against anyone else.
There were destitute people begging in the town where we visited the farmers’ market. Air pollution was high. All three of us were navigating major life transitions of one kind and another, with the midlife awareness that decisions have consequences and also much is beyond our control.
[ Let’s put a real kitchen in every school. We could use some of the Apple taxesOpens in new window ]
I’m learning to wear my new glasses, not to be dismayed by what’s now clear. Myopia is no good way to live. But I will always be glad of the week when the birth of four thrushes was headline news.
