As Summer slipped by I sat in my room and thought. My arm was heavy in my lap, my right wrist broken. The heat didn’t help. “Do they even still make casts like that anymore?” my Mom would ask. I didn’t know what to reply, having had no experience with broken bones before, only one severely ravaged heart.
As Summer slipped by all I wanted to do was write. Slate out the feelings and the lingering hurt. Ironic, then, that I could not beyond a one finger jab of a type that eased nothing, only reminded; at night I would lie awake with the ceiling rolling out poems that would fall into fluff by morning.
It felt like I was responsible for this Summer gone by and nothing earned, no joy for winter stockpiled no rabid dips into the sea.
Then arrived a long-awaited Monday in Nîmes to finally pick up the plastic card that lets me be an expat, an outsider Provençale. Hungry and celebratory, I gathered up all of the textures with my one good arm. Yet it exhausted me. The exhilaration no match for quotidian physicality.
So back to my room I went, trailing bits of Summer like crumbs from last years picnic. The taste of what never realised a too bland almost, memories to be had.
Those who said that they would stop by or take me shopping, didn’t. Which meant it was an expedition to be invited to a lunch, delicious save that, wine in, forceful words were launched (albeit with good intentions) by someone who had once meant the entire world to me.
Shocked and angry, I pulled back yet again.
As Summer slipped by, it often felt like another COVID lockdown with far too much room to question things like, “Is he right?” I would ask such things out loud. The ceiling was usually silent.
But the Time did pass, did what it needed to and so last Friday, with the work of a whirring saw, my cast was broken open. The skin underneath it was slightly yellow, the hairs on my forearm like prairie grass. All, all things unattended to, a physical translation of his voiced disappointments.
Despite my nervous over-chatting in that surgical office, bright as the sun, I couldn’t help but delight in a tentative wrist wiggle, to remember the much that such freedom brings.
Yesterday, I made one last stab at Summer.
Officially, it had gone but nonetheless I tried. Sitting on the oldest stone steps of a familiar church – ones worn down in the middle from those seeking faith – I held a cup of sorbet. Three flavours. Savouring, I watched the last of the tourists gaggle at that which they knew nothing about; yet how they had the right to be just there, just like that. It is what we all do, really, I understand. My thoughts bustled up amongst the leaves of the trees and those claims of his that had hurt were clamped down by the coldness on my tongue.
“I still have beauty, despite weight gained inside and outwards. I also have much to give that has been buried in everyday struggle. If I am not arriving as I once did, I am trying.”
And then, all of those ideas became quiet like a benediction. With a whispering joy this season of perpetual promise arrived. Summer was finally in me.
If you would like to hear my voice recording of this poem, please click above.
I hope that you are all well. Finding the diamonds amidst the rough.
As always, I am sending much Love from Provence,
Heather
Ps. I hope that you will forgive me for not responding to all of your lovely comments on my previous post. They made me so happy and touched me enormously. Hopefully with physical therapy started, it will eventually get easier to type!
I have been a bit of an odd bird in my thinking about time lately.
Yes, I understand it is loopy and more jazz than Bach; a message heard loud and clear while sitting on the Pyramids in Cairo in 1992.
So maybe a birthday is a good moment to not resist the spiral nature. I am calling on you, fifty-two…
It is forever humbling to live in Provence. These old stones have seen the like of a me before, no matter how unique I might believe myself to be (and I do).
We talk and walk, our drinking thinking feeling human-ness. We love and fall but rise trying.
“Try to reflect today,” a friend said. So I did but I am not really sure if I am younger or older than the breath before.
Honestly, I have never felt that I was terribly good at being an adult.
As proof, four weeks ago, I flew over the handlebars of my bicycle after a simple second of not paying attention to the car too close, my linen pant wrapped around the pedal tight.
My wrist is broken and it is the right wrong one.
So far, my cast has not begun to itch but my head has.
With all of these summer hours laid out before me, inactive but pulsing, I wonder.
Although I am ashamed to admit it, it can happen that I miss the ease of my old life, exacerbated by the stunning knowledge of how few people there are, now, to stand by my side when in need.
I scratch in wondering if this is what everyone feels, not only just me.
And yet, upon awakening on August 11th, there were lovely messages that said “we are glad that you are here.”
It warmed my blood and after coffee I thought that perhaps the not knowing that has been running the show for us since 2020 could be put aside for awhile.
Happiness was to be had.
And so I went to eat at my friend Coco’s restaurant. She wrote on my cast without asking.
I saw art that not only surprised me but delighted as well.
Tears fell that were purely of the happy variety. For this heart that holds so much.
The freesias and roses given perfume my apartment as the late afternoon light pours in, insisting.
And yet, feeling held, I can say clearly that I dearly hope for change in my daily life, which is not the stuff of Provençal dreams as often as may seem.
I wonder if this broken wrist was in some way no accident at all but a slide back to the Pyramids. A not gentle form of asking, “Really Heather, what could be next?”
What an odd bingo we play.
Listen, listen. I know these words are sparse but how long it takes to type them with my left hand.
So much so that maybe they are evaporating before your eyes.
