Holding my breath

Hot, hot, hot. Tiny jewelled geckos fall from the  high beamed ceilings onto bookcases and  tables, scurry out of sight. Cattle are lowing in a nearby  field and a bored teenage boy is riding a tractor up and down the  dirt roads on the outskirts of the village. Otherwise, all you can hear  is the  low hum of cicadas and  the wind blowing  through between the mountains, a hot dusty wind. It’s beautiful though, this  dusty golden furnace of a day; the mountains tumble down like velvet and  the sky is piercingly blue.

I have a persisting bronchitis that won’t  clear up, sit in the shade of the verandah reading Peter Ackroyd’s semi-historical novel The Lambs of  London, clever, a little harrowing in places. I’m wearing dust-streaked  denim capri pants, a  big loose shirt,  sandals in case I step on a scorpion. The dogs lie panting around me and lizards dart along cracks in the  path brickwork between salvia and lavender bushes. The bliss of not having to be sociable when one is unwell,  luxury to curl up with a book and a jug of icy homemade  ginger beer or pomegranate  cordial, no lunch parties or  suppers for now. On the edge of the field across the road, a small  grey cat is hunting for field mice, pouncing, feinting and creeping  along on her belly. Fortunately, so far she has caught nothing.

Indoors, in a sink of  cold water,  there  is a tangle of grapevine leaves and  white-grey wands of  artemisia or wormwood, bunches of  French lavender I want to  tie up around old mirrors and  terracotta jugs. Will they last until the end of the week?

Oh this season, so ordinary and  yet somehow on the brink of miraculous.

The Oxen

Thomas Hardy

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

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