Ah, My Little Chaumière – Letters to Rhona – 28/02/22

Dear Rhona,

It has already been hard for me to find the time, between the long jaunts afoot and the chilled night under the stars, to write to you. My wanderings have taken me and my emotions along the footpaths and sunken lanes of the bocage, on the sandy beaches, or above the rocky coasts. It has taken me and my sentiments from the nowhere of a desert to the claustrophobia of a labyrinth. One moment, I am alone, far from anyone; and the next, I am surrounded by kind eyes and the warmth held between the walls of a home.

Readily, I am aware that the nature of a solo adventure entails the entirety of the poles of human company. Alone or not, the swings between the two are often sudden one way and then anti-climatic the other. It causes turbulence of the mind by the arrival and departure of these states; as soon as I am adjusted, I am suddenly compelled forwards onto something else.

As I looked upon the sea that separated me from my distant home, beneath the towering and watchful Phare de Gatteville, I thought of that lighthouse’s intermittent glow in the night. I had witnessed it on the night before I had arrived there and on the night afterwards. It was a haunting surprise at first to notice that sudden white glow as if someone were with a torchlight in the woods coming after me. That lighthouse glow would not reach the white cliffs of my home island, I thought, and illuminate it, but with my mind, which was still awake in the woods, I could.

To sit alone in the harbour of Barfleur, to see the many passersby with a friend or a spouse, knowing that I have placed myself there alone, and to be alone for a long while, makes the chair I sit in just a little bit less comfortable. But don’t worry, Rhona, I have been bothering and consoling myself with all the activities of my yomp. I am distracted from the lonesomeness of the task ahead. Through this beautiful country, each day, I have felt my eyes widen and have felt the light that falls upon them become softer.

The pastoral scene of Cotentin, though its winter breezes are physically chilly when against my skin, has become intimate and warm. The pale-green fields of a hibernal day are crisscrossed by auburn hedgerows that, having few leaves, are prickly like hedgehogs. The banks of the tractor-wheel-grooved paths are evergreen: the carrots bloom heartily, daffodils have begun to burst forth and daisies too.

Only in winter can you see so well the mistletoe which clusters in the poplars. The plant is called le gui in French and is a parasite that feeds on the sap of trees. When I wander down country lanes, I often pass a rank of poplars (or two when along a long drive headed to a greystone farm) and marvel at their little green fireworks of mistletoe. To me, there is something so very French about mistletoe, like pom-poms, in poplars.

So too is the mysticism; under a silver-grey blanketed sky, the skeleton silhouettes of trees on the horizon are given finger joints by les guis, and these spindly hands murmur in the breeze. They whisper of their almost lost prestige amongst man, of a time before antiquity, before Caesar. The gaulois druids held mistletoe as the holiest of plants, as having miraculous medicinal virtues, or being talismanic at warding off evil spirits. Le gui au chêne, oak mistletoe, is rare and was considered the most precious and forbidden plant. I hope to find a specimen of this cultural ingredient of ancient Gaul, and then I may know and experience one of the deepest roots of France.

Read the rest of this letter at my Substack: https://dominicdebonhomie.substack.com/