"The skies can't keep their secret," Emily Dickinson wrote, and I have often wondered whether she understood that certain skies seem more willing to speak than others.
Whenever I find myself in the city, I catch my eyes wandering upward almost against my own intention, as though expecting some revelation that never quite arrives. Yet the skies there remain strangely self-contained.
They hang above streets and rooftops with a kind of reserve,
their horizons interrupted by buildings and smoke, revealing little beyond the
weather. One passes beneath them as one passes beneath ceilings, scarcely aware
of their presence.
The sky I long for is another altogether.
It belongs to the coast, where nothing stands between the earth and the heavens except distance itself. There the blue seems to possess depth rather than colour, inviting thought as much as sight.
One does not simply gaze at such a sky. One comes away from it feeling that the world has grown larger, and one's own burdens rather smaller.
When I left the city this evening, rain had settled over everything.
The flags that had fluttered so proudly after the football
celebrations now hung sodden along the streets, heavy with water in an air that
felt curiously more like October than the beginning of summer. Even the
buildings appeared to have surrendered their brightness beneath the damp.
I travelled south expecting to find the
familiar haar waiting for me.
Instead, I arrived to summer.
Roses leaned over old stone walls.
Periwinkles shone beside the paths. Wild orchids flowered upon the hillsides.
Beyond them the fields had turned gold, and the farmers were already cutting
the first hay, storing sunlight against the shorter days that must inevitably
come.
How could one fail to recover a little here?
I knew before I reached home that the following morning I should carry my breakfast into the garden. It has become one of the slow rituals by which I measure the seasons.
There is something profoundly reassuring about beginning the day beneath an open sky, while birds busy themselves with affairs infinitely older than our own, and the first warmth of sunlight settles upon the table. Such moments restore one's proportion.
They remind us that life is built less from extraordinary events
than from ordinary mornings rightly received.
Blaise Pascal once observed that "Man was lost and saved in a garden." He was thinking, of course, of Eden and of Gethsemane, of humanity's beginning and its redemption. Yet I have come to think the sentence reaches further than theology alone.
There are places in which we lose ourselves almost without noticing, and there are places that patiently gather us back together again.
In the city I often feel like a passing figure in someone else's story, present but scarcely necessary, a man crossing the stage without a single line to speak.
Yet when I return to my own garden, among growing things that ask nothing of me except time and care, I find myself returning as well. There, the hurried self I carry through the city begins to fall away. If there is any place where the heart relearns its own language, I believe it is there.
The wind carries the scent of roses and newly
cut grass, and each morning begins beneath a sky that keeps no secrets from
those willing to look upward. Little by little, I begin to recognise again the country of my own heart. This, I have come to believe, is what coming home truly means.
For my birthday, G prepared one of my favourite summer lunches, Frank's Asparagus and Seafood Quiche from Mary Kay Andrews' The Beach House Cookbook, filled with sweet crab meat, prawns, and tender asparagus. It was served with crisp green salads and a Moroccan chickpea salad dressed with harissa, delicious at room temperature on a warm afternoon.
One small note for
anyone who enjoys the recipe. The cookbook omits the size of the quiche tin. G
always uses a 25 centimetre tin, and it has never failed to produce a
wonderfully light and generous quiche.
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| For dessert, we brought home a beautiful strawberry tart from our local café, baked by an Italian lady whose gift for pastry is spoken of with admiration in these parts. G called it "summer on a plate," and I could think of no happier description. |
Recovery is seldom anything more mysterious than coming home to oneself. The place may help, and so may the season, but they are only gentle guides.
At last one comes to understand that the longest journeys are often those that bring us home to the quiet country of the heart.
