The spring buds fattened slowly forth into summer fruits, the
summer fruits gorged on the sun and the rain and ripened into swollen
bunches of sugar and promise and then the village came forth to stoop and
pick and gather. All that was grown and fostered, nurtured and tended
came to fruition and it was time to bring the harvest to bear, to say
this is what we have made and this is what it will become.
As
with the grapes so with our plans. Our ideas for what was to be, our
thoughts on what had passed. Our desires and dreams and hopes and
wishes. Those that had not come to fruition were let go sadly and with
many tears.
We had been flirting with a dream but as the rains fell and the sun beat down it was becoming clearer every day that our dreams, the ones we had been focusing on – they weren't ripening. Perhaps they were planted in the wrong place, perhaps the conditions weren't right or the timing wasn't ideal, maybe the weather hadn't been quite optimal but as the season drew on it became clearer, storm by storm, day by day that although we had wished and hoped and dreamed of a long term life in France, the reality was that it wasn't quite working for us.
Although
the plan had always been that we would just come here for a few
months while we figured out the next step, we had harbored secret
dreams of staying forever, I mean why wouldn't you? It's beautiful,
it's perfect. Except. Except that it's not home and it turns out that
we long for home - somewhere where the ground is receptive to roots being
placed. Here, although we have tried, our roots have pushed up
against rock and boulder, have been baked and burned in the heat,
half drowned in the rains, struggled to get by in the climate that is
very hospitable to only one thing, one crop that has evolved over thousands of years to
thrive here. A crop that isn't ours.
The realisation that however hard we wished for it
this wouldn't be our home and that what we really longed for home was painful, it
hurt. We have loved it here. Over the last two months the tiny roots that had managed to
push through the ancient rock and slate, that had begun to cling
slowly but dearly to the landscape were eased away, pulled from habit
and familiarity, from hope and recognition and although they were
wrapped in the damp cotton of loving and careful relocation they
cried, aching for the place that they had so desperately tried to
make home. My heart, it aches.
I didn't want to leave. I wanted to stay, until I didn't. I wanted France to be my home, French to be my language, these to be my people. This place where people care about the things that I care about, about family and food and celebration and the small but sacred routines of every day life. This place. it speaks to my soul in so many ways but not in the ways in which my soul can speak back. How different it would be if we were French.
Sometime over
the endless two months that was W&P's school holidays there came
a point that felt like The Time, the point where we had to decide to
either commit to investing a serious amount of time in France and finding our
own home, or to leave. And so we decided to leave, to try that thing
that we have talked of and batted back and forth for the last ten
years. That thing that has always been our maybe and our some
day and our what if and our but I don't think I could. The life that has sung a siren song
to us and yet always scared the sweet crap right out of us.
In
a few weeks we are moving to the Western Isles of Scotland. To the
island that my grandmother comes from, that we spent every childhood
holiday on, that I moved to with my mum when I was twelve – a move
that the only upside of which I could think being that if we lived there we would have to go somewhere else on
holiday. And yet, within a few weeks I was as happy there as I've
been anywhere. My feelings about the place are mixed. It's home, home of my
heart, home of my dreams. It's the colour of my soul and the picture
that creeps across my canvas. It's my answer to the inevitable 'where are you from?'. It's also the place of my most anxious recurring nightmares, the claustrophobia of a life I've already lived, a life that I remember as both the best of times and the worst of times. Home, in other words.
There
are a million things that draw me back and a good half dozen that
repel me. In the interests of my family and our future and the possibility that it might just be the thing that soothes my soul,
I've agreed to move back, to try it one more time, thirteen years
after I last lived there.
Nye
and the girls are delighted. There is talk of dogs and chickens and
beaches and lambs. Cows and horses and goats and open fires. Newly
built houses and machines that convert methane into heated swimming
pools. Of friendships and conversation and being able to share a
common language with people again. Of proximity to family and to the
dearest of friends. Of remoteness, of the wilds, of living a life on
the edge of all the things that most people hold dear. Of home. And
for that I hold the greatest hope. Home. God, how I've missed it.
