RAINBOWS

Daisies, buttercups, lavender, blue,
Lupine and vetch dancing through

Green matted grass

along the road,

Defying boundaries

in random flow.

No border, no red line, no color code,
Enchanted gathering, not yet mowed,

Like skin tones arrayed

working together,

Like birds of many

a colored feather,

Or multi-hued quilts from diverse hands,
Yearning for rainbows colors our lands.

PAYS DE GAUME

And now a little remembrance of things past.

Like the pendulum of those long summers, my grandmother’s favorite

Announcement would echo twice daily through the old railroad station that was our home: Le train va venir! Right on cue, the heavy stone structure would tremble and shudder in anticipation. An ancient, creaking passenger train with an enormous steam locomotive would make a ritual stop, its low whistle a call to far away adventure.

Although the station was one of a small cluster of buildings, the actual village it belonged to, Buzenol, wasn’t there at all, but had to be reached on foot, through stretches of wood and the rolling farm land that dominates the region.

One of several neighbors there was Monsieur Sohy, a retired electrician who represented the railroad, and a man full of secrets, mostly concerning the weather or reconditioned bicycle parts. He always spoke in a loud whisper, his bushy eyebrows raised with authority over grimy spectacles. Occasionally he would don large khaki shorts and set out into the woods, a cane in one hand and a rifle in the other, to hunt wild boar.

Wild boar were the legend of the region. Farmers would build tree houses at the edges of clearings and spend nights waiting to shoot these monsters, usually without success, because there weren’t any.

Here, as in other doings, time was no object. The entire area, or Pays de Gaume, as it was commonly called, was as if left out, passed over by industrialism, and carried on in its own sturdy, superstitious way. Children were used early on the land, most leaving school at fourteen, starting to lose their teeth by twenty, and were generally kept on at the parents’ farm until the old folks’ death, or retirement, for no pay except a weekly ration of tobacco.

The quality of life was really excellent. Market days, weddings, saints’ days, village balls were always in preparation. Local sausage, bread and pastries were of famous quality. Beer, like Stella Artois and Orval, and liqueurs available at all hours. A trip to the village for supplies always yielded an invitation to sit down in one of those cavernous, tiled floor kitchens for a goûter, the standard fourth meal of the day, of pâté, sausage, home-made breads, jams and a soup bowl full of excellent coffee. These large bowls, without handles, were used because bread with jam, and even fruit pastry were always dunked into the coffee: a sensible custom which makes it possible to live comfortably with poor or no teeth.

No money was spent on medical care; little or nothing on insurance. People died young or old, as the case might be, and without much fuss - perhaps clutching a cheap rosary.

Across the railroad tracks was an abandoned stone quarry. In older, more productive days stone was cut there with pick and shovel, then loaded onto small trains (we Dutch children called them lorries) to be carted to a gravel mill near the station. Narrow-gauge rails and handcarts had been abandoned there. We hitched them together, and ran trains of our own all through the big quarry, using the natural incline of the terrain for speed. The speed was great, and led to derailments and laborious rebuilding of track. Where the stone had been cut away, fossils, sea shells, petrified snails, crustations could be collected easily with the help of a stone chisel. Some were beautiful christalline swirls in the stone. These we cherished, and saved up in a small museum arranged in an empty waiting room, while on rainy mornings, by the real tracks, we collected large quantities of live snails, and put them into zinc buckets covered with lids, to be hungered out of their shells and cooked with parsley and butter for French visitors.

Child labor was the order of the day, and often quite tolerable. Frequently we would all set out in the early morning with cups and empty milk pitchers for a day of blueberry picking in the woods. The berries were small but very tasty, and grew under the canopy in patches of several acres. All we had to do was sit down and reach out. And apparently here too time was no object. Much, much later, by twilight, happy and with purple whiskers, the seat of our pants a blueberry landscape, we would stagger back to the station, where the day’s harvest was confiscated and cooked with sugar into preserves and jams that disappeared into the basement. Blueberries were supposed to be a sure remedy against upset stomachs. Garlic, which grew in the garden, worked against all other ailments. The world was altogether satisfying. At night, we imagined wild boar and other monsters prowling outside and felt wonderfully strong and safe behind the heavy iron bars in the station’s windows; a sense of security my grandmother underscored with card games and little glasses of rum.

Every morning the postman arrived on his bicycle over the hill, his broad face red and brimming with good news, exercise and brandy. Hospitality was great in those parts and postmen retired early.

We also retired early: often after twenty-mile hikes in the countryside. My parents were great believers in the joys and freedoms of forced marches. Recovering as they were from five years of German occupation, perhaps they imagined themselves part of the Allies’ glorious advance... Pure at heart, glassy-eyed, we would trudge on, feeling much like Mr. Housman’s poem of the long road by moonshine: But ere the circle homeward hies... Far, far does it remove. Many were the village pubs we passed, but did not conquer. We were footfolk and drank at the village pump. I still see the astonished faces of the farmers as we trekked by: two adults in raggedy shorts - a sure sign of the devil - two skinny, sweating children stooping under the weight of knapsacks, canteens and photogrpahic equipment.

Sometimes, when there were no activities, the old station, its tracks receding in the afternoon sun, just sat there, its heavy stone walls warm to the touch; insects were buzzing the sweet thyme and grasses of its unkempt yard. A pair of buzzards circled slowly in the distance. The woods cut dark and blue into the golden sky. Time itself seemed to have come to a halt, hovering, like an invisible train, having reached its destination.

Dining along the Northway