Short walks in Tarn et Garonne

 

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Morelle Smith

24 dimanche

Poterie Al terre. I follow the road we took the other day, past the poterie, ce jeu de mots. This morning someone has just cut the grass between the house and the road and as I walk past he gets in his car and drives across the grass to reach the road. On
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 I follow the road we took the other day, past the poterie al-terre, ce jeu de mots. This morning someone has just cut the grass between the house and the road and as I walk past he gets in his car and drives across his newly mown lawn  to reach the road.

 It continues downhill and turns to the left where there's a bank of trees. I had the feeling that I'd seen the other day, one of those fleches jaunes that marks a path, a petite randonnee, and the path led up into the wood but there is not one, it must have been somewhere else I was thinking of. But a wooden sign had pointed to Espinas in this direction, on the road past the poterie and the house with the cut grass. So I continue, looking across at the big farm where the cows are eating hay in their sheds, and there are several ducks outside another barn.

The road then starts to go uphill, and now I see the fleches jaunes that show the way. After passing a house on the left, the path turns right, no longer a surfaced road, but a path of brown earth and scattered stones. It leaves the wood behind, emerges by a grassy field and I look out over the fields to the distant slopes, some of them tree covered, small protuberances like the hill's hunched shoulders or a table set up in the hills' garden, or a lump of clay for someone to shape into a pond or a jug or the image of a snail's shell. 
I look at these small hills, these lumps or steps on the skyline and think how they all look alike or at least similar, and I don't know where I am, and I know I'm not far away, and so, even if I am lost, it feels good not to know where I am, especially good to have walked through the gentle-feeling wood. And though I have no sense of direction it seems to me that I am going roughly in a circle and the sign did say that there was a path this way to Espinas. If you follow the yellow marks on the tree trunks or on the concrete posts or on anything solid and stable enough to keep the mark. Follow the yellow brick road. 

But after coming out of the wood and walking up the field there are no more yellow signs. There's a house up ahead and the sound of chopping wood. A few metres from the house, the chopping sounds stop and a tall slender man walks uphill towards the house door. He looked a little like Bruno, who I met last night, we had shared some good red wine with him. But it's not him. I call to him before he disappears inside, ask him which way to Espinas. Tout droit he says. I thank him. As I walk past the house he pulls his jumper up over his head and takes it off.  Woodchopping warms you up. 

Just past the house I come out onto a road again, and there's a clear yellow sign. I recognise the next house on the right, it's near the poterie al-terre and I know where I am. It's one of the best feelings, to find a new path and follow it successfully.
Back home, the little clock makes a buzzing chirping sound. On each hour, a different birdsong. 2 o'clock is my favourite. It reminds me of the beginning of a jazz tune whose name I've forgotten. Now dedicated in my mind to this rare bird called the black-capped chickadee. 

Rara avis at least here I think, in these depths of the rural French countryside with its early bunches of white blossom and its steps of hills fringed with trees not yet in leaf, so their branches lean across the hill- steps like the sweep of a fox's tail.

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