leaving and looking

As opposed to looking and leaving, I am trying this time to leave and still look. At the field, green after the rain, with yellow buttercups and Queen Anne's Lace all white and small cherry trees springing up -- we will have the old ones in the far field cut down, most are goners anyway, and our friends can use the wood.
So when we are in New York, I want to know I can still look at all this.
Yesterday we drove to Uzes, whose Place aux Herbes looked like the one at Montbaziers (where Cendrars and Dos Passos spent the night), and I had my first (and certainly not last) demi-cassis, much better than the pink gloppy Monaco (beer and limonade and grenadine) I used to have, Cassis being less cloying than grenadine...
People seem to arrive every day from everywhere, mostly from nearby, a writer friend (he does "polars," must look up what exactly it is in my native English language), then to dinner with our neighbors Janet and Malcolm at Le Mas des Vignes, small delightful place overlooking Bedoin, the sunset, and the near valleys.
A slight rain today, which dispenses us from swimming in the lake, which we did at some length yesterday, no one swims out in the middle, so I have it all to myself, the water warm on top and chilled underneath, in its greenness. Some places have blue water, crystalline, says Boyce, and I point out how I love the green. And the whole damned thing.
Today, I was cementing the dislodged stones beneath our trellis with the vines, and various cracks in the wall. It won't hold, says Boyce, and I say: well, until next year. What a wonderful phrase: next year, like Henry James's favorite "summer afternoon." Next year.
Then friends for a last pastis, tomorrow I will close my eyes and pack, tomorrow night rabbit with sarriette at Christopher's house, and then I will look, not just back but forward.