looking at mulberries

Perhaps wherever you sit, in a place you love, it works. Here I am, looking out at my field, intimate -- said a classicist friend last night -- and yet, sort of expansive. Things expand: visiting my smallish cabanon a few years ago, Barbara Johnson, now not with us (oh how alas that is) said, this place gets larger as you sit here. It does indeed.

Now I am looking at our mulberry tree, with one branch hanging down, don't know why -- one branch of the fig tree, on the right side, hangs down also. But not sadly.

Today we walked out into the field, unarmed with gardening gloves, and tried all the same to pull out the offending creeping vines from the trees -- coming blackberries shot their thorns into us, but we will have gone back to New York when they are ripe.

Some nearby dove is cooing -- horrible word, yet the sound is nice.

So many friends coming up the hill, to see us or our neighbors. Our path is unmarked, no driveway, no anything, I have to hang out a scarf for anyone who hasn't been here, hasn't walked up our high stone steps to sit in our field. Folkloric, to be sure.

Our olive tree is unhappy since we moved it, refuses to grow -- last night the classicist poured a libation of the fresh and fruity dry wine from the Domaine d'Urban at Beaumes de Venise, and recited a bit of Virgil, as he had before, perhaps ten years ago, when the olive tree was in its rightful place, right in front of my writing table. I had an olive grove long ago, and then one winter, someone stole the central trunk, the motte from which everything grows; no more olive grove, but I remember it. The olive is a jealous tree, said Rene Char when he came to see us, and I then removed the larger trees around it. They have returned, to replace the olive grove.