provencal paradise

i suppose you can never explain exactly what it is about a place that makes you happy all over and inside and out. For me, this very primitive -- well, you could say folkloric -- life in and out of our cabanon just does it. We sit, are surrounded by cicadas doing their thing, rubbing their thighs or whatever it is to make this extraordinary and incessant buzz, see numberous friends of all sorts and situations and languages -- the farming people next door, the winegrowers up the road, our journalist friends here and there, a priest or two, and a lawyer and an iron worker and a diplomat and another p We have someone or ones over, stay up until the early hours with a bottle or two or three and a discussion about whatever, downstairs at our long table with the lantern overhead and the foliage all around, or then upstairs under the canisse and vines and an equally long table so we can just add any friends at any time, all that in the evenings when the heat has died down a bit and the occasional mistral has brown through the wooden doors and handmade screens over our windows - all from so long ago.
I must have been here 40 years now, with various companions and husbands and friends...

And we go to swim in the lake, and come back for lunch of a salad that tastes fresher than fresh, each lettuce leaf like something you never tasted before, and a siesta, perhaps some visiting friends. Or a book or so, right now Julian Bell's "Mirror of the World: a new history of art" and on my kindle, Christopher Benfey's Red Brick, White Clay, Black Mountain, partly about North Carolina, my native state.

In Collioure, where i longed to go back because of Les Templiers, a restaurant where Picasso used to eat in 1905, everything was a delight, including swimming three times in the very blue water with the treacherous pebbles underfoot. But we left to come back to our cabanon: other places are to visit, but this one is to live and admire and be folkloric and happy.