A Room with a View



I’ve mentioned before that we’re doing some major building work at our property, and that the builders are great craftsmen. But the person who has had the vision to bring everything together into a glorious whole is the architect, Olivier. He has a gift for transforming problems and crumbly, dark corners into wonderful spaces that, inside and outside, further enhance the beauty of this magical place.

Here’s one of those happy instances where it all comes together: the view from one of the windows in our guardian’s newly-restored cottage. The first time I walked in I thought, just for a moment, that there was a bright picture hanging on the wall, so beautifully is the view framed.

                                                                                 

 Beyond, in the rising hills to the east, the first shivers of the Alps heft the land further into the sky. There the fields are corded purple; forever that long ago summer when she scythed and bent with the other girls, the women and the elderly to pick lavender flowers for the perfume factory.

   Higher still the land is stubbled with sheep. They say that that each troop of sheep keeps the scents of its particular grazing land deep in its fleeces, so that its provenance can be established by what the nose detects in the matted, unwashed wool: thyme and dry rocks, acorn-mashed mud, slopes where the herb savory grows in abundance, the pollen of gentian fields, hollows where leaves rot with wind-blown spikes of lavender.  

           

                                                                                               from The Lantern