Making Connections

The morning sun instantly lights up the room as I open the shutters of our cottage here in southern France. Outside the window, the doves are cooing, a lone seagull cries and the magpies flit from ground to tree. The air feels warm and I have my breakfast coffee outside at our picnic table. After a week of illness, and what seems like a long winter, I finally have found a place of calm where spring has sprung and life’s questions are no harder than what book do I read today?

Jim and I left Indiana a few days ago for one of our a favorite destinations, the small town of Le Brusc on the tip of the Cape that pokes into the Mediterranean Sea. Though we never know what the weather will bring, we have been lucky so far with several days of pure sunshine and only one gray and temperatures hovering around the mid-sixties. This year, we’ve indulged in a car rental which comes at a good price with our French train ticket. So when we arrive at the local train station, a red compact car is waiting for us.

So today, instead of our usual walk along the coast, we decide to drive inland where the landscape turns to steep limestone cliffs sculpted by water. We drive through the narrow gorge and up to the top of one of these cliffs where a small town is carved out of the rock. At one end of the peak, the remains of a castle look out onto the landscape below. On the other, houses perch precariously on their stony foundation. Far off in the distance, we can see our town sitting along the sea and the island where we like to go watch the sun set. Even up here, the almond trees are blooming and we can smell in the air that spring has arrived.

As we drive the curvy, narrow road back down, we decide to stop by the pre-romanesque chapel out in the middle of the olive fields. First put to use as a church in the fifth century and then kept in good shape until the French revolution, it has recently been restored. Its architecture and its stones take me back to a totally different time and space, and yet I know that for these many thousand years, it has been a source of spirituality for many.

At the end of a gravel lane, two tall cypresses confer the traditional symbolic welcome to the stone chapel. The local volunteer who beckons us inside immediately recognizes my Belgian French and tells me that he spent some time in Belgium. He also informs me that the restoration of the chapel started under the leadership of a priest from a famous abbey in Belgium, who on a walk through the area, saw the ruins and decided to do what he could to bring the chapel back to life. I love these small coincidences that happen in our travels. It makes me realize that our world is smaller than we think, and that we often have things in common with strangers, no matter how far away from our home.

For a moment, we sit in silence in the penumbra of this intimate space with the familiar smell of wax and incense, then we walk back out into the warm sun and deep blue skies of Provence. We soak in the history of these stones, then, quietly, walk back down the lane to the car and home. It’s time to have lunch on our patio. Tomorrow will be a new day to read in the sun, and maybe take another walk along the sea.