OPEN CLOSED

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On my balcony, what for a while had been a fat, round bud, suddenly exploded under spring’s pressures. A peony it is -methinks; I am a lover of flowers, not a botanist. Curiously enough, there are more vigorous stems sprouting from the pot’s soil, which has been refreshed weeks ago; yet, only one of them has produced this miracle. Could the peony be a thrifty creature?

It attracts bees. It has the size of a fried egg, as well as its appetizing colours. Then, when in the late afternoon I returned to the balcony to have my pleasure redoubled, the late sun already behind the house, to my surprise the flower had closed up, perhaps saving its honey and fragrances for the bees who plan their arrival tomorrow. Once again, an indication of frugality.

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In a very roundabout way, it reminded me of a camping trip, made years and years ago. It was already mid-September, we were travelling rather mountainous parts of France, on the lookout for a place to put up our tent for the night. On the side of an open gate, a sign told us Camping Ouvert – home we were! Considering the fact that the ‘season’ had ended, we had already found quite a few campsites closed up for winter. Not this one – ouvert!

We had to descend a spiralling, car-narrow path, all over strewn with rocks. Down in the pit, around one last bend, we had to stop for a second gate, this time a closed one with a sign Camping Fermé… Stuck, in the middle of nowhere, more specifically down in nowhere. With the car’s nose down, there was no other way but backtracking in reverse, all the way up. Ever since that day, in our house – whenever someone puts you into a pragmatic paradox, which often happens in married life – it has become a hallowed expression: Ah, un Camping Ouvert-Fermé!

True to the French character, so well described by Molière in his l’Avare – the Miser – the owners of that campsite must have been as frugal as my peony, not willing to spend time on removing the sign at the top of the pit, and pay for another one to announce what had indeed been written on the sign down there in Hell. As the peony’s flower, the campsite behind the closed gate had looked like a little Paradise. Surely, a Dante experience.

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Sierksma, Montmorillon 17.5/2024

REDUNDANT STOP

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Nature’s power – a storm has silenced the overdose of signs and signals that are, without remorse, jamming our visual sense with endless instructions and prohibitions. At last, at least this one STOP-sign on the road which climbs to my hamlet has become superfluous. Even the electricity has been brought on its knees, its fat cable lying on the road, mixed with the tree’s debris. Merely a photo to give it an unbeliever’s blessing, afraid as he is to even touch the magnificent old oak that gave up its ghost – afraid to be electrocuted on the spot.

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Sierksma, La Roche 17.4/2024

MUDDED IDOL

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This image was made, with the intent to impose a feeling of mystery on my reader; what the heck could he have made a photo of? That it is ‘for real’, may be deduced from the tips of my shoes and from the bit of tired green which I brought in the picture, to not become a photographer of ‘the abstract.’

The image is a dire symbol of the disaster that struck me, and many others who live in a house on the river Gartempe. More than a week ago, there it was: an almost record-breaking flood, which sent a gurgling avalanche of muddy river-water into my cellars, this to a height of 1.65 centimetres on the inside walls. No warning from city hall, which is legally obliged to sound a loud siren; the thing did not work, they told us later…

I have a huge, complicated and very old house. Before going to bed, I had inspected the right one of my three cellars at 02.15 o’clock, having found but a little trickle of water entering the pipe. I had opened the door to the balcony, to prevent it from getting stuck if the water might come higher. Not expecting much more, this insomniac went to bed, to be disturbed by terrible sounds, about 05.00 o’clock. By that time, I could not go down any longer, to close the door; the water stood already one meter high, flooding the staircase in the hallway…

The open balcony-door was leading the wild river straight into my house, overturning and ruining big pieces of furniture; destroying the contents of the prepared clothes-shop for Easter, set up in the next two cellars; terminating precious 18^th-century porcelain and glassware, which were stocked in one of the ruined cupboards; making glue of a collection of stored books; pushing magnificent plant pots from the balcony wall into the river, taking away lavender, hortensia et cetera. What was left, was of the ‘tired green’ mentioned, and of the muddy green seen in the picture.

It was only days later, after long and hard cleaning work, merely making silly pictures for insurance-sake (not a good cause, as they do no insure high for property at such risk…), I took the above shot, as one of a series of three. From the second one, you might divine the reason for making the series:

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However, turning it around, all becomes clear.

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Saved between two miraculously intact glass plates was this image of an idol, once adored by a people on one of the Pacific islands – only to prove, that such idols are useless. This one managed to protect itself, or rather its image, but not the property of the one who reverently brought it into his home. The idol did not even save its little brothers – my collection of beautiful reproductions of Toulouse Lautrec’s circus drawings…

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Sierksma, Montmorillon 10.4/2024

MOUNTAINEERING and METAMORPHOSIS

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Up there, in one of the niches of the rockisch mountain next to my house, a massif that home one of these days is threatening to smother my, the reader with the right perspective and a keen eye may observe the miracle of two metamorphoses in conjunction. The mere-fifty meters high formation has been transformed into the town’s Mount Everest, as the cat – visible in one of the little holes – has scaled the steep mass of stone, and has become a real mountain lion.

In itself something to behold! But as the mount’s neighbour, I also know that something peculiar has happened: all those other niches, which on a regular day are filled with a host of silly pigeons, are suddenly empty. Normally, it looked like this:

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From time to time, I have found the feathered corpse of a pigeon, half eaten, discarded by the evildoer. I have always thought that it must have been a clever rat, climbing up there and pinching one of the birds. It seems, I was mistaken: the cat-lion did it! Perhaps so well, that the pigeons had already flown when, this time, he finally reached his high-up destination.

Another possibility: every month, the ugly diarrhoea-coloured cabin on stilts, seen on the right of the first picture, is filled with grain that is meant to make the birds sterile. In this town, people think that there are too many pigeons around. That grain may have become so successful, that all birds have disappeared – overnight and forever…

It could also have been my fata morgana; not just the smile of the Cheshire Cat up there, but an after-image of the whole animal – an illusion, something merely imagined by me. The picture proves me wrong here. Hail to the courage of a common cat!

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Sierksma, Montmorillon 27.3/2024

AGING WISTERIA

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This picture was taken in 1906; it is interesting in many ways; the history of the relations between women and men; the history of architecture; the history of the town of Montmorillon – for instance, my house, here next to the washing place, the one with the balcony, attached to the rounded left-over of a former defence tower. Of the line of houses on the photo, mine is the only one still standing; the others, from my balcony up to the Gothic bridge, have all been demolished.

What is of interest, is also the presence of the Wisteria on the balcony of the house which was bought in 2020; its time-perspective. This is how I found the river terrace, four years ago:

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It had been completely overgrown with the plant, its main root coming from the balcony floor, already thick as a tree’s trunk; so badly overgrown it was, that two of the three doors leading from the cellars onto the terrace could not be opened; I had to climb over and through the bush, in order to get to the source of its outgrowth. That it could have overstretched its empire, was due to the fact that the house, for twelve long years, had been unoccupied. Literally working on it for days on end, with both the standard and the electric saw, it finally looked like this:

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By that time, because of the chunks and trunks of stone-hard wood which had dropped into in it, the river below the balcony must have swollen centimetres. They talk of oak wood as hard. Makes me laugh; after the job had been completed, oak wood compares to the stuff the Wisteria is made of, as fresh cake to bread toasted thrice over. This must be the reason that everything points to my Wisteria as the self-same Wisteria which is seen in the 1906-picture; same entry of the roots, same trailing of its branches.

One may also observe the heavenly Belvedere, added to the house, on top of the rest-bottom of the round tower-rest on its left. It is from there, that I daily espy the large meander which leads the river to my house, contemplating its wild ups and gentle downs, with its variety of birds and skies; as well as, when in bloom, the Wisteria’s mysteriously blue flowers.

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From all this, we may deduce what kind of Wisteria it is. The ‘Wisteria floribunda’, the Japanese version, has a life span of at most fifty years; this one must be its Chinese sister – the ‘Wisteria sinensis’, which may survive up to one hundred and fifty years, twice the normal age of the human species. Yet, one may also give this tale a moribund twist. As in the 1906-picture of house, the plant seems to be already in full standing, it must now be at least one hundred and twenty-five years of age; a mere twenty-five years to go…

Yet, taking the state of my bodily frame, it will certainly outlive me; this tree of life, planted in my little paradise, will give the joy of its beauty, as well as produce the anxiety that the roots will continue to undermine both the balcony, and the walls of the house. With the deceptively airy flowers, the Wisteria is known to be wistful and cruel to buildings at the same time.

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Sierksma, Montmorillon 22.1.2024