Year in the World by Frances Mayes

Author:Frances Mayes [Mayes, Frances]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, Biography, Travel, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780767923972
Publisher: Broadway
Published: 2006-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

Standing in front of 8, rue de Colette (formerly rue de l’Hospice), with her inspired, passionate descriptions in mind, I confront a tall dun-colored house with white shutters. It looks neglected. A doctor’s name is above the doorbell, which I imagine ringing—would it be possible to see Colette’s room—but don’t. She wrote:

A large solemn house, rather forbidding, with its shrill bell and its carriage entrance with a huge bolt like an ancient dungeon, a house that smiled only on its garden side. The back, invisible to passers-by, was a sun trap, swathed in a mantle of wisteria and bignonia too heavy for the trellis of worn ironwork, which sagged in the middle like a hammock and provided shade for the little flagged terrace and the threshold of the sitting room.

Her perspective: the child hiding while her mother looked for her. “Where are the children?” Sido calls, never looking up into the branches of the walnut where gleamed the “pale, pointed face of a child who lay stretched like a tomcat along a big branch and who never uttered a word.” Colette interrupts her description long enough to ask herself, “Is it worthwhile, I wonder, seeking for adequate words to describe the rest?” She then continues in a lyric key:

I shall never be able to conjure up the splendor that adorns, in my memory, the ruddy festoons of an autumn vine borne down by its own weight and clinging despairingly to some branch of the fir trees. And the massive lilacs, whose compact flowers—blue in the shade and purple in the sunshine—withered so soon, stifled by their own exuberance. The lilacs long since dead will not be revived at my bidding, any more than the terrifying moonlight—silver, quicksilver, leaden-gray, with facets of dazzling amethyst or scintillating points of sapphire—all depending on a certain pane in the blue glass window of the summerhouse at the bottom of the garden.

The flash of memories accompanies her realization that “the secret is lost that opened to me a whole world.”

Time, sun-baked time, time that keeps on slipping, slipping, elusive time, time like the stone Romanesque eyes peering from behind a clump of leaves, the startled pagan looking toward a transformed future. Art historians refer to this recurrent motif of the face in the leaves as “the green man.”

My childhood was not edenic, far from it, but the concatenation of first experiences remains a vein of gold in memory. Going back, dipping into those impressions, gives me not nostalgia, no, no, no, but private renaissances. Swinging on the wooden supports of my mother’s canopied bed, climbing out the window to play in the moonlit garden, painting myself all over with house paint (my mother shrieking You’re going to die), riding on the back of a sea turtle making its way back to the waves, the sweet reek of pork roasting on a pit fire, my sashes tied in bows, my father whispering You can have anything you want, hiding in the hydrangeas, imagining my face as

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