drowning in a fragrant sea | Upper Normandy

For us it had so far been a typically humid lakeside early summer. Maybe there is supposed to be some kind of romance in the dense stagnant air; crowds magnetically drawn to the lake; the quiet of the night overridden by the whirring of fans, the countryside bursting at the seams with caravans and families on bicycles. Whatever there was, it was gone, like the birds who nest in the quiet marshes over the winter. Summer just set in too hard and too fast. It’s always the times when you don’t expect much that you find a part of you are looking for, even if you’re not exactly sure what that is, kind of like what people say about love. Nobody would have expected that you could drive four hours south and that the air would clear. In Normandy, mornings were so cool that crystalline layers of dew settled over the wheat fields, some fields still green with youth, some a warm flaxen gold and waiting for the first harvest. The sun would rise gentle and mellow, tinting the countryside with peach and bubblegum pink as dew dripped off the flowers clinging to farmhouse walls. We were close enough to the Landing Beaches that we could feel a coastal breeze wafting over pastures, tiny birds resting on the winds, towering benign cumulus clouds flitting across baby blue skies. Roads were so small that wheat seeds came through open windows and we were almost swallowed by meadows where cows grazed on shaded slopes. The delicate network of roads wound through flourishing villages drowning in a fragrant sea of flowers and timbered farmhouses. We parked at a crossroads and walked through fields basking in the gentle sun. Suzi sniffed between maturing stalks of corn and young pockets of blooming wildflowers, rambling, wandering. Baby cows met us by rusting iron fences, noses wet from dew as they nibbled our clothes, clearly curious of the early visitors. Red, blue, yellow, tractors hauled the first of the hay, sending stalks flying like confetti, a celebration of us being, for once, in the right place at the right time.

Mild rain showers cooled the evenings even more, fat drops pooling under the thatched roof. The evening air was suddenly encumbered by scents of freshly cut grass, the earth breathing through the rain, a marriage to the sweet sticky smell of molasses in the feed of the dairy cows next door. It was both floaty and lulling, lingering light in the sky tracing the clouds through the shadows. From the newly damp earth we tracked in shards of freshly cut grass, they stuck to the soles of our shoes and trailed lines of emerald into the house. Some days the afternoons were so mild you could nap in the sun, all dreams of poppies and molasses, and wake up sun-burnt. But even on the hotter days, it was the kind of southern dry heat that feels like a golden reward and not like a burden. The sky ran through a gambit of Pantone blues, washed like denim, and hay bales puffed like popcorn in the lee of chateaux.

Maybe the heat would build, and the landscape would turn deep yellow and burnt khaki. Maybe it wouldn’t. We left Normandy with mornings that were still cool and foggy, sunlight illuminating cobwebs, birds floating on brisk breezes carrying the seeds of dandelions like whispers. It would be how we would remember those early days of French summer - the baby cows and their molasses, Suzi and her fields of young corn, the forests’ eternal romance with birdsong. And the sun, endlessly flirting with the June clouds, her lover.

Green was the silence | midsummer

“green was the silence, wet was the light,
the month of June trembled like a butterfly” - Pablo Neruda

flora | Bergen, North holland

My trip to the north of Holland was enveloped in a weekend heatwave, somewhere in the deepest summer, a tangle of clear skied days fading to warm nights that sheltered the symphonies of cicadas. Holland is by no means a big country which is perhaps why each area has seemed to cultivate its own identity. To Bergen. It surprised me as a place that revealed different parts of itself slowly, in the seasons, the shadow and the silence. My visits to the town in winter were punctuated with a sort of nostalgia for the Alps, with the timber-clad houses glowing amber from lamps and thin, frigid air soaked with the smell of wood fires. Cars clattered over the cobbles and silence swept through the wooden eaves. It was richly quiet, perhaps a faded white rose, lavender after spring rains. But in that deep summer it was different. More like trees dripping with lilac jacaranda; or vines of red roses draping a trellis. There was more life, perhaps too much at times. The town of Bergen itself is treated as a stop-off to the northern coast, and the Dutch seem to seek out water almost as much as it threatens to overwhelm them.

The windows of the houses with their wooden facades were thrown open and swimsuits dried on balcony railings. There was that noticeably marine atmosphere of real beach towns; not where sand is washed by warm seas and tourist sprawl lines the seafront, but of those temperate beaches bordered by dunes under milky skies. Small children on bikes wore caps and brought along their buckets and spades; their mothers’ sundresses streamed behind them, colorful as their bicycles. There were the men on their Vespas in bermuda shorts and hawaiian shirts, little dogs rode in bike baskets. This was the surface, what you may expect of a Dutch seaside town.

But there were surprises too. A green woodland, almost overburdened with pine; mottled summer sunlight dancing over the ferns. Flowers, in a clearing. From the heat and sun their luxurious red was watered down; like the bottom of a drink at a beach resort, its color diluted by melting ice. The patches of wildflowers, a muddled harmony of poppies and their late summer counterparts. Wild marigolds, foxgloves, cornflowers, daisies, the green stems and leaves slowly fading. There were petals on the sidewalk, and flowers growing wild over walls, that nobody really seemed to notice. The call of the sea was too strong, the ocean of flora in the last throes of its summer glory was all but invisible.

The sun set late, the aura of a latitude further north. The roads grew quieter. The sunburnt children had come home, bikes over cobbles. The air was still, chickens cooed in a garden nearby, hidden from view by a wall of vines weeping white flowers onto the lawn. The downpour would arrive soon, Bergen’s narrow roads would glisten with pooled rain and the nights would draw in more quickly, draping darkness over the pointed roofs and timber. There would be a reminder of the warm days, in the petals of those flowers, either dripping water, or fallen and dusting the street with summer.

“I will touch a hundred flowers and not pick one” - Edna St. Vincent Millay

*all photos were taken with my iPhone so they’re not perfect, but beauty of the flowers kind of speaks for itself.