Pushing Beetles through the Wall

This will be an exercise in memory. In the first years of my childhood, my parents often took my sister and I travelling around the Provence, mostly choosing sleepy towns as temporary homes, from where they could show us the cultural centres of southern France. I will attempt to recount you some of the images that stuck strongly in my mind.

Once we stayed in a small house, but where, I don’t remember. As with many old memories, this one exists in a cloud, there is no context besides the fragment itself. It exists in a vacuum, where once might have been a town, village or the French countryside, now remains nothing beside a bathtub and myself in it. 

In my recollection the wall next to the tub consisted of stacked wooden beams, dark and splintered with age. Hundreds of fat beetles, thick as thumbs lived in holes perfectly their size in those planks, their heads sticking out, two long antennae waving about. I remember pushing them through with my children’s pointy finger to the other side, where they disappeared into the unknown.

More palatable are the long purple lines of lavender stretching between the pale, sun bleached rock of those southern fields. The delicious smell of these flowers emanating from every market in all the small towns in the country, as they are reworked into soaps, small bags for hiding between fresh laundry, or simply sold as the dried flower itself.

Perhaps not a specific memory in its own right, still, I feel it is important to mention the uniform backdrop to my recollections of those days. A backdrop of a careless childhood that would be, where my sister and I could walk around this country, uncomprehending its language, wondering at the massive butterflies fluttering around us, looking for quartz among the hills and enjoying French sweets after a warm day in the sun. I can hardly imagine a better childhood.