What the Wind Said
A storm is coming. The news came in the late morning, prompting a purposeful census of doors ajar, shutters flapping, objects leaning innocuously against walls, ready to take flight. In the mid-afternoon, two men in work clothes come down the drive. We heard ‘un cri’, they say, on the wind. ‘Une brouille’.[1] Is everything alright? All is fine here, I insist, it is the sheep, no? Or the dogs? No, they say, not like a sheep, like a human in pain, or ill. We all pause, as if scenting the air, but no further cry comes. All is fine here, I insist, all is well. They nod, shrug, retreat down the drive to continue their search for the owner of the voice on the breeze. I stand and watch them go, and listen at the edge of my senses, feel my blood ticking in my throat. There is nothing but the wind.
We batten down the hatches, closing our pistachio-coloured shutters from the inside and plunging the house into a premature nightfall. I fall silent for a moment, like a bird in a solar eclipse. The tricolour in the cemetery next to the house, already tattered, unpicked by decades of storms, has started to snap and straighten in the wind by 6pm. A commotion above our heads as we secure the potager gates reveals that the hens have taken to roost early, and they bicker among themselves bitterly, their jockeying for branch space showering us with foliage. The cat melts across the drive and beneath a car like a wraith. I would call her in if I thought it was any use but she is not a cat you call, rather one who calls upon you. The uppermost boughs of the poplars begin to keen. We have secured ourselves against disaster. Now is the time for fire and shelter.
Winter here is structured around the tending of fires. In back gardens and the corners of fields bonfires smoke lazily, scenting the late evening air and making the fading light syrupy and unreal. Four summers ago W pointed out a copse to me which he wishes to buy. It has been neglected by the person currently renting it and, unbidden, twelve years’ worth of saplings have sprung up, crowding in on each other, jostling like adolescents for space and light, a chance to stretch and spread their sap-filled limbs. With a little management this woodland could provide sustainable fuel for the farmhouse throughout the year. Presently deer cut a lithe path through the trunks and watch you, invisible, from the green depths.
In the absence of the copse, we fall back on the woodpile, stacked in unpredictable strata, running on its own system of arborecultural time. Much of this wood is harvested from that which falls in storms, on the farm and on the voie vert. Tonight’s gusts, topping 130km/h, will make a substantial contribution. Some of this wood is ideally sized to fit into the smaller woodstoves and fireplaces of the gites but larger logs require splitting for ease of use. On squally afternoons, when the appetite for any intellectual pursuit has palled, a few hours of wood splitting puts you back in your body to sweat and smell the dust of the barn and the split wood. Chopping wood with a hand axe is, I find, an alarming, hit and miss process. Chopping wood with a sledgehammer and a wood grenade: significantly more satisfying. If you are not familiar with the wood grenade, it is a solid iron pyramid, whose flat bottom splits into four ridges which spiral to a point. Placed at the centre of a log in the correct orientation and hit with a hammer, these spirals force the wood fibres apart in the direction they are weakest, producing satisfying wedges of timber. We fill a modest basket and return to the house.
And as I write this the wind is howling down the chimney and shifting the glowing logs in the grate. The candle flames on the mantle eddy and gutter only to re-ignite. We play the delicate game of balance between wood and flame and air. It is a very old game indeed. Irregular gusts thud dully against the glass of the stove, as if trapped inside, begging admittance. To lay a fire, is to embark on a piece of architecture. Fleeting, quotidian, unthinking. But still, you build a structure for the fire to inhabit. You design its voids and its scaffoldings, and you draw the flames up through it. And you watch as the fire remakes it utterly. Outside the storm redesigns the treescapes of the farm. Inside, because the shelter is strong, the storm is good.
[1] ‘brouille’ can mean a quarrel, an estrangement or falling out. As a verb, ‘brouiller’, it means ‘to blur’. In other contexts it can mean to scramble or jam or interfere. It can also mean ‘to cloud’ as in ‘to cloud ones judgement’, to make one unable to see clearly. I mis-translate it because of this, and because of the oncoming storm, associating it with literal clouds, ‘nuages’, and it is only when the men have turned left out of the gate, diminishing into the distance, that I understand, with a small fall in the pit of my stomach, what they had said.