Hello all! I’ve categorized this “What we wear” as well as “Milan color story.” Both are leggermente misleading, because I’m not wearing these colors myself, at the moment, nor are these colors native to the city. But they certainly are EVERYWHERE right this minute. And I was taken with them while walking a couple days ago. So here we go! Fasten your eye-belts. They are quite the ride. And I love them.
While photographing the gates for my earlier post several onlookers of the four-legged variety spied on me. At least, they tried to, despite the aforementioned gates.
This town is full of dogs you never really get to see. You hear the barking, then the rushing toward the gate—all part of the well-contained attempt to scare you away. And then, after you’ve imagined a ferocious beast, a sweet little snout appears in the gap between the dirt and the enclosure. Sometimes they carry on barking. Sometimes they whine. And sometimes you can hear a tail wagging on the other side: trespassing forgiven.
[You know you're in a small town when the "big" town where you do your shopping looks like this.]
I suppose if I had to name the greatest invention of all time, it would not be the wheel. But the door. It, alone, wouldn’t have led to the Industrial Revolution, but it issued the greatest metaphorical invitation of all time. Or the greatest shutting out. Depends on how you look at it.
Here, in our small French town and round about, there are such invitations at every turning. Barn doors. House doors. Secret entrances into meter-thick stone walls. Great wrought-iron affairs leading to tree lined drives and often shuttered-for-the-winter chateaux. But my favorite, at least today, are the small, waist- or chin-high garden gates that open onto courtyards, fields, alleyways, or just “some other space.” Modest. Rotting. Rusted. Neglected. Worn wood graced by a porcelain knob. Some wedged between cinder block walls, other between pillars grander than they are—they are all beautiful to me. They beckon, don’t they?—”come in, no, stay out, well, look but don’t touch”—but not with confidence. They murmur under their breath, most of all: “Maybe.”
[If you enjoyed this post, you might also like "The door within the door," another one of my door-obsessed observations, this time from Milan.]
Certain features along the road say “hello” and “goodbye” like nothing else. This is one of them—Burgundy’s version of the red carpet, the welcome mat, the yellow brick road, the way here and (sadly) the way back home:
These old French villages are full of ghosts. But my favorites are those that haunt the walls. Signs (literally) of things past. Hotels. Dairy shops. Jewelry and watch shops. Bakeries long gone or relocated. Typography is a passion of mine, and as spectacular as it is in many of its digital iterations, there is nothing that compares with these hand-painted beauties. I wonder who decided what font to use? I wonder who chose the colors? I wonder what hand painted them so steadily? Layers and layers of time, peeling away, fading before our eyes, some lingering a little longer as reminders of something that came long before us.
In this last window, the swallows have come back year after year to build their nests under the windows of the old watch shop. Collectively, they and their feathered ancestors have seen it all. The times of war and peace. The seasons of drought and plenty. The heat waves and the cold snaps. I wonder what memory they pass on to their babies, along with that incredible instinct to cross vast sweeps of our planet in the winter, only to return once again to that particular barn, or that old dairy shop. What do they make of the comings and goings, the painted words that one year are vibrant, another nearly invisible?
Last spring, I caught sight of this old man making his way home with a bit of scavenged firewood. I imagine he’s using it now. The wind is so cold. And so fierce when it whips up. An hour ago the sky was black and the beams were creaking. Now it’s serene. Not a cloud in sight, except for those harmless stragglers, skidding like dust bunnies before a brilliant moon. The smell of smoke is in the air. The wind pulls it out of the chimneys, sideways. Some of it is his.
