In the early evenings we sat outside our vacation house high on the mountain and listened to the goats being called home below. Each made their way back from different parts of the island, the bell around their neck ringing out with every step, a great cacophonous tinkling from all directions, refracting off the mountain side, portending dinnertime. The bells, mixed with the heady fragrance of the Maquis that blanketed the island — eucalyptus, juniper, rosemary, heather, myrtle, sage, mint, thyme, lavender — make up my memory of that time. And the horizon line in the distance, its natural precision. There were days when there was no differentiation between the blue of the water and the blue of the sky, just a clean, unbroken surface, like a placid ocean extending vertically, forever. Other days, the sky looked pressure washed of its color against the ocean’s deep, greyish blue and the light off the horizon was soft and wavering. I was reading Etel Adnan’s Shifting the Silence and her descriptions of a beach not too far from there, and her assertion that shimmering slows down all other perceptions.


✦˖°.

݁₊✦˙ .