Feeling Places

My mother claimed she never needed to travel because she could read about any place in the world.

Reading isn't the same as experiencing the feeling, I told her.  I want to feel the places I go be it another country or cooking lunch in my kitchen. It is not just seeing a flower, it is noticing a delicate lighter line on the petal, experiencing it. It's being amused a misshaped carrot or hearing the bubbling of a soup as a reminder to turn down the heat.

Meeting Eleanor

Eleanor of Aquitaine intrigued me from childhood. I read anything and everything I could about her. Nothing compared to standing at her tomb, her husband Henry and her son Richard the Lionhearted near her. The remains of the people buried in those caskets had lived lives full of power, happiness, sadness, war, peace, good meals, sex, adventure and I was in the same room where they lay. It was if I'd flown back in time.

 

Mary Queen of Scots

The guide in his kilt stood on the spot within Stirling Castle where the baby Mary was crowned. Granted the church around her was no more but the spot that I could walk on was a historical reality carried into modern times.

On another trip to Scotland, we were at a house where Mary had slept. I could look out the window and see what she saw when she first woke in the morning. Downstairs there was a piece of the cloth from the dress she wore at her execution and a lock of her hair. Again, I could reach through centuries and feel the past I'd read about.

Sagas

The room was dark to preserve the Icelandic sagas in this Reykjavik museum. They told of events in the 9th and 10th centuries, their version of the internet. Some were written later. I couldn't read them in the original. My knowledge of current never mind ancient Icelandic is non-existent, but that didn't stop me from feeling a connection to the scribe in a room dipping his quill into his homemade ink and copying the words. Maybe he was waiting for a call to dinner of what probably would have been fish. Did his children interrupt his work? Was he cold and did he need to put an extra log on the fire.

Vandoeuvre

Vandoeuvre is the tiny village outside of Geneva where we live. It is a combination of farmland, modern mansions and a château or 2 or 3 or more. The center of the village is where the Tuesday marché is filled with vegetable and food stands. A few years ago they excavated the center to find a Roman villa. In my imagination, I picture a family in togas, with the wife carrying a basket and buying carrots from the marché. 

The violin playing puppet

Unlike the sweltering rest of the world, the temperature along Lake Léman was perfect for ambling along.

The puppeteer was thin, young and working the strings of his puppet. Although I don't know the music's name, its notes reach my soul. The puppeteer had mastered his craft so that the puppet stroked his instrument to the music. The tiny creature dipped and doves as if he were real and for a moment I felt he was real. I hope the puppeteer treats the puppet gently in reward for his performance.

 

 

Sunflower fields

Going to the next village we pass two fields. One is filled with sunflowers so tightly together that I almost need sunglasses. Next to it is some other green crop and spread out among the green  plants are about 20 sunflowers that have popped up far apart from one another. It is almost a metaphor for an escape from congestion to space, from following the crowd to doing one's own thing. Of course it is temporary. The sunflowers and the mystery crop will be harvested, their moment of glory at an end. I shiver thinking of their short lives recreating earlier fields of sunflowers and predicting next year's crops.

Long ago, I discovered that people do not necessarily think and feel as I do. They may be content to read as my mother was. Some will drive past those sunflowers without noticing them. I think of the phrase to each his own and it's okay.

Maybe some of the things I feel will sneak its way into my writing. Maybe the feelings will be part of a memory that I can bring out and savor, a thought of sunflowers on a rainy day or during a winter snow. 

It doesn't matter. 

It is enough that what I have felt has brought me happiness in otherwise chaotic world.