Layers of history
The Way to Berniquot
Berniquot the wind-whipped plateau, whose ragged edge I can barely make out atop the stone cliffs that tower above Durfort, fascinates me. I wonder how the villagers who fled from Sorèze and Durfort to Berniquot in the 10th century when the Vikings arrived to plunder their land and burn them out of their homes managed to tough it out for the better part of three centuries on those inhospitable heights.
A bedroom in La Villette
As Gertrude Stein might have put it “there was plenty of ‘there’, there”, although there was somewhat less “there”, there when we arrived in Soreze in 1993.
My friend Alice and I had come from California to visit our friend Carole, who had just bought a house (fixer-upper) in Sorèze, a quiet village in the department of the Tarn. An old and venerable center of learning, it has some examples of fine architecture like the Renaissance buildings of L’Abbaye École. (As well as more modest monuments to its medieval past like the “pig doors” on Rue Azaïs.) Our friend Carole bought the house on Rue Ferlu for a song. Alice and I made the long trip from California because we knew it would be as amazing as the other houses Carole has transformed into “art houses” with her brilliant imagination and hard work. She painted the walls with charming scenes and vignettes, all in the vibrant colors of the South of France. She didn’t stop there, she painted the light fixtures, the furniture, the floor; in fact any surface to which paint might adhere. The end result was enchanting; everyone loved “La Villette.” Read more
Inspired by my visit to Saissac with Glenda, Siri and Maya, I made a collage deck of “story cards”. The first person to draw a card would initiate the story using the image on the card for inspiration. The next person to pick up a card would continue the story. We would go around the circle building the story card by card. The person to draw the last card was challenged to tie up the loose ends in a grand finale. Our friend Peter was brilliant at inventing endings and never failed to conclude the action with an unexpected turn of events that would make perfect sense of our wild imaginings.
