PAUL CHRISTENSEN

Cool nights. Great for sleeping. Lovely to roll around and push one's foot down into the autumnal depths of the sheet and lie there, soothed. As if you were stretched out in a cool mountain stream, with the trees forming a luminous and shadowy canopy over you. This is how my dreams form, in the tranquilized latitudes of my bed -- my Lotus land, where the torpor is overpowering me. Below, in the village street, footsteps make echoes and slowly disappear. No one is hurrying to

It was hot yesterday, so hot the sun stung my forearms as I walked along at the antique market in Bonnieux, a village hanging on the side of a bluish mountain squared off here and there with old vineyards and austere stone houses. The sky was nearly cloudless, and so dark in its blue depths you had to stare up at it from time to time. It seemed unreal, almost like some huge silk canopy dyed in India and hung out to dry. The merchants were tired and fed up with the thin crowds

Back in France after two long, pandemic-bound years at home, in Vermont. I spent most of my time reading, listening to the house brace itself against the wind, watching clouds hesitate in the sky before moving on sluggishly. I heard the birds sing through their routines and then fall silent as the sun began to sink. I heard the mail truck slow and then pass up my empty mailbox each day, and the fuel truck stop and back up with a warning beep, and then the gurgle of fuel oil b