Time and Tide…

The only reason for Time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

Albert Einstein

As I write this, it’s sheep season in Provence. The fields on the outskirts of town, in between the canebrakes and canals, are beginning to mushroom up flocks of dusty, dumpling wool. It starts in mid-March, a trickle at first, then come early April burgeoning tides – hundreds, thousands…tens of thousands. Impromptu paddocks pop up in silage fields, temporary electric fencing strung up to cloisonné the turf. Herd dogs dance, and nip, and yap; copper bells clankle, kids bleat, ewes baa, rams rumble. Brought in from once greener pastures (I’m truly not sure where), the transhumance is rolling, roiling through. It’s a word from the French, via latin: trans (across) the humus (ground). It describes the seasonal movement of livestock between winter and summer pasturages. And it’s something I’ve come to count on to mark the passage of time.

I knew sheep season was imminent because the almond blossoms reached their peak a few weeks ago.  Heady, honey-thick brushstrokes and breeze, dervishing invisible as Max and I wandered the hedgerows.  This scent-fall was, in turn, presaged by the overnight appearance of the blossoms themselves a week earlier.

If I did not possess a watch, a clock, an almanac – or a smartphone which has become them all – I would still know (to within a few days) where in the year we were. When in the world.

Maybe these sigils exist everywhere, maybe in New York I should have noticed the dogwood bloom along 11th street, or when mangoes made an appearance on the impeccably groomed Turkish vendor’s cart at the corner of 76th and Lexington (Umit, you’re one of the few things I miss). In Baltimore, maybe I should have been on the lookout for soft shell (and I was), timed my days to the chanting, honking, brawling of Raven’s fans.

The recipe may say “knead for 10 minutes”, but the Boulanger will tell you it’s done when it’s done, when the surface of the dough turns ‘satiny’ and stretches just so without splitting, when it springs back under thumb, when it ‘feels right’.

Sweet corn is ripe for gathering when the golden tassles wither to chestnut brown, and a thumbnail slice of kernel reveals translucent (not transparent, not yet opaque) milk.

The transhumance happens, not on the 8th^h of April, but when the shepherd decides it’s time.  The shepherd decides it’s time by watching the sheep, the thickness of their coats, the gait of the ewes. The ewes change their gait because…..well, not being a sheep, I’m not really sure.

The point is there are markers, pins dropped on the temporal map.  Like a jazz chart, it’s not exact, more an outline for variations on a theme, but it’s reliable.  There are any number of ways of playing ‘Body and Soul’, but it always comes back to Coleman Hawkins.

In Provence, the variations of late April nights will include thick and rolling insinuations of Jasmine, the scent of unrepentant, gleefully embraced guilt and indulgence, followed 2 weeks later by a gold-tinged scent-dripping of honeysuckle.  Signaling warmer days, geckos will appear, first on the rocks and pathways, eventually on the pebbled glass of the bathroom balcony door snatching mosquitos and moths in a beneficial mini-carnage.

The weekly marché is basically a calendar:  Asparagus means spring is truly here;  preceded ever so slightly by the appearance of Banon at the fromagière;  in May we roll into ‘les temps des cerises’, when cherry blossoms plump into scarlett-dripping fruit, reminiscent of the revolutions that inspired the song.  For non-franco-philes – It was written in 1866, one of the most popular songs in France, there are over 100 recordings of it – what started out as a paean to the evanescence of love was embraced by the Paris commune as a metaphor for what life, the world, would be like after revolution has changed everything for the better.  Yet again.

Autumn brings abundance of a different kind – beetroot, Brussel sprouts, mushrooms by the legion; chestnuts get roasted, street-lining trees get pollarded, Roquefort and glorious, gooey Mont d’Or cheeses settle in next to glasses of port, night falls early with surprising, seeping haste.

And it’s all reliable.  Or at least noticeable.  I’m more aware of asparagus than I am of the day of the week.

There are personal waypoints too – you might not notice, but I do, my wife does:  The time of year our Algerian neighbor offers us a bowl of apricots from his son’s garden – we were warned that he could be an angry drunk, but we’ve never seen him drunk nor angry;  The first day of what we call ‘rosé weather’; The morning I wake up and switch from shoes to sandals (usually in concert with the appearance of snap peas).  The first coquelicot of the season…

And so it goes.  Year in, season out.  We tend to notice or add new markers regularly, and they’re instantly embedded in our psyche as if they’d always been.  Technically, it’s called our ‘circannual’ cycle  (as opposed to ‘circadian’, our daily rhythm – which also has markers, but that’s another story).  And they ground us. Literally, to the place we are.  The signs in Arles are different from New York are different from Istanbul are different from Copenhagen.  And they become our yardstick, our benchmarks, our body and soul.  You pass one signpost, you begin to anticipate the next.  They don’t exactly lead you home, but they remind you what home is.

For now it’s sheep.