Summer Sun Contentment

By a distant village summer river 'plage' we listened to a MADAGASCAN music group.  They were good!  At home, I needed to lie down and wait a while. My bra was soaking wet. I researched how to lower heart rate.  After while I counted 90 per minute when the target for aged 70 = 75 to 128 beats per minute so I'm not doing too bad!

This year is the first evening that I have sat n my back garden since 2016.  In 2017 and 2018. burdened with the WILL,,  I hardly ventured out when HEAT was too much or COLD and RAIN was inclement,  so I became more physically unfit.  Today, I felt that glorious heat of summer, when I can bare legs, arms and therefore my soul.  It feels as if I am on the way to being healed.  I did bare my arms and legs on the Ile de Ré in September 2018 after I had travelled alone to see a Performance of Shakespeare as I began to emerge like a butterfly opening her wings.  
It was with romantic notions and memories, yet with personal pleasure of being on my own and independent of anyone that I went again to that wonderful place of security, safety.   It was with romantic notions and memories,  I revisited an Isle that reminded me much of a place I considered to be my home town – Southwold …. but in actual fact , when I returned there in January and February this year I could not stay for long. It was too closed,  too crowded, too 'noir'. I did not feel free.  I felt stifled, that 'my home' had been robbed from me by the hooray Henry's and squashed in so called needful development.   Whereas France seems more and more to fulfill my need to be alone and independent even though I long for company.

BUT BACK TO THIS EVENING.

Today I bought two types of exquisite goats cheese from “ISABELLE” in La Roche Posay market. 

I cannot explain the complete story in my head to you or retell it for me, but I pressed the water pump to water garden plants for the second or third time this summer… we had had so much rain in June.  A stained by time and weather plastic chair had made its way to the lilac tree but no one had ever sat there. 
It looked inviting.
I created a makeshift table for the chair. 
I took my cheeses, rice salad and glass of red wine on a tray with my reading book to dine,  to look towards the setting sun … it sets behind the rooftops. 

OH MY!

Yes it was 2016 when I was last here…. and only just before HE without many days of warning LEFT at the end of July when we were supposed to have gone camping after finishing the kitchen.  HE, my former partner who I feel several times had shafted me, forgive me, but I can’t think of other appropriate words, when one felt abandoned and rejected.  Well, anyway, having decided to sell everything and 'give almost everything away', he again escaped to the south of France or maybe this time was straight to Peckham Rye where he fell out with the host on the day I departed to go see my mother for her 90^th birthday.   He needed a bolthole … what|????   In normal circumstances before that he could always rely on me but when he left in July, old wounds opened up especially remembering the Bordeaux incident the years before!
A Long costly journey for a bolt hole from UK to France for an immediate bolthole?  Can he not go to his daughter or sister?  I never said YES and I never said NO. I was late departing and a ferry had to be reached in an ailing vehicle. I was on my journey with everyone set up with keys to look after my cat. … our cat!       
CUT…… C.U.T.

I really wish to write about being in the garden this evening.

I sat feeling the most excellent warmth and that wonderful contentment that comes from sitting in absolute heat and European sunshine that was a very rare wonder in England.

I read my book.  Grellier the cat came to look from a distance.
It was almost 23h before I returned indoors.

When I have a need to be close to others, or to express thoughts, desires, abstract feelings which have insufficient words, then music and company, or even being still and alone has great gifts.
The hot African heat drawing itself north through Europe on account of too much water evaporation holds a special moment in one's living hours.
Contentment is a most wonderful gift to treasure.