Crossing with Swallows
... or brief encounters on our road trip north from Porto to Plymouth, where memories old and new start to merge
Silence and the paralysis of waiting has dominated the last couple of months, and I’m sorry for the irregularity of my posts here. A. and I have been in a holding pattern, but now we’re where we need to be in England for the next couple of months, and already I can sense the time is going to fly.
But, perfectly timed for my first return drive ‘home’ after we left nearly 4 years ago, I was inspired to join Jeannine Ouellette’s ‘100 Days of Making and Memory’ with its 1st 10 day ‘chapter’ starting last Tuesday (the day we set off) in which subscribers were invited to write 100 words each day in response to making something from memory.
Our original journey to Portugal followed pretty much the same route as the one we’ve just used to return, but this time without our little Monty wedged between rucksacks in the boot, and this time to help our younger son move out of his flat (where he’d looked after a lot of our more - sentimentally - precious belongings) ahead of his move to Canada. We also find ourselves needing new tenants for our old family home, with all the clearing, cleaning, and decorating that now calls for.
Memory along with the opposing forces of attachment and separation are going to be strong themes over these coming months, and the prospect of turning such upheaval into small, tangible acts of creation feels very stabilising 😊
With limited resources available i.e. phone camera, notebook and pen, I share here what I’ve ‘made’ so far, but in my Mum’s old cottage, rammed with family memorabilia, we’ll see what else may emerge in the coming days!
Day 1: Vila Nova de Gaia (Portugal) to Irun (Spanish border with France)
Crossing the Bridge
We eat breakfast at a service station just outside the first place we lived when we moved from SW England to Portugal, whispering so that the ‘tourists’ don’t know that we’re English too, and then Ade takes over the driving so that I can see ‘my beautiful bridge’.
I catch my reflection in the passenger wing mirror. My usual frown has been replaced by a contentment on lips that I note have found a rare symmetry.
We’re driving through the mountains of North East Portugal, an area called the Marão, craggy and dotted with dolmens, but softened too by patches of vineyards, forming green waves across the slopes. The dolmens remind me of the tors that jut up all over our beloved Dartmoor. We left home early this morning for … home.
Too often during our chequered time here we’ve wondered if we’re in the right place.
But, this morning, as we drive across the swooping bridge near Vila Real, its angel harps rising ready to be plucked by the wispy fingers of the morning mist, I know that this landscape is also home. It has a claim on my heart just as Dartmoor and Cornwall’s North coast have - I’ve never actually lived in either of those places, either, but something in me understands these regions as home. There’s something about that juxtaposition of the enduring and ancient - the granite tors, the dolmen-strewn crags - alongside the vast and fluid Atlantic Ocean and the rivers that flow to it - that somehow holds me. England’s West Country has that. And Portugal’s North does too.
It’s the same journey we did nearly 4 years ago, in reverse now, and our first drive back to the UK since moving here. No poor pooch wedged in between rucksacks in the boot, but he trained us well and we still stop every 2/3 hours for wee-and-walk breaks, smiling fondly at the dogs and their owners who remind us of us, but remind us that right now, we are also somehow not quite ‘us’.
A brief encounter with the Guardia Civil after a misguided u-turn, then a too close encounter with a deer who races across our road, its hind leg and our front bumper missing each other by a hoof’s breadth, remind us that we are still often strangers in a strange land where the unexpected jumps out at us at many a turn, and life can turn on a pin.
For the most part, we travel with memories but find we’re making new ones, too. We’re still somewhere in the in-between, but today home feels behind us, and I’m already looking forward - as I’ve always done - to being back.
Day 2: Irun to the Brittany Coast (France)
Tolls, lorries and service stations … and the discovery of how far away we are from Calgary
Today we agreed we’d just drive. Get as far as we could before exhaustion or bad tempers got the better of us, whichever came first, and hopefully not together.
We’d split the driving into 2/3 hour blocks (wee-and-walk, right?) and aimed to get a little beyond Rennes, leaving only 2 hours or so to get to Roscoff for our ferry tomorrow.
Best laid plans. As I leant forward to put my shampoo in the toiletries bag, the lower part of my back gave way. This was all wrong. I don’t have a bad back. A. has the bad back. Initially I couldn’t even straighten up. But not getting in the car for the next leg of the journey wasn’t an option. I stretched, did ‘cat’ and ‘cow’ poses, and walked round and round the estate until I felt I could at least get into the passenger seat.
It wasn’t the best start.
At our first walk-and-wee stop, I entertain the parked-up lorry drivers with more yoga, and discover that I really no longer give a monkeys about what strangers think of me.
It’s liberating.
After a few hours, I feel able to sit in the driver’s seat and take my turn.
It is hot, gutty, and the only purpose we have in doing what we are doing is to get from A to B.
Long lines of lorries - mostly heading south, thankfully - remind us of family summer holidays in traffic jams between Spain and France in the South that were so bad car inmates would get out and play badminton or set up their picnic tables. We groan inwardly at the prospect of our return mid-August, but while the trip may seem reminiscent of so many family summer holidays, this one is bound by jobs we need to do, responsibilities we need to carry out.
At a service station somewhere in France, we stop to eat a baguette and have a herbal tea. A signpost where we sit tells us, rather bizarrely, that Calgary is 7,563kms. Of all the places it had to pick…
But we manage to do what I also knew we would do and get further than we expected, and somehow land up in a very friendly motel-hotel set in a beautiful garden, swallows nesting in the eaves above our room, their little heads poking out of their small, cylindrical nests. Mum waits for their return to her cottage in Cornwall every year; we have 3 ceramic ones packed in a box in the boot as our home-coming gift to her.
We learn we are too late for dinner but the hotel’s friendly staff greet my newly-developed ‘franguese’ with warmth and smiles and apologies for ‘not speaking English very well’, and bustle off to retrieve something from their freezer, plus free puddings for being ‘so smiley’.
As A and I eat our microwave-heated pots of homemade dhal, drink local Breton beer, and find happiness in our puddings, we receive a message from our Portuguese teacher. We passed our A2 exam with flying colours.
Maybe we’re cracking this transnational life better than we’d thought!
Day 3: Brittany to Cornwall
We wake up to the surprise of rain and cool grey after the 30-something degree heat we’ve been travelling through the past 2 days.
That’s fine, we think. It’s just acclimatising us to an English summer.
It’s not just the landscape nor the weather but the names in this part of France that are so closely connected to England’s West Country - the coastal inlets, green sloping fields, and granite cottages that are so familiar to us from home are bestowed with names that could easily be Cornish: Trélévern, Kerbors, Tréguier, Trédarzec - only the acute accents give the game away.
Both Cornish and Breton are from Southwestern Brittonic, a Celtic language, and linguists consider them both to be dialects that would have been mutually intelligible. (Thanks, Wikipedia).
But time to dream and reflect on these shared histories is rudely cut short by the flash of a speed camera as A. overtakes a lorry on a ring road, unaware until that moment that he was breaking the speed limit.
Fast forward to our arrival in England after the nearly 7 hour ferry journey where we find ourselves having to slap on the headlight reflectors we just happened to spot in the ferry shop on our left hand drive car, and then spend the next hour and a half rapid-fire converting kmph to mph as we drive along foggy Cornish roads where the speed limit seems to change at every bend.
“What’s 40?” A. fires out at me.
“64,” I pronounce, as if in some crazy maths challenge.
The final 60 miles to my Mum’s little cottage buried in the depths of Cornwall are the hardest part of the journey.
Roads we once knew like the back of our hands hurl us around as if we’re on a fairground ride, and we are suddenly strangers in our own land.
We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.
from Ted Hughes, ‘Wind’
So this is how my summer has officially started.
And while both of us feel some sense of urgency just to get cracking with our many jobs that lie ahead, these first few days at my Mum’s offer a valuable bridge of another sort where we can rest a bit, and restore a bit, walking the beautiful coastline around here or just chatting with family in her pretty garden with roses spilling over everywhere, the eucalyptus she and her husband first planted from seed 35 years ago now towering over most else, and the ancient apple tree already promising a bumper crop.
And it gives us a chance to hang out a bit with her visiting swallows.
Check back in next week to find out just how a stay at my Mum’s inspires more ‘making and memory’!
And if you’d like to join Jeannine Ouellette’s ‘100 Days of Making and Memory’, check the link (you do have to be a paid subscriber).
I’m also enjoying Caroline Donahue’s ‘Governess Season Bingo’ and am delighted to have crossed off ‘live music’ as my first square! (Thanks, The Cure, for an epic concert at Maia a couple of weeks ago!)
Até à próxima,
Michelle 🦋
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Sounds like an epic journey Michelle. I listened to it on audio and felt like I was travelling with you. Hope the back has improved 😊