I think I may need to apologise. I’m sure the prompt ‘Fresh’ is supposed to encourage me to find a perfect picture of Spring but to me it just had to be linked to the line from Paul Simon’s song. Maybe I’m not quite there in terms of Spring … it tends to be very brief and sudden here, as I noted last April in my post ‘You can cut all the flowers…’ It’s barely marked at all before Summer, in all her verdent green and technicolour splendour, steals centre stage sometime in May. We get flowers, of course but it isn’t the English Spring I was used to before moving here. And the snow is still coming at us. Not much – I admit this picture was taken in the last days of February but it just seems to fit so well … I love the bright relief that fresh snow lends a landscape.
The chapel is called Notre Dame de la Fonte Sainte and sits in the Pays de Gentiane at about 1230 metres. It is a place of pilgrimige marked by many crosses on the road that leads to it, almost as though the visitor should crawl on his bare hands and knees, wearing a hair shirt and do the stations of the cross. We felt much like staggering pilgrims having ascended from St Hippolyte, gotten lost and trudged through over-knee snow. The Bean was stoic, asking to be put down when Two Brains tried to assist her in the most challenging parts, so that she could snow-snorkel her Olympic finest through the fresh drifts. A racketer that we met at the high-point was visibly disgusted that we were putting the little creature through this misery and it was only later that we realised the bornes were in fact strategically placed to view the Chapel below from. Perhaps we should repent – I think that’s what the Catholics who built the place would bid us do but I’m afraid we just laughed and enjoyed the moment. And the view of this little gem sitting in her fresh white heaven was surely worthy of every taxing step even though we had shunned the carefully sculpted viewpoints …..
PS: The song is ‘I am a Rock’ and, like the voice of those lyrics, I seem to be rather wanting to wall myself in more than usual at the moment but I would like to say that in addition to ‘my books and my poetry to protect me’, I am hugely grateful for the support given by those that read my posts. Thank you and I promise I will stop being gloomy Eeyore very soon.