FIDELMA COOK

AS IS often the way, looking for one particular photograph I found another that led me off on a number of thoughts. Taken two months after I moved here, in the corner of the frame it shows my son sitting on the large tractor mower I bought with the house.

The house is to the left with the drive curving past the front field.

It was just about recognisable as Las Molieres. The facade, obviously in hindsight, newly painted to hide the creeping damp from potential owners, is a blank canvas with nothing growing on or before its face.

The field straggles along with what look like tufts of vegetation. Looking closer I recognise a barely 2ft fir tree, a Christmas tree with roots planted after the feast.

At the side of the house there’s another straggle of trees on to the drive, which is still battered Tarmac.

Today the house is draped in wisteria, cotoneaster, jasmine, climbing roses, clematis and honeysuckle. Large terracotta pots hold more roses while smaller ones change with the seasons.

The tiny Christmas tree is now a 14ft ramrod-straight beauty and the back of house straggle of trees, 20 to 30ft of conifer protection.

What was a dumping ground filled with broken tiles, smashed bottles and wire and pipe offcuts, is now a lush rising circle filled with huge shrubs and rampant herbs such as rosemary, sage and dill, grown for smell and looks. A magnolia tree has made its home there, too, as has another, whose name I’ve forgotten. Buddleia grows strong to call out to the many butterflies.

Flame red, cobalt blue and white are the primary colours broken by the spring-strewn wildflowers. And the sad drive with its pot-holed pools of water was quickly covered with riverbed stones dredged from either the Tarn or the Garonne.

What in the photograph was a bare patch of Tarmac squaring off before the field is now a lavender hedged dining area with table and chairs. A demi-lune bed of Mediterranean plants now thrives beyond the huge lavenders that began as tiny sticks.

None of this is my physical doing, just the idea of it. But, like cooking, I don’t need to actually do it myself to take pleasure in someone else’s execution…for me.

Yet, until I saw the proof in the photo in front of me, I really had not, bizarrely, noticed the natural growth of what little was here.

In fact when asked, I always say, the trees are stunted in their development, roots waterlogged in the clay soil that in the summer sets as hard as concrete.

And all the time they were growing under my unseeing eye.

I have equally been unaware of time speeding up, of years whooshing by, although my face and body show its permanent, sad passage.

But there is a paradoxical upside to this land and time blindness. All I’ve left behind – people, places, drifting memories – are fixed too, unchanging, forever at their best.

They have never moved from where I left them. Their small children have not grown up and moved away; the dead, among them far too many old colleagues, still exist on a permanent night shift, raucous with the whisky that would kill them; the living have yet to face the myriad ailments that affect ageing bones and there’s always another party just, just, beyond the horizon. It is a rather lovely parallel world that continues without me; a comforting Neverland where, like Peter Pan, I can release my feet now mired in clay. Perhaps that is, and has been, the lot of migrants from time immemorial.

It’s hard now to imagine that when the Irish, fleeing famine, or the Scots dispossessed, set sail for the New World, their families held wakes for them, knowing they would never see them again in their lifetime.

But the cruelty of final separation left, for many, untrue, warm memories of homelands and family and friends. It was all they had to sustain them as they suffered and struggled in their strange new country.

For we exiles of choice there are no such horrors, but the desire to look back to a time of relative youth and expanding future remains.

In a strange way, the internet, visible access, diminishes us, although I could not live here without it.

For there is something rather comforting in a vision of life continuing on a loop without us and the belief that one day we could just quietly slip back in and all would be as it was.

Nonsense, of course – but beguiling nonsense. I often think of what it would be like to retrace my steps and catch a train and go to a house where inside would be the past and I would enter in full knowledge of the here and now. And I would appreciate and relish every lost moment with an unimaginable intensity.

So there you are. It was just a photograph – a moment in time, a moment barely remembered but, oh, what it unleashed.

And no, I never found the one I was looking for.