home

Morning. I am lying in between the stripes of the vineyard, the bulbous black clusters sugar-frosted and glinting in the sun. The heat has a chilly autumnal gauze around it full of paradox - log fires and suntans, lunch al fresco and sledging, cotton skirts and boots. Our cats are twining themselves around gnarled trunks and posing for me under a shifting canopy of vine-light....



I am home.



It is evening. I go off to pick thyme for the chicken. Scrabbling up the red sandy rock I see ochre cloud-puffs in the deepening blue and a silver cat sitting proud on his pink throne. My fingers smell pungent from the herbs in the air rinsed clean with rain and pine.

I return to the house and my husband's eyes have welled up.

"I like having a wife" he splutters.
"Even a friend is nice".

We are together again.

Night......