Palimpsest

When I was a little girl, I loved to spend the weekend with my grandmother.  We would walk the old neighborhood where she lived in Santa Paula, a sleepy, agricultural town in the Santa Clara Valley of Ventura County.  Granny would recount stories of the people who had lived in the Victorian and Craftsman houses.  She knew their names, their pets, their relationships and failings.  She wove their histories into overlapping stories that covered generations, Canterbury Tales of love, deceit, forgiveness, crime, courage and passion.  Layer overlaid layer as the years passed, new tales superimposed on the old like parchment scraped of ink, ready to reuse, but with faint stains bleeding through in places.

I am now the age of my grandmother when she told me these yarns.  I am back in Aix-en-Provence, far from that drowsy town in California, yet as I walk these much more ancient streets again, the old feeling of double-vision returns.  I see the winding passages that lead from the wide Cours Mirabeau with their trendy boutiques and faintly beneath, the Medieval cobbles, ghostly monks, scurrying merchants and lower still, Roman soldiers and fountains.  Above these imagined images, are my own memories of two, previous visits, my personal history of cafes where I shared l'apero with friends and markets where I shopped for aubergines and oranges, felt the bite of the Mistral and sipped hot, mulled wine in the Christmas cabines.

The scene is familiar and exotic at the same time; the palimpsest is clean and smeared simultaneously.  As I look back on my life, my travels and adventures, the same strange blurring occurs. It is not that the bottom layer is obscured, but that the lavish layering of experience like an illustrated manuscript with lively marginalia adding dimension.  "So, this is age," I think.  I had hoped for wisdom, but this is not bad.  Puzzling out the stories beneath and above provides an almost, but not quite, psychedelic richness that challenges and invites me to see the follies and foundations, a few triumphs and some tragedies. Time is a river that flows always onward, but memory, like vellum, is blessedly faulty and human.