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Canicule
Posted by squirrley on 30 Aug 2010 | Tagged as: home
After a couple of quite cool weeks, we are having a little canicule.
I ran into my landlord and his family at the pool. Just his two little girls had been laying down their towels, features obscured by their sunhats; I was thinking how charming little french girls are, and how this one, just like my landlord’s eldest daughter, had a chirpy, titmouse voice although normally I don’t actually think of children speaking like little birds. Then the landlord and his partner appeared, and I realized I had thrown my towel down at the public pool–with its vast expense of sunny cement–right beside my downstairs neighbours/landlords. I quite like them, and we had a nice chat. They were very happy and I likewise. We had not been expecting the canicule. A little extra summer, sweltering, was sooooo welcome.
The diving boards were even open. I had been regretting not having dived this summer (the deep end being only open erratically and then populated by long lines of boys with six-pack abs and fancy dives and spins). So I dived. Twice. Each time clean and deep. In that moment of slicing the water, parted into its bright coldness, then slowing into gravity, buoyed to light (bubbles, bubbles spinning everywhere)–for a moment I shed the paining, my body a wondrous place. It was amazing.