Perhaps... (three more things at Le Légué)

Palettes, a tarp, silt-supported ferns and moss, hold down the old shed roof of undulated asbestos.  A piece of board with plastic stuck-on tiles blocks the gap below the rusted hinge, where the wood has rotted away.

Once perhaps, a woman in a blue or pink housecoat, flowered or striped, looked at the pretty new panel on her wall with admiration and appreciation; the peaches, pears, cherries and plums spilling from the blue lattice baskets, the golden grapes and soft green vine leaves framing every square, and felt a fruitful glow of promise in her life. 

Or perhaps the plasticised images of abundance taunted and depressed her.  Or perhaps she scarcely saw them, they were simply wallpaper.

But a child would have.  Hanging over the back of a rush-seated kitchen chair, counting and adding up the leaves and grapes round each edge of each tile, observing that there are three different shapes of basket, though the blue and white pattern of each is the same, that it is plums which have fallen from this one, cherries from that. 

And perhaps that grown-up child passes here now, and remarking the house restored but the shed still neglected and undealt with, and seeing the cornucopian baskets repeated over and over once more, feels again the ridges of the rush seat digging into her knees, and smells the coffee brewing, or the fish or pancakes frying, on her mother's kitchen stove.

~~~

A big black labrador type dog lopes purposefully across the road, carrying an enormous, bloody beef thigh bone almost too big for his jaws.  He looks sidelong at us but doesn't break step, and as he makes his way along the pavement a stir of thrilled amazement follows him.  Grown men make way for him with a smile; an elderly couple bend and gasp, their faces delighted 'O's which say 'What have you got there?!'; a family of small children seated round a table outside the cafe where he lives swing round and hang over the backs of their chairs to stare and point and giggle as he installs himself in a corner of the terrace and gets busy.

There is something atavistic about this intense vicarious pleasure which the sight of a dog with a good bone elicits in us; perhaps it is something to do with why we let them into the caves in the first place.

~~~

A wooden boat for sale in the marina. painted like a toybox: bright blue hull and cabin, deep red deck, yellow trim and bowsprit, a green metal box on the foredeck holding... something needful.  A little boat, on a miniature scale to the serviceable, samey fibreglass around it.

I can't really sail; I don't really 'do' boats, and wouldn't want to be doing with all the necessary things, caulking and weatherproofing and all that, but how many people passing this one and its beckoning 'A vendre' sign, wouldn't just see themselves for a moment in another life, and think to themselves 'Perhaps...'

I wonder what colour the sails are?

~~~