From one hill to another
This Sunday, November 9th, 2025, we went to Miramon hill. Bright sunshine, blue sky, autumn wind. On the road from Sainte-Colome, we caught glimpses of the first snows gracing a few peaks, and of many a nonchalant sheep on the green slopes. Expedition members: Mayuan, mum, dad, Ninon, and me.
That day, I celebrated my fourtieth birthday. It was actually for this occasion that mum and dad came to visit us and spend the weekend. Our programme: feasting in some nice restos, strolling down the quiet streets of Arudy - and visiting the bit of land where Mayuan and I are planning to build our strawbale house. It was mum and dad's first time there. They met the seven mighty oaks that have been watching over this place for several centuries; the young wild cherry tree tenderly hugging the most venerable of these great ancients, its shining silvery bark against rougher, creviced skin; several enterprising and stubborn ash trees; around the ridge, beautiful pebbles bequeathed by a river of old; the long horizon line to the east, rising from the plains as far as the eye can see, becoming foothills, and eventually, the Pyrenees; the small wood below; further away, the buildings of the big dairy farm, which we will have to learn to overlook - just like the 5G antenna, to the east, a few hundred metres away... At least, it should enable us to remain connected to the rest of the world without depending on telephone lines vulnerable to storms.
Above: A hill in the Gard region, 1987
About thirty-eight years ago, mum, dad, and I settled on the top of another hill, in a very different region. A hill hidden deep in the garrigue gardoise, surrounded with Mediterranean forest, neighbouring the Cèze river valley. It was there that I had the great good fortune of growing up, together with my brother Lloyd, among green and white oaks, arbutuses, junipers, chestnut trees and black pines, olive and fig and almond and cypress trees, not to mention Granddad's linden, and the proud mulberry-plane tree whose shadow cooled down our summer meals, or the eagles who sometimes left the Concluses nature reserve to come say a piercing hello carried on the wind, making us crane our necks as we looked out for them at every corner of the sky. A reddish land, tough and topsoil poor, full of stones, fragrant with thyme, rosemary, lavender and savoury. We set up secret dens in the woods. We hunted for chanterelles and pieds-de-mouton. The song of the nightingale, then that of the cicadas, signaled the start of summer. We met our friends on the beaches of the river Cèze, in Montclus, le Courau, la Verdède, Cazernau; we sprung from the rocks of l'Île bleue and l'Aiguille and splashed into its clear waters. In our tent pitched up in the garden throughout the summer holidays, we listened to the grunts of the wild boar in the underbrush, while the chirp of the night crickets rocked us to sleep. When the brisk mistral wind blew, from the Méjannes plateau, we admired the blue ridge of the Cévennes and the silhouette of the Mont Ventoux.
This year, in March, mum and dad left the Mas de l'Aiglière. This old farmhouse half in ruin that they patiently rebuilt, over the course of more than fifteen years, bringing together their respective talents and sensibilities as a dancer and a photographer; which they turned into a beautiful family home. A house which eventually became too big for them, difficult to maintain, and a bit too far from urban amenities. They've moved to Bergerac, closer to Lloyd in the Périgord vert, and to us here in the Béarn. For the first time, this summer, we didn't eat on the big green solid wood table that dad built, on the terrace. For the first time, this winter, we will not celebrate Christmas there. Life has brought us to the greener, lusher South-West, to lands slightly less badly hit by droughts and heat waves. Lands where cicadas do not sing - yet.
It is thanks to mum and dad that Mayuan and I are able to launch ourselves into this house-building project. Without their generous support, we would simply not have the means of buying this plot of land of Miramon, or to build anything there. And it was the sale of the Mas de l'Aiglière to another family that made this possible. This house, and all the love, the courage and the labour that still shine in its walls and have allowed it to exist, and all the memories we weaved there, the moments of sadness and the peals of laughter, the parties and the quarrels, and the benevolence of all this hill's inhabitants - human, birds, trees, insects, flowers and mushrooms - some of all this love and energy, some all of these relations, have become transformed to allow new adventures to begin. For Lloyd and Amandine, at la Ferme des Asphodèles; for mum and dad, in their new house; and for us, here in Miramon. From one hill to another - a new cycle begins.
Miramon, 2025