Matin Breakfast is over, which paves the way for another important deliberation: What is for lunch? And where? However, this imponderable will have to wait just a few moments to provide space for the rest of the morning. The sun keeps rising, the shadows shortening, and cats are getting lazier. Cats are not known for their continually long bursts of dog like energy, preferring instead the languidity, characteristic of a feline louche. It knows food will arrive either by its slave’s own hand or it will bob by in front of it in avian or rodent form. There is no need to go around chasing hope and its shadow. Why risk effort when effort comes to you? Indeed, effort is required to find or keep one’s preferred snoozing spot, be that windowsill, garden wall or tree. If a Provençal cat is ever spotted doing something as strenuous to its demeanour as actually walking, one may notice that each paw is carefully placed in front of another almost sloth like in deliberation. There is not a hint of any thought in its head beyond focusing on saving energy for when it might become needed. Should a wall impede progress, a walk around it should suffice but if not then the morning’s saving up of its energy store should allow one jump to the top where no doubt the cat will become overcome with the effort and lie down to sleep in the sunlight dappled shade of a tree. Mice grow fat, safe in the knowledge that food is plentiful, and the cats grow lackadaisical.
As the morning progresses, the sound of vines fizzing with the sound of sugar creation in their big fat black grapes can almost be heard, and definitely imagined. The gnarled black old vine stump crack in the heat as it rises, the leaves whistle and rustle as the wind slips down from the Rhône Valley. The dry-stone encrusted earth that passes for soil is alive with tiny
A DAY IN PROVINCE - BENNY GOODMAN
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