08/10/2013

This place










This place is immutable, the pictures are from earlier this summer but it looks like this all year round. The air is a bit more crisp at the moment, the trees still stand tall and full, the grass is still green. My grand-mother's family always lived around here, she was born and grew up in Paris during the War, she was 15 in 1945 and moved back to Brittany. She met my grand-father who was in the Resistance and by then was cleaning the beaches around here, during which he accidentally stepped on a mine and survived all his injuries. More of that later. They got married and one thing leading to another ended up in Marocco where my granddad was a school teacher, they stayed there 30 years. But all this time they were coming back here. My great-grand-father who was a military man and served during the WWI, and in Paris during the WWII, was now a gardener for a castle. The land around that creek belonged to those people and he helped plant the pine trees. 
My mum has a lot of stories of when she was 15 and was coming to swim here. Always here. There are beaches everywhere, but this one has always been 'ours'. My mum was taking me there when I was a kid, when it was a dirt path to go down. That's still where I go swimming in the summer and walking in the winter. That's where I took Tom when he first came to Brittany. That's where we went the day after we got engaged. It's one of those places that I need to go to and that always makes me feel better. I feel the same about museums. With two art teachers for parents they are a bit of a second home for me.


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