Le Temps des Cerises

We are now in Le Temps des Cerises.   “Cherry Time” conjures up everything about these rare, perfect days in May and June that stop your heart with their kaleidoscope of colours and perfumes.   

It’s the time of the longest days of the year, when the evening church bells echo above the river and we’re bathed in the irridescent light of “golden hour.”  

This particular June, it’s as if we’ve been cast back fifteen years.   Before the evidence of climate change, before incessant heat-breaking records.  And due to abundant winter rains, it’s once again a year of roses.   Their petals explode with colour and their sweet, thick exhalations try to cling – but I’m heading down into the woods.   I’m on the trail of my favorite old linden tree whose blossoms have just emerged.  It’s time to collect their flowers for linden tea, an age old remedy for stress and insomnia.   

Claire initiated me into this rite years ago, when centurion lindens graced our garden.  As we sorted blossoms that June, we talked about transmission – the handing down of culture, tradition, know how.  She learned from her aunt in la France profonde, the Berry region of central France. 

In those days our giant lindens housed thousands of honey bees.  I now associate linden fragrance with a bumbling, lullaby buzz and long, warm June afternoons.   Time for talk, for listening, breathing, imbibing perfume and nodding off into an olfactory daydream.  

Early this morning my daydreaming was broken by the sound of chain-saws felling trees in the eastern valley.  Each time a tree crashes, I have a pavlovian reaction.  It brings back the day our centurion linden trees were felled.  As they thundered down, one by one, I felt each crash reverberate through the ground like an earthquake.  Each crash pounded up the hill to splinter my heart. 

I looked down to the river.  One moment they were there  – next moment, empty sky.  Gone the ancient wood and its secrets, gone the habitat for bees, birds, insects, animals, gone the scent of June that coloured my night dreams along the river. 

Mourning is an odd bedfellow.  It won’t be rushed…    But the following June I received a sign to pull up my bootstraps.   Right below my window – that intoxicating fragrance.  Linden blossoms!   I followed the scent into the woods, and there she was.   A single old linden amongst the oaks.   And another miracle.   Below her, a little grove of baby lindens, smothered by thorny brambles and junk trees, trying to make a stand.  

And that is how I made peace with my grief.  Tending this patch in the forest I now call my “Linden Nursery,” clearing away creepers that drag down struggling seedlings, choosing a few saplings for my own allée des tilleuls.   I pictured a temps des cerises years on, when there would be an allée of lindens in our garden, exhaling perfume and nourishing the honey bees. 

We planted five little waifs and marked a new beginning.   

Today, several years on, in the time of cherries and roses and lindens, those waifs have produced their first blossom.   It takes years for a linden to flower; how grateful I am to witness their coming of age.    They remind me that coming of age stories can happen at any time of life.  When forces stronger than we think we can bear try to break us.   But instead, that storm somehow transforms our splinters into something of a finer mettle.   

As for the linden nursery, there are now far too many saplings for the space.   Henri has suggested we begin again.  There is a field just yonder.   A ridge over a hidden spring, over a grove of majestic oaks.   It would be a perfect place for a line of Centurion Lindens.  

I will be gone when they reach their mature height.  But I intend to return some century and sit under their boughs and breathe deep.  Of blossoms and perfume and buzzing life and a warm June afternoon in the temps des cerises.