It's Still Life

Part 14, Brigid’s Diary: Winter, 1836 – 1841, Cagnes-sur-Mer, France

Where Waiting Is Believing

The arbours are vine-brittle skeletons touched with ice; terracotta pots lay shattered by winter’s slow fist, and even the small grey angels above the door have surrendered to grimaces.

For these five years, we’ve lived in a stone cottage adjoining the larger farmhouse — red-tiled, low-shouldered — with iron railings worked into pious crosses and artful knots that hold nothing in and keep nothing out.

Weather here is not weather at all, but a pressure, an icy thumb pressed between the eyes, and a quiet that’s become the sound of everything waiting to be reclaimed.

Felreil is a dark wind on his bicycle — he left this morning for the gendarmerie to renew our residency permits, boots flashing, coat snapping, riding hard enough that no clerk might decide to charge for the pleasure of remaining.

For now, this is home: Cagnes-sur-Mer, where every knock at the gate feels like a question asked by someone else’s hand.

But know this: winter makes liars of certainty — as the day thinned toward dusk I caught myself listening for his wheels the way you listen for a clock you do not trust.

Previous Instalments – To access all of the instalments on one page, please use this link. Written for Denise’s Six Sentence Story including the word “change”. Images created with Midjourney; all writing is my own original work.©Misky 2006-2026.