Spending Time with a Toddler

As I am very bad at imagining what anything is ever going to be like - or possibly very pessimistic - I am often positively surprised. Never has this been truer than in my experience of becoming a grandmother. 

To be honest, I hadn't envisaged myself as a grandmother at all and so I had no clear expectation, just as before learning I was to become a mother I had no expectation of that experience either (although with some reason in that case as when I was 20 a doctor told me that I probably never would have a child - but that's another story). 

The only time the idea of being a grandmother had even occurred to me was when reading the ecstatic comments of one of my favourite writers, Helen Garner, on the subject. 

Mind you, much as I love being a grandmother, I still don't entirely understand a passage of hers where she describes how, when on a Melbourne tram with one of her grandchildren, someone takes her for her grandchild's mother and it seems absolutely vital to her that they know she is the child's grandmother - not because she feels guilty of misleading the other person but because being a grandmother is something she is so especially proud of. 

But I do now understand what she sometimes tries to explain - that the love you feel for a grandchild is quite unlike anything else, including the love you feel for your own children, enormous though that is.

It might be something to do with regaining a sense of how marvellous the world is or possibly a matter of discovering a new perspective on time.

For my grand daughter, most objects I barely notice or take for granted are interesting and even exciting. For her, almost everything is fresh and vivid. Because of this, she lingers, even in apparently dreary spots. Time stretches. A five-minute walk takes half an hour, as snails are studied, leaves collected, puddles jumped in, cats and dogs and birds and aeroplanes all greeted.

The other day while out walking together we came across some dandelions. Some were still flowering, others had gone to seed. When I spotted an unusually perfect dandelion seed head. I picked it:

I showed her how to blow on the seed head and count each time she did so, until all the seeds were scattered, as if each breath was the chime of a clock:

She blew until every seed had gone but, as she is small and her blowing is not expert, we had arrived at 29 o'clock by the time she'd finished:

Well no one ever claimed that dandelion clocks work with Swiss precision. In fact maybe they aren't about telling the time at all, but simply reminders that time passes very quickly. It feels as if my grand daughter was only born a month or two ago but in reality she is already almost two and a half years old. 

 

Bonnard in Aix en Provence

Ages ago I went to an exhibition of paintings by Pierre Bonnard at the Tate Modern in London. It was, I thought, exhaustive. Therefore a day or two ago in Aix en Provence when I saw that a museum I was visiting was displaying a small exhibition concentrating on the influence of Japanese prints on Bonnard's work I imagined there would be nothing new to see.

I was wrong. There were in fact plenty of paintings I'd never seen before but most of them weren't as good as the Japanese prints they were displayed with - and from which allegedly Bonnard's inspiration for his works there came.

There was one exception though, this really lovely picture:

It is called Fish in a Pool at Agénor and was painted, (oil on canvas), in 1943.

I put a few other snaps of my trip to Aix en Provence on Instagram. Plus here are a couple of nice doorways and two or three random street shots:

Aix is lovely but many other people have heard that it is, which means inevitably that there are so many places to eat that are of the kind that tout for passing business and know they will never see you again that it is difficult in two days to discover restaurants that care about making food and serving it so beautifully that you cannot wait to return. Tant pis. We still ate well - and drank far too much delicious wine.