'TIS THE GIFT TO BE SIMPLE

TOMATOES AND BUTTER BUCKETS

Fleeing from the Olympics, we took refuge in the southwest of France, on the Atlantic coast. Nothing much happens here – which is part of its attraction. We kept busy, however. The local tomatoes are of a succulence and sweetness one finds nowhere else, so we spent one afternoon reducing 15 kilos of them, with the addition of garlic, basil and salt, to half their volume of passata, now packed away and frozen, to enliven and illuminate those months when no sun shines.

We also visited some brocantes or vide greniers – literally attic-emptiers: outdoor sales at which the locals sell off those items that hover somewhere between “junk” and “collectible”. 

My favourite finds were two wooden buckets created almost a century ago for butter, back in the day when it didn’t come in foil-wrapped packets but in blocks, from which the grocer carved a slab with a wire.

Both were made by hand from paper-thin slices of wood and secured by metal staples – a system that survives today, at least in France, only for oysters. I find their simplicity and classic shape as satisfying as any piece of music. They have earned their honourable retirement in our Paris kitchen, perhaps to hold onions and garlic.

There’s a story of John Updike to which I often return  - though Archangel isn’t really a story. A prose poem? or a meditation? To me, it’s an encouragement to value the small things – like butter buckets, and tomatoes. Here it is, in part.

“Where, then, has your life been touched? My pleasures are as specific as they are everlasting. The sliced edges of a fresh ream of laid paper, cream, stiff, rag-rich. The freckles of the closed eyelids of a woman attentive in the first white blush of morning. The ball diminishing well down the broad green throat of the first at Cape Ann. The good catch, a candy sun slatting the bleachers. The fair at the vanished poorhouse. The white arms of the girls dancing, taffeta, white arms violet in the hollows music its ecstasies praise the white wrists of praise the white arms and the white paper trimmed the Euclidean proof of Pythagoras' theorem its tightening beauty the iridescence of an old copper found in the salt sand. The microscopic glitter in the ink of the letters of words that are your own. Certain moments, remembered or imagined, of childhood. Three- handed pinochle by the brown glow of the stained-glass lampshade, your parents out of their godliness silently wishing you to win. The Brancusi room, silent. Pines and Rocks, by Cezanne; and The Lace-Maker in the Louvre hardly bigger than your spread hand.
Such glimmers I shall widen to rivers; nothing will be lost, not the least grain of remembered dust, and the multiplication shall be a thousand thousand fold; love me. Embrace me; come, touch my side, where honey flows. Do not be afraid. Why should my promises be vain? Jade and cinnamon: do you deny that such things exist? Why do you turn away? Is not my song a stream of balm? My arms are heaped with apples and ancient books; there is no harm in me; no. Stay. Praise me. Your praise of me is praise of yourself; wait. Listen. I will begin again.”