Colony

That sinuous southern life, that oblique and slow and complicated old beauty, that warm thick air and blood warm sea, that place of mists and languor and fragrant richness...

I thought. I thought of the slow yellow autumn in the swamp and the high honey sun of spring and the eternal silence of the marshes, and the shivering light on them, and the whisper of the spartina and sweet grass in the wind and the little liquid splashes of who-knew-what secret creatures entering that strange old place of blood-warm half earth, half water. I thought of the song of all the birds that I knew, and the soft singsong of the coffee-skinned women who sold their coiled sweet-grass baskets in the market and on Meeting Street. I thought of the glittering sun on the morning harbor and the spicy, somehow oriental smells from the dark old shops, and the rioting flowers everywhere, heavy tropical and exotic. I thought of the clop of horses' feet on cobblestones and the soft, sulking, wallowing surf of Sullivan's Island in August, and the countless small vistas of grace and charm wherever the eye fell; a garden door, a peeling old wall, an entire symmetrical world caught in a windowpane. Charlestone simply could not manage to offend the eye. I thought of the candy colors of the old houses in the sunset, and the dark secret churchyards with their tumbled stones, and the puresweet bells of Saint Michael's in the Sunday morning stillness. I thought of my tottering piles of books in the study at Belleau and the nights before the fire when my father told me of stars and butterflies and voyages, and the silver music of mathematics. I thought of hot, milky sweet coffee in the mornings, and the old kitchen around me, and Aurelia's gold smile and quick hands and eyes rich with love for me.

It was lovely wine, soft and full of flowers.

...bathed in the thick honey gold of the sun through encircling trees only just beginning to turn the muted metal colors of fall.

At four that morning my son, Peter Williams Chambliss, slid into the world tiny and red and roaring with life and the awful love that caught and whirled me away when they laid him on my stomach was as strong and old as the earth and would, I knew dimly, abide as long.

The sunset over the bay that evening was a conflagration of blood-red and orange and deep, gold-edged purple. I remember: unforgettable.

Fireflies winked, and the darkening bay breathed and sighed like a great dolphin and the thin pure curve of a young moon hung in the green sky...

I fell in love with Peter at that precise instant. I don't suppose many other women know the exact moment the rest of their lives began.

Peter and I danced in bare feet in the cold wet undergrowth while the moon poured its wild old silver down on us and the water ran black and ancient and the moss shone.

Sometimes I could scarcely breathe with the knowledge that for the rest of my life, whenever we wanted, Peter and I could lie down and do whatever we wished.

Her light brown eyes were the color of sherry, fringed with long, thick, gold-tipped lashes.

On a night of icy silver radiance, when the very sea and stars seemed on fire with light.

All places where the French settled have corruption at their heart, a kind of soft, rotten glow, like the phosphorescence of decaying wood, that is oddly attractive.

The air was cool and fresh and smelled of the kelp and salt that streamed in off the bay at the full of the tide. The sun was high in the tender vault of the sky, and the thunderheads that would sweep in late in the day were still only white marble puffs at the margins of the sky, solid and silver-lined. There was a blue clarity about the horizon and the distant hills that spoke of a weather change but not for another day or two. Along the meadows' edges, as we drove past, I saw pink clover and purple lupine, hawkweed and wild daylilies. Brilliant pink wild azaleas, called lambkill here, flickered like wildfire in the birch groves. Daisies, buttercups, wild columbine, and the purple flags of wild iris starred the roadside. Behind them all was the eternal dark of the pines and firs and spruce thickets and, between those, the glittering indigo of the bay.

But there sometimes comes a moment, a small, silent white explosion of awareness.

(the villa) It's beautiful too, all hot pinks and reds, and rocks and sand and blinding blue and white.