Abroad Thoughts from Home

What will I remember?  The heavy woods, the empty straight roads, the dry golden grass.  Eddie's barn, its apex sixty feet above my head, great sweeps of tiles, its beams eleven metres long.  The beaten earth floor, the sunlight.  The vertical thunderstorms over the valley of the L'Asse river.  Limoges on an empty Sunday.  Tiling the pig sty roof as the Romans would have done it, wooden beams on rough walls, tiles hung on thin laths, each tile held in place by the support of its neighbours and a thumb's smudge when the clay was still wet, thumb prints still visible today.  Lizards.  Monastic living at long tables of food, candlelight and beer.  The church clock chiming twice for the field workers.  Clouds of swifts, house martins and swallows, a young fledgling buzzard somewhere in the woods over the valley, the same mewing sound here this afternoon from the buzzards fledged in these woods.  What will I remember?  Sunlight and painted shutters, wooden floors and ancient dust.  And that barn...