Along the Camino with Lisa: The grove at mile 41 or so

I love what Lisa sketched today.  I feel as if she’s passed through this piece of woods I’m in today, and she’s moved into the sun to sketch this barn.At mile 41.1, Stage 4, several miles shy of where I’ve walked by now, there is a path through the woods. There’s a tree fallen here, leaning over the trail, as the brown dirt track disappears into a grove of gnarled trees. It’s a path that makes me want to step under that tree, a sort of leaning archway, and follow it. I can hear the birds, sleepily talking in the trees. It might be early summer here. The trail is only passable spring to fall, and there might be just the merest hint of green starting, or maybe, I’m thinking, the trees are in full leaf, but the leaves aren’t yet big and bosomy. There is grass growing on the floor of the grove, shin-high and waving in the breeze. Today it’s hot in there, close and dim.
Even though the character of the light is entirely different, I’m taken back all at once to the olive groves in Greece – close growing, wild and tangled, some of them were, with small leaves dusty and grey-green in the heat. I’m pretty sure these aren’t olive trees, but in the photo they aren’t very clear, and in my mind, the heat and the dust and the aroma all combine with this picture. Memory is entangled with everything we express, isn’t it?
I am surprised, on a day so entirely different, that I can feel the heavy shimmer of heat and dust again, just by looking at this picture. I can smell the dust and the growing all mingled. I can hear the high call of a bird, song blown by that wind that’s waving the grasses, so that it is carried away just as I hear it. I hear the crunch of my trail shoes in the dusty gravel of this path, and I walk on. My pack is heavy, sweat drawing a ribbon of slime across my shoulder blades. There’s hair that’s escaped from my braid and it is tickling my face. I brush it away and the sweat on my face pastes it down for a minute anyway. My feet are gritty and dusty in my shoes but we’ve been walking so long by now that I’m accustomed to that feeling.
I’m ready, now, to step under that leaning tree, into the shade and dust and heat of this path through the tangled woods.

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