Last day of the year. A lovely winter day with sunshine, a softness that brightens the day, energizes and energizes us.
A storm is forecast, approaching the coast to the west. The media warn us, predicting a scenario that could become a disaster.
But not today, tomorrow.
It's 1:00 p. m., the sun is soft, the air is soft. We finish our lunch on this temperate forecast.
I don't know how it happened anymore. But it did come.
And if we were to see this storm by the sea, now, there is still time, we could be there for 15 hours.
A flash of time, his eyes shine. I say chick. She answers chick. I get up, tell him to get ready, we're leaving.
I gather a few things together and we both go out to meet the storm at the ocean's edge. The sun still accompanies us, the country roads unfold in front of us, smooth, even if the wind faces us.
She is moved, in tears, she says that this is the best gift we could give her. She can't believe it, she can't believe we're both going to see the sea.
Little by little we leave the sun and the blue sky, we enter the gray and the rain. The storm's coming, so are we.
Fouras is our destination, a peninsula, opposite the island of Aix.
It's a little over three o' clock when we get there. The waterfront is ours. It's still raining a little more. The wind blows in gusts. The sea is beige, sandy and squirming in all directions. The tide is high. Everything has come together for us, for now.
Well dressed, we brave the elements. There's no more mother and daughter. There are two children, delighted with this adventure, delighted to have gone beyond reason, delighted to approach the sea and the storm.
A moment out of time that we try to engrave in us, for eternity. A moment of eternity as one dares to live too little, too often.
We savour it, we enjoy the magic we have provoked. Fatigue and boredom are swept away. We will even fetch oysters, to bring back, as if we ourselves needed proof of the madness through which we had the audacity to explore.
We still fill ourselves with the wind, the shaken sea and the image of the Château de Fouras, which is not in its first storm and will pass through many others, a permanent witness of the impermanence of the environment.
We go back on the road, we go home. Behind us, the wind pushes us. In front of us, the night holds out our arms. We go up the course of the earth, eastward, to the house.
The way will seem to me to be as short on the way back as it is on the way. I'm not tired, I filled up with energy, iodized air. I think she is, too.
I feel light-hearted, alive, happy with the carelessness that overwhelmed me, delighted to have made a good joke, to have cheated the routine, to have cheated on boredom.
When we get back, he'll say we're sick.
Sick people, no. Crazy for life, yeah.
In the evening at dinner, he will continue to say and repeat that you have to be completely ill to cover hundreds of kilometres like that, for nothing.
It wasn't for nothing. It was for the best reason, the pleasure of feeling alive...