Provence Postcard

The lavender is on the postcard; the day itself smells of something the postcard forgot.

The postcard shows lavender, of course. What it cannot show is how the day actually begins: with fig, green and milky, the smell of a leaf torn from the tree beside the shuttered kitchen, sap on the fingers. You take your coffee outside. The garden is mostly pear trees, and their leaves give the air a cool, slightly crisp greenness that the postcard would never bother to mention. It is only at noon, when the heat finally arrives and the wind turns, that the lavender comes up the hill from the fields below, herbal and clean and faintly camphorous, the way it smells on the road rather than in a sachet. You had intended to write the card today. The pen is beside you. Somewhere below, a tractor starts, and the whole valley turns purple in the heat.