Birds, some people believe, are messengers.
Take the raven, older than the Christian myth.
Take the urban legend of the wild bird's omen when it flies into a room.
The miner's canary.
The carrier pigeon of the trenches...
Of the birds that breakfast outside my window, one sometimes lingers. Different from the rest, he has white wings, and like the pygargue à tête blanche, this one has white tail feathers.
How did he come to know that of the 14 or more who wait for me to get out of bed, he's my favourite?
I've never told him, reluctant to offend his friends. This morning, he settled down again on his railing outside the bathroom window.
It's not more bread he wants.
He just keeps an eye on me through the frosted window and watches over the garden below.
I cannot help this: when an African or "dark age" humour takes me, when you are silent, I like to fancy that this quiet bird, black and white and richly shaded from neck to beak, brings me a sign from you...
But he's no dragon, mercurial this month -- he's just a Paris pigeon.
Speaking of you with Sam this lunchtime brought the sun out.
Or so, again, I like to think.
But without a word of you, this evening brings the mist.
Four months ago, the teasing questions I borrowed for you from 'Les Inrocks' went unanswered.
Still I don't even know your favourite colour...
In October 1987, 19 months before a child was born, her parents came home from a few days in Britain. We flew the very night 'Dandan the weatherman' later told us had brought "south-eastern England's worst storm since the Great Storm of 1703".
Millions of trees were felled. The tempest tore through Brittany's forests and beyond.
With no chance of turning back, we had a fine pilot. Our plane was hurled across the sky like a plastic kit, but he stayed the course.
Passengers too proud or stupid to fasten their seat belts smashed their heads on the luggage racks. Two were badly hurt.
I'll never understand exactly why I wasn't afraid while Catherine, trembling, kept her head buried in my chest.
Nobody had told me then why the cabin crew had eyes only for the wings; weeks afterwards a steward explained that flight attendants know just how far up and down the tips can bounce before the strained metal snaps free of the long tube it keeps aloft.
Only one stewardess panicked. As we steadied into a dive, she grabbed the intercom and announced: "By the grace of God, we're going to land at Roissy Charles-de-Gaulle."
Furiously, the captain went public then. We all heard him order the girl to shut up and come to the cockpit at once.
Catherine vowed that she would never fly again.
And for years, Ellie, she never did.
Whether that storm was a harbinger of things to come, I don't know.
That chunk of Antarctica the size of Belgium that broke off the ice shelf. The autumn storms of 1990. The diminishing glacier front, creeping back up mountainsides I've seen in the southern Alps.
The tempest of Christmas 1999 that brought down Marie Antoinette's Virginia tulip tree and Napoleon's Corsican pine, had Catherine weep when she saw what it had done to her local park, the gardens of Versailles.
 The shifting sands of Africa, inching south.
And Paris in August last year.
But of one thing I'm sure: even this garden needs the protection of strong, sturdy trees.
What trees you might bring from the United States and your travels I cannot guess.
I must, of course, suggest oaks.
Silver birches too, pliant in the wind.
From Africa, it has to be the grand baobab, what else? Of the two pictures here, the Kid took one and me the other seven years ago.
One tale puts the baobab among the first trees on the land. But when it saw the palm tree, the baobab grew jealous, wanting to be taller. It told the gods.
When the red-flowered flame tree arose, the baobab was envious of its blossoms. On spotting the fig tree, it asked for fruit as well.
Finally, the baobab's demands exasperated the gods. They ripped up the tree by its roots and replanted it. Upside-down.
Since that day, the baobab has never asked for anything.
Botswana's Basarwa (bushmen) believe the baobab began life old.
In many cultures, it is sacred, a place to bury ancestors. Its hollow trunk is good for storing water, birds and monkeys adore it, its monkey bread fruit is edible. Makes medicine too.
 The baobab is Africa's Yggdrasil, the world tree of the Norse people in my own ancestry.
Being no baobab but part Viking, part Mediterranean and part Saxon, with a salt sprinkling of Celt in the paternal blood, it's been too hard for me to keep stories and queries to myself, even since the month the fates turned me head over heels!
But what of you?
Certainly you're no belle dame sans merci; I'm through with her kind.
Yet you're becoming the beauty who vanishes for any reckless man who dares ask her to identify herself.
Am I a wolf fit now only for the ostrich farm?
Trying to tend a garden when my head is deep in sand?
How long must my harder questions, Ellie, meet with no answer but the winds you're flying now?
A cold draft too, where reason chills the passions.
 Well, I don't want you to be sad.
It feels like time.
Tonight.
If you're to leave it none the wiser and the only whispers it can hear come from my heart, I must clear my head of thought and turn, at last, straight to source.
It's time to tap the roots.
The I Ching, perhaps, will tell me what the "wise man" would do once his dream has caught up with his life.
9:36:33 PM 
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