{"id":53734,"date":"2024-12-01T06:16:24","date_gmt":"2024-12-01T11:16:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.chezcora.com\/?p=53734"},"modified":"2026-06-24T10:28:50","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T14:28:50","slug":"the-mornings-sky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chezcora.com\/en\/le-ciel-ce-matin\/","title":{"rendered":"The morning\u2019s sky"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

This morning brings a furious sky like a stormy sea or battlefield, ink blue, black lines, holes in my head and my fingers hard at work, drumming on the keyboard. The days slip between these pages filled with words that make no sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through the caf\u00e9\u2019s window, I observe an angel who\u2019s busy cleaning the celestial vault. They colour the vastness of the sky with a single droplet of blue dye. It makes me forget about my dream, my age and the creaking of old bones. Starting out young and green like my favourite tree, I\u2019ve become an ancient aspen that sometimes trembles. In the back of the lot, this majestic tree and I age together. Our spotted coat of bark is becoming more brittle, but our sap gets a bit wiser each day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are a million words in my knapsack that assemble into half-decent stories with each passing day. My imagination has that power. Every morning, it knits a bit of warmth for me. It remembers old victories, deserved trophies and handsome faces I should have loved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWriting is only possible by writing,\u201d according to French Canadian author Robert Lalonde. All I wish for is for my mind to turn out nicely written sentences, egregious adverbs and remarkable words that link together to tell a story. I try to soothe my hesitation and fears; I\u2019m afraid of ghosts that might refute me. This morning, the blank page before me is as vast as the Sahara Desert.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back at my kitchen table, I smell the sweat of the wilted September flowers. My old body trembles; I curse the damned ticking of time. Will I soon see the land promised to good women? I try to put my head to sleep, but it stubbornly insists on dreaming with eyes wide open. Could Morpheus leave me behind?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After drinking a few cups of coffee to wake up, accompanied by one or two biscotti, I start to write while the clothes go around in the washing machine. Five or six times every day, I look for my magnifying glasses. Maybe they\u2019re under a cushion, on a table buried beneath books, behind a couch or in my Mini. I\u2019m always searching for something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through the row of windows in my kitchen, I watch as autumn dries to shades of brown; I feel the wind getting colder. The birds have emptied all the feeders. Will they migrate, sleep in the hollow of a tree or in the needles of pine trees? Like I do each year, I\u2019ll throw them a real feast before winter lays its coat on the ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a young girl, I remember writing in the basement, near the old washing machine. The grumpy wringer as background music and the bogeyman\u2019s bright yellow eyes watching me through the window. I was 7 or 8 when I wrote my first poems. Dad sharpened the black lead of my pencil with his pocket knife. I wrote on the back of old calendar pages that Mom would save for me. I\u2019d write new words and short sentences, the beginning of stories that I hid in my pillowcase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seated at the kitchen table made from Formica, we\u2019d cut out our drawings and stick them on the back of pages from the calendar using cooked potato skins. In the winter, we\u2019d skate on the ice-covered stream; my nose ran, my young years floated away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later, sitting at a park bench in the fall, I\u2019d grab my blue pen and open my notebook. I\u2019d jot down a sentence and then a second, just as wobbly as the first. With loose leaves at my feet and a few ants climbing my leg, waiting for the right word was unbearable, just like it is today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lost in thought at my big kitchen table, another fragment of the past appears. April 2016, Kyoto. The cherry trees are in bloom, dressed in every shade of pink and white. I visit the geishas\u2019 quarters on foot in Gion. Their faces and necks are entirely white, their lips a deep shade of red. Their makeup is an art form; their outfits as fine as the work of the Old Masters; their smiles indelible memories\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m ending today\u2019s letter with the extraordinary words of the great writer Nikos Kazantzakis in his last book \u201cReport to Greco.\u201d
\u201cMy entire soul is a cry, and all my work the commentary on that cry.\u201d
I try to console this aging heart, to coax it to freely say YES!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Forced to grow up quickly, I often get the impression I\u2019ve toiled too much. I never learned to dance or to love. Sometimes I hear my heartbeat roar like thunder. Maybe it\u2019s a bell that\u2019s ringing or a fire truck siren sounding, or maybe, a handsome lover falling down my chimney?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dear readers, the sky this morning was heavy with debris and I struggled to write. Was it the raging sky? Was it me? Was it my aging heart, still determined to love?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cora
\u2764\ufe0f<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning brings a furious sky like a stormy sea or battlefield, ink blue, black lines, holes in my head and my fingers hard at work, drumming on the keyboard. The days slip between these pages filled with words that make no sense. Through the caf\u00e9\u2019s window, I observe an angel who\u2019s busy cleaning the celestial vault. They colour the vastness of the sky with a single droplet of blue dye. It makes me forget about my dream, my age and the creaking of old bones. Starting out young and green like my favourite tree, I\u2019ve become an ancient aspen that sometimes trembles. In the back of the lot, this majestic tree and I age together. Our spotted coat of bark is becoming more brittle, but our sap gets a bit wiser each day. There are a million words in my knapsack that assemble into half-decent stories with each passing day. My imagination has that power. Every morning, it knits a bit of warmth for me. It remembers old victories, deserved trophies and handsome faces I should have loved. \u201cWriting is only possible by writing,\u201d according to French Canadian author Robert Lalonde. All I wish for is for my mind to turn out nicely written sentences, egregious adverbs and remarkable words that link together to tell a story. I try to soothe my hesitation and fears; I\u2019m afraid of ghosts that might refute me. This morning, the blank page before me is as vast as the Sahara Desert. Back at my kitchen table, I smell the sweat of the wilted September flowers. My old body trembles; I curse the damned ticking of time. Will I soon see the land promised to good women? I try to put my head to sleep, but it stubbornly insists on dreaming with eyes wide\u2026<\/p>","protected":false},"author":414,"featured_media":53735,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"Un ciel en furie, comme une mer agit\u00e9e : Mme Cora d\u00e9crit le ciel de ce matin et les pens\u00e9es qu'il fait na\u00eetre.","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_seopress_news_disabled":"","_seopress_video_disabled":"","_seopress_video":[],"_seopress_pro_schemas_manual":[],"_seopress_pro_rich_snippets_disable_all":"","_seopress_pro_rich_snippets_disable":[],"_seopress_pro_schemas":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"class_list":["post-53734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lettre-mme-cora"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chezcora.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chezcora.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chezcora.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chezcora.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/414"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chezcora.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chezcora.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53734\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chezcora.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chezcora.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chezcora.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53734"}],"curies":[{"name":"WP","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}