“Bird Calls” an Excerpt from A Northern Light in Provence by Elizabeth Birkelund

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Bird calls.

“They’re duet-calling. There. Above.” He points.

Two small brown wrens perch on the post of the vineyard trellis beside them.

“It was popular among eighteenth-century Japanese poets, this kind of call-and-response poetry. Do you know it?”

This man is so esoteric. She shakes her head.

“A poet composes three lines, and the other poet starts his poem with the last word of his friend’s poem. Sorry, generally, these poets were men. The women were probably whispering the words into their ears.”

They climb a small hillock, and from there, not far away, towering above the vines, she sees a landmark: it’s a tree, and it must be fifty feet tall.

“My friend, the cork oak.” He answers her unspoken question. “During harvest days, in the midday heat, grape pickers seek rest under the cork’s shade.”

He separates from her and bends slowly to sit on the edge of the hill. She can tell that he’s grateful for the rest.

“This is the last of a forest of them—generations of ignorance. Before the Labayes planted vines, this land belonged to a cork forest. A cork tree like that one can live over three hundred years and can be harvested over fifteen times in its lifetime. Every nine years or so, these grand specimens were stripped of cork. We’ve let this tree enjoy its retirement years, which is why its trunk is gray and not red and bare.”

She sits beside him, leaning back on her hands. It’s a miracle of a tree.

“Cork oaks, like the Iberian lynx, the noble cat that used to prowl these grounds, are now almost extinct. I take extra care with this tree. I found a description of it in the daily records of Gregory Labaye during the wine blight in 1863. He wrote, ‘The massive cork is still with us, thank God Almighty.’ This tree has been beloved by many long-dead Labayes.

“Gregory, the arboriste in the family,” the Poet continues, standing up slowly, and now pulling her up gently with both hands, “was possibly more important than any of my troubadour forebears, yet he was the outsider. There were tales of him loving trees more than humans. I’ve inherited this trait: I can’t go for many days without the company of trees.”

How would the Poet survive in her tree-barren Arctic? “

Here’s a like-minded confession,” she says. “When I first saw the huge tree at the front of your house, I had this distinct desire to hug it.”

“I knew we were knit from the same cloth!” he says with a guffaw and a tap on her shoulder. “We humans receive deeply needed sustenance from trees.”

Gravity hastens their pace down the hill. They walk in silence, almost sleepily, along a path through a denser incubation of vines.

“You’ve told me you live on an island alongside the largest island in the world,” the Poet says finally. “Well, here, Île du Nord, is my little island in the sea of a vineyard.”

The passage opens into a round clearing, surrounded by rows of vines stretching out in five directions like a star. At the center is the enormous cork tree, its gray-black, knotty trunk so wide it would take four people to embrace it. Whitish fringe, on its exterior sprigs, flutters in the wind. Under the tree’s lowest branch, she sees a small table and two chairs.

“Do you hear it?”

Where it had been still and quiet inside the layered embrace of vines, this clearing vibrates with the sounds of leaves fluttering at a high-pitched hum.

“That’s the mistral whistling through the leaves of the cork. When I spend a long time here, this tree sings ballads to me. You can tell she’s a female by the clusters of black drupes in the leaves. There, you can see a few up there. As you are learning, I make nothing up: it’s all already here.” He leads her to the table.

“Please, have a seat, Île du Nord,” he says, bowing.

He struggles a bit to pull the chair out for her. The dogs settle around the Poet’s chair, except for Tang, who, tail wagging, stands beside her.

Set before her is a tray with a dainty pink floral trim, and on it, a metal coffeepot, a small white ceramic milk pitcher, two white cups with saucers, two matching white bowls, two silver spoons, a basket covered with a napkin, which she guesses hides croissants, and a yellow bowl, filled to the brim with bright, shiny strawberries.

“I picked these strawberries for you at midnight last night,” he says, puffing up his chest.

Bliss is strawberries, picked at midnight, and eaten under the shade of a cork oak in a secret garden in the vineyard.

About the Author

Elizabeth Birkelund is the author of two previous novels, The Runaway Wife (2016) and The Dressmaker (2006). She started her career in the editorial department at European Travel and Life magazine, then turned to freelance writing as a monthly personal finance columnist for Cosmopolitan magazine. She has written for numerous national publications, including Glamour, Self, Working Woman, and Victoria.

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