Down the Durance in France

Abstract

The river of my boyhood flowed north undammed, flooding in the spring over Mexican Town, soaking the bottom half of a sack of my mother’s beans and, checked in its flow over the floodplain, depositing silt between the swelling beans.

On Sunday if you had been with us, you would have seen a red vineyard, all red like red wine. In the distance it turned to yellow, and then a green sky with the sun, the earth after the rain violet, sparkling yellow here and there where it caught the reflection of the setting sun.

— Vincent van Gogh, Aries, November 1888, letter to Theo (The Red Vines)