Improvisation

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Almost a half century ago, hitchhiking in the ancient zone of red wind and dust between Oujda, in Morocco, and Tlemcen, along the northwestern Algerian frontier, I heard distant high-pitched cries emanating from just over a small rise. Reaching that rise, I looked down and saw before me a group of young children playing football with what appeared to be a ball made of taped-up rags.

The games are in any event nothing but stories, and the stories have no life other than the lives we bring in telling them. Little wonder then we want the stories never to come to an end. The life we have brought to them becomes with time their spring and their source of continued motion, and in this way the stories go on though we don't. The red strip of wild poppies snapping like stretched sails in the wind.

La Sebkhra à Timimoun, et les premiers cordons lunaires du grand erg occidental: photo by Taquelmoust, 2005
Corn Poppy (Papaver rhoeas): photo by Lajssikonik, 2006