The tipping point

When the children were little and just at school I'd walk along the Ridge in an attempt to make things connect.  They did (as they always do) in an incoherent way; I had to scuttle across Gabriel Blanc's field to get back to a path that took me back to La Borde, knowing that he had a little plane and could trace me at any moment. 
Paranoia has always existed, but drones didn't at the time.
In any case I trod softly and respectfully between the lines of his sunflowers or wheat.
One day on the top of the Ridge, in a moment of decadent freedom, I spread my arms out so as to touch the tip of Soularac (a Pyrenee) and the highest point of the Black Mountains where the Massif Central begins.  
Not wanting to sound like a tree hugger here......
.......but I felt the balance of being a late 30 something who had children off the breast and at school, at long last, and two parents who were mobile and sentient and fun to be with. 
It was like an electric shock across my body that ran from one high piece of France to another through my arms and I understood that it was a solstice moment and the axis would turn.
Forward wind some years.  My parents are heading west into the night and panicking, my daughter is heading up to the zenith and is panicking. 
I find myself around 5 O'Clock, waiting for apéro time.