When I am Old[er]

There is a scene in the film Winged Migration that immediately captured my imagination the first time I saw it. Eurasian cranes settle into the waving grasses of a windswept field. Near this field is a stone house. A donkey peers from a fence around the house; a woman opens a gate. There are close-ups of the cranes searching for food, such as frogs, in the windswept grasses dotted with meadow flowers. A heavy old woman dressed in a blue patterned dress with a dark blue scarf on her head walks slowly toward the cranes, a metal bucket in her hand. I imagine that the woman comes out every year with this bucket full of grain, trying to get close to these beautiful wild birds that migrate so far, 2500 miles, we are told. The donkey brays in the background. In one close-up of the cranes' pecking in the tall grasses, one can hear chickens clucking in the background, a perfect blend of the domestic and the wild.

I imagine I am that old woman. I want to be that old woman, with the wrinkles around my eyes caused by squinting in that open landscape of grass and sky. When I think of growing old, of dying, I imagine my last years in a place such as this, in Aubrac, France. A low fire will be flaming in a fireplace inside the stone house. I will arise every morning to throw grain to the chickens and to take the excess grain across the fields to stare at the sky, waiting for the return of the cranes.

Other places I've seen on film arouse similar feelings in me:

• the scene of the Dashwood cottage in Andrew Davies' recent adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. The cottage is set on a cliff by the coast in Devon, England. A lot of the country scenes there are of rain and dark skies and pounding waves against a desolate coast.
• Scenes from PBS's mystery mini-series Oliver's Travels, set in the far Orkneys of Scotland. The scenery is enhanced, of course, by the accompanying handsome, craggy visage of British actor Alan Bates.

Most of us probably have an image in our heads of where we would like to be in old age. I don't want to be in a retirement village or a bright home in Florida. I want to be somewhere desolate but beautiful where I can contemplate mortality and re-live memories among domestic duties and sky-gazing, "all passion spent."

As Michel de Montaigne wrote: "I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening."