La tranquillité de la campagne

Four days in the country. Nice and quiet, don’t need to talk to anyone. Walk through the garden, see how everything grows. Hours stretching out before you. Or at least, that is what I thought when leaving Limonest. Somehow life in the countryside is a lot busier than one thinks. In my enthusiasm I had taken my language courses Arabic and Italian with me. After all, in four days there is plenty of time to work on those. However, as things turned out, not really.

All right, I did sleep a lot. And spent quite some time cooking and baking. I like doing that and the oven here is terrific so I figured I’d take the opportunity and try out some new stuff. In addition however there are always things to do. Like taking pictures of everything that grows here. The parents like being informed about how their fruit trees, berry bushes and other new plants with names I have long since forgotten do. Now prune, apple and pear trees are fairly easy to spot. They are about as tall as I am, I know where they are, can’t really miss them. However, at some time when I was not here, the parents have also planted rather obscure little things here and there. Somewhere around the edges of the garden where the grass grows tall. All right, the grass grows tall everywhere now due to a broken lawn mower but even with a mower in working order I think finding these twigs would have been a serious challenge. “They have been marked with silver foil papers”, I was informed over the phone. Please check on them, there’s five. So there I was, walking through our garden like a boy scout with a camera, looking for tiny twigs with silver foil on them. If you have never been a scout that is not easy. Eventually I found three out of five, all doing very well indeed.

Apart from checking the growth of new plants and trees and taking pictures of them considerable time is spend paying social visits to the neighbours. A little way up the road is the farm of an elderly French couple who thought it very nice of me to come and pay them a visit. As they keep an eye on the house whenever no one is here they had already spotted me arriving, although when you are driving around in a car as green as an apple, literally, I doubt it is hard not to see. Although I went for half an hour, I think I ended up chatting to François and Odette for an hour and a half.

Tuesday was delivery day. Tiles previously ordered at Gédimat were being delivered on a pallet. The delivery people do not put them inside and so I saw myself forced to carry them in box after box. Muscle ache in my arms and back being the result of this carrying tiles. Later during the afternoon I went to see acquaintances of my parents who run a campsite nearby close to a village called St. Bonnet de Vieille Vigne. It’s an odd 10-12 kilometres away. Having first considered going to see them on Wednesday, my leaving day, I was glad I didn’t. When going to see them it is wise to take some time for that as they love chatting. Their daughter was there as well and is quite interested in doing the same job as me next summer. She now works on camp sites and in hotels but compared to that, this is luxury with two compulsory days off per week, at least eleven hours between each shift and paid overtime.

All in all my four quiet days in the countryside became rather filled up days. Very nicely filled days though and when being away from work and home even, very quickly it feels like you have been away for a very long time. A phone call from a colleague therefore becomes a reminder that it is only a few days and that after a long weekend, it is time to go home and back to work.