Another Perfect Day

I had one of those rare perfect days yesterday.  I successfully rounded up the horse, Tasha, and took him for a pleasant, slow two hour ride.  I marveled at how different the landscape looks from the back of a horse.  The view seems to unfold before you in a rolling panorama because you’re sitting up high.  One house that I had seen on several walks with the sheep, but hadn’t taken much of an interest in, rolled into view and I was visually pleased by the new way in which it unexpectedly revealed itself to me.  I had never noticed before that it was built from a beautiful softly burnished red stone with pink mortar holding the pile together.  The house was deep in the woods and as we went by, two red deer bounded out from behind it.  The domicile seemed enchanted, as if it had to be the site of one of those European-based fairy tales which were read to me as a child. 

The day started out overcast with the normal July-August morning fog that comes up from the river valley.  The air was cool enough to keep the flies at bay.  We didn’t encounter or hear one motorized vehicle, just a single runner puffing up a steep hill.

When we returned to Nicole’s house, she wheeled out of her house in her motorized wheelchair to greet us and to feed Tasha some stale bread. After feeding Tasha my apple core, brushing him down, and turning him out into the pasture,  I told Nicole I’d be back Monday morning, as I’d like to try to ride every other morning. I then headed off on my three-speed bicycle with the wicker basket on the front.

Nicole’s place is situated on the top of a huge hill, approximately four kilometers away from my house.  I flew down the hill, visions of Lance Armstrong dancing in my head, and didn’t have to pedal until the final half kilometer.  I stopped and chatted with Monsieur Dupuis who was starting out on a walk towards the river. 

When I drove in our driveway, past the large hedge that needs clipping again, past my beautiful antique roses that are now blooming profusely despite their leaf blight, past the ripening giant blackberry bushes, I sported a large grin.  Thrilled with the sun forcing its way through the fog, invigorated from my ride on Tasha and the bicycle run down the hill, I thought that this is how life should be:  a big dose of Nature surrounded by family and friends. 

In the evening, my husband, I, my son and his girlfriend drove back up the hill to our little, official postal village for its annual dinner.  We started out with the aperitifs while greeting all the people we knew.  At the fete, all xenophobic nationality differences disappear.  There was the manic Scottish couple, that I found entertaining this year, when last year I avoided them.  There was the sexy young German wife over who people couldn’t stop marveling over, and who my son and I spent too much time puzzling over the fact that she was married to the effeminate, homely looking older Frenchman who didn’t sit with her and their two young children at the dinner.  He has roots in the area, but now lives in Lyon.  We figured he must have a lot of money.  But that isn’t necessarily the correct conclusion.  I too was once a very sexy young woman and I married a much older man with no money and lots of debt, so I should be the last one to judge a book by its cover. I sat near one of Horatio Alger’s daughters and her Arab husband, one of “those people” who are ruining France if you listen to the right-wing politicians.  They were a very sweet couple, and were with their studly fifteen-year old son, and hip thirteen-year old daughter.  They had driven in from Toulouse for the party. 

We sat at tables set up end to end, with long benches, a seating arrangement that heightened the conviviality of the night. Sitting on my bench, I faced the gorgeous river valley as the sun set on the vineyards far below, and the lights of the farmhouses and little villages began to twinkle in competition with the stars above. As Horatio Alger poured wine in my plastic cup, and the first course of soup arrived, I thought that if there should be a Heaven, it cannot be any better than this.