A Normal Day

A fierce lightening storm destroyed the Grand Battle of the Confetti at the nearby village.  My son said that an hour after the band started playing, the bandstand was blown down by the strong winds and people screamed as they ran away from the destruction, their cigarettes blowing through the air as they scattered.  He and his visiting girlfriend had to walk home in a driving rainstorm as lightening crashed around them.  The much-anticipated confetti battle didn’t have time to mature.  It was a sad evening for my son, because he had given me five days of drinking in order that he could go wild at this party which he had looked forward to for months.
 
Blanche was so wet in the morning that I was wringing her wool out like a sponge.  She was the whitest I’ve ever seen her since she was a lamb.  She’s quite beautiful when she’s washed up.
 
Some of the neighboring farmers had walnut trees blown down by the storm.  We had a part of a tree, not a walnut, fall down right where Blanche sleeps.  I’m lucky it didn’t hit her or I’d have another dead sheep on my hands. However, if she would have died during the storm, she would have fit into the dead animal removal man’s schedule and could have been picked up on Tuesday.  Thankfully, she’s looking good and I don’t have to deal with that trauma.
 
After a day of our resident rapist cat howling continually, and raping young kittens on our terrace, my husband had had enough and drove into the big town to buy an air gun.  My son’s a crack shot. Nevertheless, the two of them managed to maim several cats in the rear end.  They did kill one, but it was a sordid affair, requiring a drowning where the victim didn’t go willingly to the great beyond.  My husband and son are going to drive to the big town again today to buy a bigger gun. My husband tried poisoning the cats the day before but that didn’t work. The air gun does seem to be keeping the cats away from the house. Hopefully, we’ll have a lot of dead cats for the dead animal removal man on Tuesday.
 
Yesterday, while in the greengrocer, I was trying to order a quarter kilo of new potatoes and just couldn’t find the right words . . . at one point the clerk thought I was demanding four kilos.  The only other customer in the store stepped in to help and told the woman that I wanted “four hundred grams.” Then the helpful lady asked me if I was American.  I had to admit that her suspicions where right.  She told me that she was also born an American, in Pennsylvania, but had lived here since 1989 as a travel writer, with her American travel writer husband.  We had a nice chat about how the area has changed since she moved here fifteen years ago, “before any Americans had arrived,” and I was jealous that she lived here before the metallic buildings and the housing developments, and the foreigners had started overtaking the countryside; and, that she was able to live here when there were still some characters breathing from the First World War.  She did point out that one improvement was the fact that the greengrocer now existed.  She told me that it used to be you couldn’t find fresh produce unless you grew it yourself. Ah, I longed for those good old days, as I clutched my bag of newly purchased vegetables and cheese, and didn't think of my two foundering tomato plants back home.  (My friends Pierre-Yves and Marylen told me that it wasn’t too many years ago that you had to purchase your groceries from a man who came by your house once a week, dropped off your purchases and took your order for the next week.)
 
For dinner, I prepared a tasty pork roast with onions and new potatoes, accompanied by roasted green beans. We ate outside on the new outdoor table, which my husband scratched the day before while repairing a parasol that had blown away in a wind storm the previous week. The table was decorated with a very pretty, delicate bouquet of roses that I had picked from my rose garden. We drank a tasty, label-less bottle of local wine which a friend had given my husband.  We ate an Alsatian apple tart and we all complained that the crust was soggy. I think that was because yesterday was an uncomfortably humid day the result of all that rain the night before and no crust could stand up to that. 
 
After I had cleaned the kitchen, I took some geraniums out to Blanche.  It was late dusk, and she was already lying down for the night. She sleeps out of sight of the house, near a torn, white canvas hammock.  My theory is that she imagines that the hammock is a giant sheep, and it keeps her company. She gobbled down the geraniums.  I scratched her neck and belly and commented on how beautiful she was now that she had had a shower.  She didn’t follow me when I left, which I found surprising.  She watched me walk out the gate, and then settled herself in for the night.  I would have assumed that she would always follow me, but she was ready for bed and she wasn’t interested in going with me.  
 
My son’s girlfriend has had some experience with 4-H sheep and she said that Blanche is the fattest sheep she has ever seen.  It’s a good thing that she didn’t see Blanche before she was sheared, was cut off her grain rations and turned out onto the pasture, because she was a lot fatter then.