Rainy Days and Sheep Always Get Me High

Oh, it’s very beautiful outside. The morning is still dark at seven in the morning and a steady rain is pouring down from the clouds. As an added bonus, we don’t have to irrigate the walnut trees today. Nature’s doing the work. I love dark rainy days here at the Moulin. Days like this just add to the cozy, protective womb atmosphere of the place.

One of my most memorable trips to France was with my son during a rainy October. We went to Normandy, where the weather was clear for the most part, but cool, and we were the only people on the D-Day Beaches. I have a photo of my eleven-year-old walking alone on a long, desolate stretch of the beach. What a singular experience for him, a World War II buff at that age, to have that magnificent historic site all to himself with his imagination free to run wild without any visual impediments, like other people, destroying his fantasies.

After Normandy, we drove to Paris, and stayed in the ultra- modern Hotel Square across the Seine from the Eiffel Tour, in the 16th Arrondissement. The hotel is in a residential area and we had great fun watching the Parisians go about their real lives as they walked their children to school, visited the bakery, had their hair done at the coiffure. It was a very different experience than staying on the Left Bank, or near the Opera House, where we never were able to witness the pleasant daily routines of French families.

During our Paris stay, it rained, and rained hard, every day. I loved it. We seemed to have the tourist haunts of Paris all to ourselves. The rest of the world can have springtime in Paris, but give me the autumn. To sit in the Tuilleries garden when the chestnut leaves are falling is heaven made manifest. To promenade under an umbrella down the Rue St. Honoré with your eleven-year old son is all I could ask for. The sensory experience of huddling under an awning at a sidewalk café for tea and hot chocolate is heightened when torrents of rain are threatening to douse you.

I don’t know what I’ll do with my beautiful rainy day. I might work on my novel, or paint, or sew, or do all three. I had “scheduled” Blanche for a walk this morning. I’m trying to ride the horse every other day and walk Blanche on the off days; but she doesn’t like going out in the rain.

Yesterday Blanche once again escaped and didn’t have the decency to announce that she had arrived at the house. I just happened to have glanced out the kitchen window and was shocked to see this large sheep devouring one of my large pots of geraniums; the same geraniums that I had been admiring for their vibrant beauty earlier in the day. She had no intention of going quietly back to her pen. When I opened up the door to the kitchen, she barged in, ate some old flowers I had sitting in a pitcher on the sink counter, and then checked out what was on the kitchen table. Since she wouldn’t go back in her pen, I decided to trim the large hedge out by the road, to get Blanche away from the flowers and accomplish some work at the same time. She happily followed me out there. But after a while she moseyed back to the terrace with the intention of eating more geraniums. My son chased her away. After several attempts at trying to coax her back to her pasture, even sitting with her to rub her belly in the hope that she would follow me for more massaging, I resorted to using cookies to lure her. It worked. So now I have a sheep that drinks out of a cup and eats cookies. If she polishes her manners, for instance realizes that you don't eat the hostess' flower arrangement, she’ll be presentable enough to attend high tea.