The Last September Day

The vendage, or grape harvest, started today so the surrounding roads are filled with tractors pulling steel wagons and heading to the cooperative.

My roses bloomed profusely while I was in the U.S. and I’m sad that there was no one here to enjoy them. Some friends from San Francisco spent one short night here, so perhaps they saw them. I cut off the dead heads this morning and snipped off a few of the remaining roses to make a beautiful pink and yellow bouquet that I have sitting on the kitchen table.

This afternoon, I picked up walnuts by hand. My hands are now stained a dark brown and they’ll remain that way for many weeks. Regrettably, I’ll have to try and use the nut machine tomorrow because there are just too many to pick up by hand now. I like picking the walnuts up by hand. It’s peaceful. The birds serenade me. Blanche and Soixante-Douze follow behind me nibbling on the grass and occasionally they knock over my collection bucket. And when there isn’t an overwhelming amount of nuts, picking them up is great fun, with all the excitement of an Easter egg hunt when I find a shiny, clean walnut that has just popped out of its green covering and fallen to earth.

I’ve never used the nut machine. That was Monsieur Reste’s domain. I looked it over yesterday and I can’t even tell where the ignition is . . . so keep me in your prayers or meditations! The irony is that I lobbied hard against buyin the nut machine. I thought it was too much money, and that it would be a lot more fun if we just picked walnuts by hand . . . like most of our neighbors who have small groves. But after a few hours yesterday and today of bending over constantly, I’ve got to admit that I’m looking forward to utilizing the machine. Also, I'm afraid that if I keep bending over, it won't be long before a wild boar takes an interest in me as a possible mate.

As I get older, I’m finding out that a lot of things I never liked, I’m now having to tolerate or concede their usefulness; and a lot of things I once liked, I’m having to reject them. I’m realizing that there really is a yin and a yang and one would be much happier if one didn’t form strong attachments to either.

I went out and picked nuts for a bit as the sun was setting. Blanche and Soixante-Douze were busily engaged in their late evening speed-grazing, prior to settling down for the night. Eventually Blanche mosied over to say 'baaaanjour," and her sidekick Soixante-Douze trailed behind. I spent about forty-five minutes hugging Blanche, and rubbing her belly. She loves that. And if I dare to stop when she isn’t ready, she hits me with one of her front hooves. Soixante-Douze doesn’t trust humans, she must be pretty smart, so she just lay down nearby and watched Blanche get her massage. I wish I could potty train Blanche so she could move in with me. I’ve never known an animal that is so gentle, trusting, and loving.

Ah, but I digress, divulging my fantasies of having a housebroken sheep to live with. It was a beautiful day here. However, the nights are cold and so this old stone house is about as warm as a deep freeze, because it isn’t hot enough during the day to heat it up. I can’t turn on the central oil heater because the thermostat is broken. I carry a small space heater around with me when I change rooms. Before I went back to the U.S., I had my lesbian plumber come out to replace the thermostat. She looked everything over and said she would have to order a programmable thermostat. I told her when I would be back, and asked if she could try and arrange to do the work soon after my arrival. She said that was possible. The day before I left, I received a devis, or estimate from her office. I thought that was strange because I hadn’t asked her for one. But I thought it was considerate of her to send me one so I would know in advance what the work was going to cost me. I laid it on the desk and left for Paris. When I returned two weeks later from my trip, I noticed that at the bottom of the devis, she had typed that if I wanted the work done, I needed to sign the devis and send it in to her. So, because I didn’t take the time to read her letter carefully, I’m freezing all week.

Another inconvenience is looming on the horizon. My favorite pizza guy is going to leave for a two week vacation this Sunday. He’s going to Paris. I guess I’ll just waste away to nothing while he’s gone. I’m not very good at cooking for myself. My
table-for-one repertoire consists of plain pasta, lemon yogurt, pistachios, apples, and tomato/onion sandwiches with mayonnaise . . . oh, and protein shakes in the morning. I’m not in to making hot things if I’m the only one eating.

That’s all that’s new here today. I was blissfully immersed in divine Nature: giving a sheep a massage, picking nuts, washing nuts, and picking roses.

(The next installment will concern itself with the miraculous reappearance of SIRK . . . the cat who refuses to die.)

Those Rude French People

Rude Parisians

My Air France flight arrived ten minutes early to Paris yesterday. However, air traffic control made the plane circle so we ended up being forty minutes late.

While waiting for my baggage to arrive on the carousel, I thought it would be best if I made a trip to the restroom before hopping on the Metro into Paris. There were two women’s restrooms, one on each side of the room. I headed for the one on my left, but found an American woman yelling at the thin, French janitoress who had conveyed to the American that she couldn’t go in the restroom because the janitoress was in the process of cleaning it. The woman huffed and puffed and then stomped off.

She didn’t head towards the other restroom, which was nearby and in sight of the closed restroom. I headed to the open restroom and waited in a short line to use the single stall.

Just as I moved up to the head of the line, the janitoress came over and announced that the other restroom was open. So I headed over there and had the luxury of being able to utilize a newly cleaned public restroom at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Ah, the simple pleasures of life.

So another incident of uglyamericanitis played itself out in Paris yesterday.

Since my arrival was late, I was correct to be worried that I wouldn’t catch my train in Paris at the Gare d’Austerlitz. Pulling my two bags behind me I raced to the airport train station. I usually go in the train office and buy my ticket from an agent, but the office was so crowded that I thought that this time I would buy my ticket from a machine, because after all I have my French Carte Bleu, and I’m a cool intercontinental woman, and I can work a French ticket machine.

The station was crowded, and I had to stand in line even to access a machine. When I got up there, I couldn’t remember my secret pass code. I tried it three different times, and then a message came on to tell me that I couldn’t use my carte any more. Luckily, my husband had the foresight to give me some Euros in change because the machine didn’t take bills. The Euros are so heavy, so I hadn’t bothered to bring much change with me on my trip back to the U.S. . . . after all, I rarely use the change except when I’m at the farmer’s market. Usually I use my Carte Bleu.

The machine dispensed a ticket, and with my bags in tow, I hurried down the escalator, boarded the train, settled in my seat, and the train took off immediately. Whew. That was lucky. And, what was even luckier was the fact that it was the EXPRESS RER to downtown Paris.

However, the train went so slow, that I was of the agitated opinion that I could out run it. I kept nervously glancing at my watch. When I finally arrived at the St. Michel Metro stop, I was certain that I would miss my train. I only had fifteen minutes to drag my bags through the St. Michel Metro Maze, endure the stops at four Metro stations, squeeze through four turnstiles with my very heavy and large bag, and climb multiple flights of stairs. There was one veiled woman begging, and as I stumbled down the stairs I thought that a lucrative business for her to start would be to help people carry their luggage down the stairs where she was sitting.

At St. Michel, I almost caused a tragic accident as I stepped on the steep escalator, and not having stabilized my bags, I began to fall backwards, and my bags began to fall backwards. An old woman behind me saved me by pushing me back up on my feet. If she wouldn’t have been able to right me, I would have fallen down the escalator, with my heavy bags, and taken out ten to twenty people.

I was hobbling up the first of three long flights of stairs, thinking that I would have to carry the bags up one at a time, when a good-looking young, Frenchman asked if he could take my large bag up the stairs for me. I sighed a relieved “oui” and he toted them up the three flights for me. If he wouldn’t have done that, I would have missed my train, for I arrived with only twenty seconds to spare.

My husband said, “You must have looked really hot for him to do that for you.” No, I didn’t look hot. I looked like a haggard, forty-six year old woman who had been awake for the past twenty-four hours, and had spent eleven hours shoved in a tiny seat on an airline that had dried out my skin, and because of turbulence I hadn’t been able to brush my teeth before we landed and there was too big a line at the airport bathroom for me to brush there, so I did my best not to breathe on the guy when I thanked him profusely, as the sweat dripped from my forehead and chin. Doesn’t my husband remember that boy scouts used to help little old ladies cross the street?

The conductor told me that I was so late it was imperative for me to hop on the first car, and then make my way back four cars to the one to which I was assigned. It was impossible for me to take both of my bags through the small isles so I took the small one, found my car and compartment, and then went back for the other. The train was chugging down the track, and I was falling from side to side as I tried to balance myself and the large, heavy bag. I knocked into people’s feet and legs, and heads, and kept muttering “desole” with my horrid breath while sweat was pouring off my brow and from my armpits.

I couldn’t fit the large bag into my compartment because there were four of us in there and there wasn’t room for the big bag. So I left it in an adjoining car that had luggage racks each end of the car. When we reached Brive, thank goodness I was awake and that I paid attention to the announcement, and that my French is now good enough to understand mumbled public addresses because they announced that they would be decoupling cars seven through ten at Brive. I was a bit groggy but eventually, I realized that my heavy bag, that had caused me so much trouble in the Metro, was in car ten!

So, I hurriedly put my shoes back on and raced back to car ten to snatch my bag.

My husband is always chastising me because I prefer to take the train to and from Paris when I fly in and out from Charles de Gaulle. Air France pretty much throws in the Toulouse leg for free, so he doesn’t understand why I don’t take it. There are several reasons. The first one being, that often the Toulouse plane is late. So when you combine a late plane with the waiting in the airport, and then the train trip up to Cahors, I really haven’t saved much time. The second reason is that I just don’t want to shoehorn myself into another plane after I’ve just escaped from the coach section of a transatlantic flight. I’d rather jog down to southwestern France. Thirdly, I enjoy spending the night in Paris before I catch my plane out. I don’t understand how anyone can just fly into and out of Paris. I like to see it, smell it, and crawl through the Metro with my white pants.

And if I hadn’t had that ordeal yesterday racing through the Metro, I wouldn’t have learned a very important lesson: that there are some really wonderful strangers, saints among the riff-raff, who are willing to save you from tumbling down escalators, or to selflessly help you make your scheduled train by putting their back out carrying sixty pounds of books up steep flights of stairs.

I’ve been having a hard time having faith in people lately, and yesterday taught me to not give up on mankind.

Vignettes of France

I drove into our little village to pick up my daily pizza.
It was just before seven p.m. when I pulled up in front of the butcher shop to park my car. The handsome butcher was behind the counter while the short, homely butcher mopped the floor in preparation for closing. One woman customer was at the counter. All three of them were laughing.

I felt a poignant joy to be a witness to their lives. This is the France that I love: the independent shops, the owners laughing as dusk falls and they sweep the floor, the church bells striking seven and all the shop keepers coming out to close their shutters for the night heading to their waiting dinners, young people and old people sitting on the benches in the village square, the restaurant waitress setting the outdoor tables for the night.

Sometimes, I get so caught up in noticing what I don’t like about the modernization of France, that I’m blinded for months to the simply beauty of the lives that carry on around me. Therese bringing me a clafoutis made with Roger’s peaches and then the next day bringing me the greens for the rabbit; always kissing me when she sees me. Roger coming to my dinner bringing flowers for me and Francine, and bottles of his homemade moonshine and peach wine. Steef, sick from a disease that is attacking his nerves, hears me on the horse outside his house, and hobbles out to talk to me. Seeing my saddle packs, he fills them with cucumbers and melons.

Leonce is burning tree branches right now, as his wife sets the dinner for him on the table outside. I drove by and honked.

I sit on the terrace, eating my pizza, drinking some local wine, watching my sheep graze, while the most sublime classical music pour from the government radio station. I have found heaven.

The pizza man asked me how I was doing, and I said “bien.” And then I asked him how he was doing and he said “mal.” I asked him what was wrong, and he said, “pas des touristes.” I laughed and told him that I was happy that the tourists were gone but that I could understand why he was sad. He said he might take a vacation in October and I said that he mustn’t go in October because I would still be here. I think he will stay when he weighs how much money he makes from me in a month.

He said he wanted to go to England and I suggested that he should come to San Francisco since the dollar was so low and the Euro was so high and the British food was so bad. He didn’t seem interested in my suggestion.

We’re in for a very hot week. I guess Mother Nature is making up for our cold August. According to Horatio Alger, this hot weather, after all the rain we had should make for a good grape crop this year. I was told that the last year our region produced a truly stellar wine was in 1990, so the vintners are keeping their fingers crossed.

I have a great confluence of events happening at the moment. My house is cleaned. The yards and tree groves are smartly trimmed and mowed. I have my rose garden weeded and fertilized. Monday, I’ll start all over again with the mowing, weed wacking, weed pulling, and junk sorting. But today, all is beautiful, and in its place, and for the moment, perfection.

I cut a beautiful bouquet of roses and lavender for my bedroom. Every time I look at it I get a little bit melancholy because minute by minute its beauty slips away. I guess I’m a lot like that bouquet! Last night I had the unpleasant observation that I now apply the heavy concealor over half of my face. I used to just use it under my eyes!

Dinner and War

You may recall an earlier post, “The War’s Over,” where I wrote about a young woman that was shot by the local Resistance for allegedly collaborating with the Germans. Last night, I had a small dinner party in celebration of my neighbor Francine’s past and my upcoming birthday. I again asked Roger what he knew about the woman who was shot by the Resistance in our little commune. And he said, “Which one? There were two.”

Then he proceeded to tell me that the young girl, who I’ve been puzzling about ever since Madame Dupuis mentioned her, was living across the road from our farm during World War II with a woman who was teaching her how to become a seamstress. This little fact aggravated me because I wondered why no one had mentioned it before when I was asking questions. I assumed she lived up the hill in the commune proper. I get frustrated with my rough French because I have trouble interviewing people about stories that I’m interested in, and if they tell me an interesting fact, I often don’t pick up on it.

The Maquis (Resistance members) did take this woman and shot her dead by the water springs halfway between our commune and another village. Roger had previously said that she was in her mid-twenties, but last night, he lowered her age to twenty which is approaching Madame Dupuis’ claim that the unfortunate female was only sixteen when she was killed. Roger did confirm more of Madame Dupuis’ story when he told us that the woman’s father had to come down to retrieve his daughter’s body with a cart and two work horses. Madame Dupuis had told me that the father had to walk down from the hill commune with a wheelbarrow and added that no one would help him retrieve or bury the corpse. I’m going to visit Madame Dupuis soon and quiz her some more about this young woman. Finding out the “truth” is starting to obsess me.

Roger didn’t give us too many details about the other woman that was shot and killed by the Resistance except to say that her son was the diabetic amputee who had previously been a truck driver here at the flour mill, and he died last year. I have to ask Madame Dupuis about this woman. I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of women were murdered in France, during and immediately after the war, not because they were collaborators, but because they had displeased some local man.

Roger said what I have been thinking for quite a while, that it’s practically impossible to make judgments concerning right and wrong during a war; people just don’t understand the complexities of war unless they have lived through one. He said that it must be very difficult to be living in Iraq now, because they have a foreign invader and a civil war going on at the same time.

I did discover last night a proud fact about my little valley and my two nearest communes: that there were many refugees from Occupied France living here throughout the war and Jew or Christian, they were protected by the locals. None were reported to the German authorities and the communes provided free housing to them.

Roger told me that our neighbor, Leonce, the hard working, spry old man with the weed whacker who on his Sabbath day of rest bikes thirty kilometers for fun, was taken prisoner by the Germans during a round-up of 18-35 year olds to be sent for slave labor to Germany. Leonce was taken to a holding area in the northwest of our departement to await shipment to Germany. There, with the help of some Gendarmes, he and ten other men escaped. Roger said that by the end of the war ten men from our two nearby communes died in Germany in the labor camps.

The war permeated everyone’s life. My other guests, Pierre-Yves and Marylen were living in Paris and Burgundy respectively, both in Occupied France, and as young kids, they were terrorized by the sight of the Nazis. Marylen said she saw them every day because they took up their headquarters across the street from her family home.

Pierre-Yves, as an eight-year old, was on the last train to leave Paris before the Germans marched in. His mother, younger brother, and he fled to Brittany’s western coast. They stayed in a hotel room for a few weeks until his mother decided that she would rather be taking her chances in Paris than to be confined to a small room with two boys indefinitely. I asked Pierre-Yves, “But didn’t you have trouble finding enough food to eat in Paris?” His eyes got very wide and round and the agitation of the old memory was visible across his face and he said with great force, “Why yes, we had hardly any food. At times we WERE starving.” It was obvious that sixty years of plentiful food have not been enough to erase his memories of childhood deprivation. Now, I have a slightly better understanding of why age-old animosities fueled by occupation and war are impossible to extinguish. I guess that’s why Hamas and Sien Fein insisting on fighting against what seem to be insurmountable odds.

Today, the rose vines covering the house where the murdered seamstress once lived are blooming beautifully. It’s a sunny, hot day. Saturday bicyclists stop and fill their bottles up at the natural springs where she was shot. Life goes on and I am reminded that I'm just a speck of flotsam on the ocean of history.

Update: Therese came over yesterday with a grape basket full of carrot greens for the rabbit. I had to break the news to her that the cat ate him.

It's Not the Red Wine

I went horseback riding today for the first time since my fall and had a wonderful time. The morning was fresh from a storm that crossed over us last night. I went by myself on Tasha, the horse I usually take. I had to get off him at one point during the ride because he had managed to get both of his plastic bit guards into his mouth, so I had to extract them. I was a bit uncertain if I could remount. My right side still hurts a bit, and when I got on him initially I needed to mount him at the stable by standing on a little hill beside him while he stood in the driveway. However, I was very proud of myself as I slowly pulled myself up and over his back. Tip: Don’t put your fingers into a horse’s mouth.

I’ve been mowing non-stop for the past three days, and today I’ll weed-whack. I really, really miss Preston now. He mowed almost every day he was here leaving me free to sit around the house eating bonbons. Weed whacking is tough work. But every time I want to stop because I’m too tired, I can hear my seventy-five year old neighbor’s weed-whacker going, and so I plunge in again.

The energy and stamina of the old people here puts me, an in-shape jogger, to shame. I’ve come to the conclusion that the real French Paradox does not center on red wine. No, the French Paradox is a combination of habits: eating foods fresh from the farm that hasn’t passed through a corporate processing plant, easy access to healthcare, and physically exhausting work performed every day. Now that last point is a tough sell for most people. We wish it was the wine, not the work that held the key to a lengthened life, but I’m afraid it’s not so.

Here, in order to keep ahead of the plants, I need to work like a migrant farm worker. The work is endless. No sooner do I finish mowing the property than I have to start over. I have no idea how a farmer can possibly do all the work that’s required. All I have to do is maintain the place and take care of 150 walnut trees. It seemed like an absurdly easy job, until I tackled it.

My husband and I are always trying to think of some sort of business idea to start over here. I told him yesterday to cross anything that had to do with plants or animals off of his list. Farming is too labor intensive. Sure we’d be extremely skinny like all our other neighbors who are agriculturists, but I just don’t think I could physically stand up to the amount of labor that farming requires.

When you eat today, look closely at your food and realize that someone had to exert backbreaking, virtual slave work to get it to you so cheaply. The irony is that the people who live in the cities are getting fatter and fatter each year, while the people who make their living off the farms are skinny little folk who can barely eat enough to replace the calories they’re expending.

Driving back from my horse ride, I saw Madame Boudet bent over in her garden. It doesn’t matter what time you pass by Madame’s house, she’s always outside, bent over her garden, her vines, her fields.

Since the old owner left, I’ve been free to shape the property in my own image. I no longer hide inside the house during the afternoons, afraid of being forced to listen to him drone on at me for an hour or more. I no longer have to debate every tree I want to cut, every piece of junk I want to throw away, every little rock border I want to build, every bush I want to plant. At the moment, this “shaping” means that I am hauling old discarded junk from where it was thrown seventy-five years ago and sorting it at a staging area hidden from view. I might be finished in 2010. Every clump of weeds seems to hide a piece of junk: the chassis for a baby carriage, a cute outdoor table that would be wonderful if the rust hadn’t eaten holes in its top, tires, used oil drums, et al.

Right now, I have the front of the property looking pretty decent. But it’s embarrassing to walk behind the house or the buildings. There’s junk everywhere and unfortunately, none of it would make it on The Antiques Roadshow.

I don’t mind the physical work. I’ve lost the few pounds I put on while my girlfriend Kathy was here. We visited a lot of the local restaurants. But the endlessness of the work is what overwhelms me. I try to view it as a Zen lesson: The imperfection inherent in all attempts at perfection.

The weather forecast is for a huge thunderstorm this afternoon and evening. I hope it arrives, for it will give me a reprieve from my endless mowing and weed-whacking. But right now I must go out and finish what I can before the storm arrives.

Happy Anniversary

Today is my ninth wedding anniversary. It's also the ninth anniversary that my husband and I have been apart. I've always been in France. Usually with my girlfriend Laurie. One year she took me to the beach at St. Tropez for my anniversary where I spent the day surrounded by hundreds if not thousands of dangling penises. Still, I only dreamed of my husband Craig. That's true love.

I don't know why I had the great luck to bump into Craig and marry him. He wasn't at all what I thought my "dream man" should be. He drove a beat up Lincoln Continental. (Well, maybe it was only beat up after I started driving it.) He wasn't interested in material possessions. (Well, maybe he would be if he hadn't aquired me and was frightened off by the expsense of chasing my crazy ideas.) He rarely dresses up. (Even though he is extremely handsome in a suit and tie, but hey, it keeps the other superficial women away from him.)

But as I've written before, we often get what we really desire and need if we just don't force the issue. And so, I end up with the man who is "perfect" for me. We agree on everything. (Except how I spend money and how he dresses himself from the Costco shelves. Perhaps in that statement there's a cause and effect I haven't been grasping before.) We spend all our free time together. (Except when I'm in France.) He loves my son Preston. He tolerates my sheep fetish. He falls for and finances my silly dreams. He doesn't care if I don't cook very often. He raves about my cooking whenever I do cook. He brings me a tray of tea every morning when he wakes me up at 5am. He doesn't watch sports. He doesn't gamble. (Unless you count being a professional option trader as gambling.) He doesn't get drunk. (I guess that's because he has to drive me home when I've had too much.) He knows art. He knows good wine. He's brilliant and witty. He's humble. He's kind. He's humorous. He's a great lover. Yikes. I better stop writing about him because I'm crying now. This has to be the first time I've cried on my wedding anniversary.

Jeanne d'Agneau

I bought a new sheep for Blanche last week. After spending a month trying to find a sheep with black eyes, the breed of sheep that’s traditional in the eastern side of the departement, I finally gave up and purchased an all white six-month old lamb from a neighbor up the hill.

This lamb is very tiny in comparison to Blanche. But Madame Moulie, the woman who sold me the lamb said it’s because she’s sauvage . . . in other words, she wasn’t overfed as Blanche and Olympia were when they were lambs. Blanche must be three or four times the size of this new arrival and Blanche is only six months older.

Madame Moulie’s son delivered the new sheep in the back of his small van, scooped it into his arms, and set her down in my pasture. Blanche had run over to see what was going on and so she sniffed the lamb and didn’t seem interested. The lamb decided that Blanche wasn’t as interesting as the mother it had recently been stolen from and so it took off on a tear running towards a corner of the pasture.

Now unfortunately, the pasture is only fenced in on one side. The stream and a canal provide the barriers to escape on the other three sides. This was an inexpensive way to enclose Blanche and Olympia who only desired to stay near me. But this nervous lamb, who reminds me of Joan Crawford, was probably capable of breaching the moats. She certainly had the motivation: to get back to her mother. Joan disappeared into the bushes and over the embankment. I gave out a nervous chuckle and joked that I’ve thrown away money before, but that this was the first time I’d seen it literally run away.

A few minutes later I was relieved to see the lamb emerge from the brush, covered in brambles. Luckily for me, she had tried to cross over the creek. Sheep don’t like water. So she reluctantly came back. If she had attempted to cross the two other sides bordered by the dried-up canal, she could have winded her way up the hill to her former flock and into the loving hooves of her mother by nightfall.

Moulie the Younger left. As soon as he pulled out, Jeanne (that’s French for Joan) darted back into the bushes. And she didn’t come out. A college friend, Kathy Fogarty, was here visiting, and I turned to her and told her it would be a bit difficult to explain to my husband that not only did I get taken by the neighbor who overcharged me for the puny lamb, but now I had provided a 100 Euro meal to one of the neighbors.

We headed back to the house, where we sat at the kitchen table and I bemoaned my stupidity for not putting the lamb in the sheep house for a week or two so that she could become accustomed to me.

About two hours later, Kathy and I went out to get Blanche to go for a walk. I called Blanche and she emerged tentatively from under a large bush. She hides there to keep the flies off during the warmest part of the day. She didn’t eagerly run towards me as she usually did. But then, to my great delight, the little lamb stepped out and stood beside Blanche. The lamb held her neck up ramrod straight, giraffe-like, and looked around nervously, reminding me even more of Joan Crawford. We didn’t take Blanche for a walk, because I thought it was best to leave her behind to make the lamb feel at home. And, to tell the truth, Blanche didn’t express any eagerness to go with us.

It’s been a week, and Blanche and Jeanne are great friends now. Unfortunately, this means that Blanche has absolutely no interest in me. Just the week before Jeanne appeared on the scene, I had taken a two hour siesta with Blanche, the two of us stretched out on beach towels side by side. Now she has her little buddy who trails her every move and has absolutely no interest in me. If I call Blanche, she doesn’t come running to me any more, she just lets out a barely audible baaa, which I interpret to mean that she doesn’t care about answering me, but just does it because she feels guilty that she’s ignoring me. She used to let out very loud baaa’s when I called her. In fact, she wouldn’t stop baaing until I acknowledged her.

Previously, Blanche hung out in the corner of the pasture nearest the house. How I enjoyed catching a glimpse of her if I looked out a window or sat on the terrace; but now I rarely see the two sheep. They hide under the bushes all day, and when it cools off, they go out into the walnut grove and eat. I think that Blanche rejected me because she greatly enjoys the companionship of the lamb, and the lamb, being sauvage has communicated to Blanche that humans are not to be trusted. That’s one smart lamb to have figured that out so early in her life. She’ll make a great attorney or policewoman. So Blanche, to please her new companion, steers clear of me. She won’t even try to force her way through the gate when I walk through in order to follow me. I guess that the good news is that she seems to have given up any desire to escape from the pasture to eat geraniums.

I guess I’ll have to get a buck for the two of them and start my flock. I wasn’t going to breed Blanche because I didn’t want her to become so interested in her lambs that she would cease to be a pet sheep and cease being interested in me. Sheep are just like teenagers . . . they’re more interested in following the dictates of their peers than they are in staying with the parents who love them.