What a Beautiful Day!

What a beautiful day. The birds were serenading me when I woke up. A teal-headed duck was paddling in the mill basin when I opened the window.

I bicycled into town. The sheep were yelling at me to take them with me as I rolled out of the yard.

All the houses I passed had their windows flung open wide to let in the spring air.

Monsieur Foissac was putting down the road on his tractor. He motioned for me to stop. I was worried that he was going to tell me he was suing me over his flooded noyer. He just wanted to tell me that he was bringing me another load of rocks. When he clears out his fields, he brings me the rocks. I have a gigantic pile now. I don’t know what I’m going to do with them. I think I’ll be forced to take a masonry class at the local trade school. Then I’ll build a little village for my sheep.

I asked him if he had seen his noyer. He said, non. I told him to go look at it after he dumped off the rocks because everything is bien now.

Today was market day in the village. I ran into Horatio Alger and his wife. While we were chatting, our mutual neighbor Arlette was walking by and joined us.

I went to the bakery/patisserie and purchased some pain vigneron. That’s my husband’s favorite bread here. When I complained about my favorite pain noix being a day old at the other bakery, he suggested that I try the pain vigneron. It’s a version of pain noix but it has some local wine added to it. The problem with my husband’s suggestion is that the pain vigneron is so good, and so fresh, and the crust is so crunchy that I can’t stop eating it.

I went to a wine and local foods specialty store to see if they had the wine my brother had requested. Non, they didn’t have the wine in stock, but the owner would go out this afternoon and pick it up from the vintner. Could I come back in this afternoon or tomorrow? Non, I can’t because I’m on a bike and I don’t want to come back in today and I’m going to the big town all day tomorrow, but could you drop it off at my girlfriend Nathalie’s office? Bien sure, Madame.

I stopped by Nathalie’s office to tell her that the wine was coming by this afternoon. She said she’ll gladly swing the five kilometers out of her way and drop it off at my house after work.

On my way back home, I rode my bike across the one-lane bridge. There’s a very plain sign, in French, English and Dutch that informs bicyclists that they must walk their bikes across the bridge. But if I can’t hear or see any cars coming, I ignore the warning. Just as I was getting near the end of the bridge, I heard the rumblings of a vehicle on the metal planks of the bridge. I was so far ahead of them that I was sure they wouldn’t have to slow down for me, so I kept pedaling.

When I was a little ways off the bridge, the vehicle came alongside me and didn’t pass. I thought, oh, no maybe it’s someone who is going to yell at me about riding on the bridge. Maybe it’s a rare sighting of a gendarme and they’re going to ticket me. It turned out to be my friend Françoise. She lives in the village and owns a summer cottage in the country near me. She told me that she was going out to her cottage to oversee the pouring of the cement for her new swimming pool. I told her that was a fantastic development. The sheep and I would walk up this summer and use it. She laughed her sparkling, infectious laugh.

We discussed the chemo treatments our friend Pierre-Yves has to go through right now. Both of us feeling sad that he, of all the people on the earth, has to be ill, has to suffer. Françoise told me that her husband has lost a lot of weight because the doctor told him that he was going to keel over soon if he didn’t watch what he ate! I didn’t think such things happened in France!

We said aurevoir, and we both went our ways. I passed Monsieur Foissac again. He was in his wife's garden watering the tomatoes that they started in the cold weather under plastic coverings. He gave me a friendly wave and turned around to continue down another row. I’m assuming that he found everything to be in order in his noyer.

What a beautiful day.