Warmth, leaves, wind - and and the tree that looked back at me.

 This sunny Sunday - the 3rd of November - was mostly spent by me sweeping up leaves from the terrace outside and - inside the kitchen - sweeping up dead flies..In a way I was glad my garden man was not here to do it - like most men (?) he likes to use machinery to do things...and his leaf-blower is hideously noisy.  He wears it on his back, cigar in mouth, and stomps to and fro.    I had  cleverly put all the chairs on the table so there were no obstacles as I went to and fro. All suggestions as to how to get moss off stone easily gratefully accepted.

In the kitchen it was dead fly time and I confess to having used a fly killer spray - yes, yes, I did cover all the pans, crockery etc (my nose) before spraying.   When I was much younger - and permitted to go up ladders - I did use those sticky coils that you pin to the ceiling.  For some reason the flies are attracted - and get stuck. Then one has to go up a ladder and unpin the sticky mess....

After my hard work I decided a drink on the terrace was merited. I duly supplied myself with a glass of wine and decided to somnole a little whilst resting my eyes on the clump of oak trees on the  corner of the woods.

After a little while I began to feel a little uneasy....I looked around but there were no persons to see...all was unnaturally quiet...I looked towards the trees....there was one looking back at me...!!

Vanishing tree act in the Dordogne

 My house is convienently placed on the 'Route des Plateaux' - once known as the D103. It goes to St Astier and  should be named 'Route des Pins' for on both sides there are plantations of tall,skinny pine trees, naked from their roots until their crowning glory of leaves. I have a curious feeling that they are a recent plantation.

 Driving between them is a curious sensation for while most of them away from the road reach high for the sky, possibly three houses high, the roadside ones seem to lean over passing cars. No, I do not know what variety of pines...some authorities suggest that there are a little short of 200 varieties.  Then, suddenly, a large swaithe has been reduced to neat piles of naked wood, the heads nowhere to be seen.

Apparently most of these will end up as paper - perhaps supporting headlines in newspapers. Some might end up as those light-weight vegetable boxes that you tread down into firewood.  Actually I have noticed that you can 'cut' them up with strong kitchen scissors...

And, once at a meeting of the local Foresters association, in which I am probably the oldest member in years, I remember  complaining about these brief plantations for I have always thought of trees as near eternal deities, not something to be sown and harvested like ....leeks or palms....but something to be treasured and respected - like the ancient oaks.

Numbers can be a Nuisance

 Warning!    the writer of this piece (yes,Me!) admits to being poor with numbers...it started with a 'misadventure' when I was 15 (or so) years old and in an all girls Grammar School.   We had wooden desks with lids...the maths teacher was a woman in her late forties...She had a very powerful voice ( needed for a class of 40 girls!) and liked to use it.

That day our lives were being made miserable by 'fractions'...worse than whole numbers....She picked up her desk lid, looked at us and boomed ...'The Golden Rule of Fractions.....' thumping emphasis from her desk top...My brain shut down, has never recovered... 

The reason for reverting to this painful episode is because the formerly intelligent French postal service also recently got besotted by numbers, each post box (please note the emphasis) has its own four digit number.  Your post is not delivered to 'you' but to 'your name' on a box with a certain number....

I have not dared to enquire about the origin of the four numbers.....some say it is to do with nearest cross roads (in kms), others suggest it refers to the nearest point of usuable water, there is also the (paranoid?) supposition that it has to do with the nearest police station - or hospital....One fantasist of my acquaitance says it is in preparation for deliveries by drone...

Under the old system for very rural areas your postal address was your name, followed by the name of the land area in/on which your house was built, then the name and postal code of your nearest Mairie - the main admin point. But then.....then it was highly likely, if not inevitable, that the post delivery person would be related to those receiving the post...

And now...who receives anything on paper anymore?  Only those of us who refuse to give our email addresses to all and sundry...

Where have all the walnuts gone?

•  So where have all the walnuts gone?    There was I, basket on arm, nettle proof plastic shoes on feet, mobile phones securely in safe places on my person, not quite striding but certainly walking firmly through the ankle high grass. Yes, of course I had my trusty stick with me... I use it to behead dandelions and thistles, also to lift up odd piles of what I can only describe as 'stuff'...to see what is going on.
• The fields have not been mown this year, nor grazed so the grass was moderately high except for the tracks left by the wood-bearing trucks...I had asked for some more firewood to be cut this year because it takes an expletive-deleted length of time to dry sufficiently to be used in the cooker or the sitting room fireplace.
• I cannot even blame the squirrels...we have the proper RED ones here - because they all seem to have gone on holiday somewhere else..
• Local wisdom says 'it was just a bad year' ...which is not very helpful.  But I do worry now about my ideas for planting more walnuts.   I shall need a good weather forecaster first....

Are the northerners hoarding winter?

Well, are the Northern countries hoarding the winter weather storms?  Certainly down here in the French Dordogne (possibly France's most densely wooded county) the leaves are still firmly on the trees and the tree fruit is not ripening.  Is this a dispute between two sets of 'gods'...one that sponsors the cold with some darkness, the other that sponsors the light with very brief, not quite rainy episodes?

As a consequence I am left with a vegetable garden overburdened with tomato plants of various varieties, none of which ripen.  My experience indicates that a fried, or grilled unripe tomato is NOT worth eating.    Unfortunately it is not much better as salad.  Local St Astier (in France!!) overheard gossip suggests what I have to do is to:

put unripe tomatoes in a wicker basket, add apples and bananas, cover with tea-cloth and leave outside in the sun light...

On verra....

The last orchid of 2024....

A splendid discovery during my last stroll in the damp fields....

 ..........spiranthe d'ete!!

This I saw only a few days ago - probably the 22nd September - pushing up through the coarse remaining uneaten grass of summer..

It was my orchid expert friend Stephanie Do-Re-Go Lima...with a name like that what else could she be but an expert in something rare..

Fortunately Stephanie did live at La Chaise for some years during which she worked very hard on her knowledge of wild orchids.   Fortunately for Stephanie, the La Chaise fields have always been well endowed by orchids, even when we had heavy footed sheep grazing the land.   When a local farmer was permitted to take hay from the fields Stephanie immediately armed herself with piquets and netting to surround the orchid patches.    It was a great success.   All the orchids continue to flourish as appropriate times at La Chaise.

The oak that spits, the rook that walks...

Does one ever get used to 'strange' things when in the deepest country side?  Not in my experience....

So, going up the drive from the house to the road, ignore the left-hand side vegetable garden - which is still mostly tomatoes - but look up at the great oak.  It will be looking right back at you...then make a spitting noise and - if you look down, you will see an acorn at your feet...Even when I go up the drive in the car (because I am going food shopping) it will spit and I hear a faint ping.    If I am luck the ping will be the acorn bouncing off the car's hood and will leave little or no trace of its passing...

The other curious thing that has struck in the past few days....there is a large rook that WALKS on the road....I meet this rook when I am leaving the village bakerie and general store.   Obviously no one wants to run over any animal on the road but most animals seem to have the common sense NOT to cross the road when something mechanical is in the offing - do the animals KNOW that a 'human' is in control of the tin machine?   Are they perhaps confused by the new fact that the majority of these machines are shiny white?  I am sorry that I do not have a picture of the rook - but I am a hopeless photographer...