little things

The Tunnel I love

| Mairead

2509b

(Leaves and seed. I pick something up every time I go walking)

I went on my walk this morning (of course I did!) a bit earlier than usual because it’s not so pleasant to walk in the heat. Anyway, there’s a stretch of the road which I call the tunnel (or tunnel as I like to say in French) and I absolutely love it. It’s dark and incredibly quiet in there. You can just about make out the light from the sky in the distance. This morning I had to stop and get a good feel of its magic.

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(Duck. From the riverside in Vouvant)

I never bring the camera out on my walk, much too much distraction, but two nights ago I had my phone and I took a picture. It might not be very clear but I wanted to give you a visual sense of my tunnel.

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(My tunnel, sigh)

So… I’m standing in my tunnel this morning and the phrase the darkest hour is just before the dawn comes to mind. And it got me thinking… my tunnel is such a comforting place to be, I wonder how it would work if the next time I’m feeling down, I imagine myself in my tunnel. A place to be held safely in the dark until it’s time to venture out into the sun. I’m definitely going to try it. (By the way, in case I forget and you notice I’m needing my tunnel, could you remind me please?)

2509a

(Love this quote from Maya Angelou, it’s now in one of the journals I’ve been creating here)

With only a week left (I think I’ll keep saying that every day from now on….) I’ve been thinking of all the things I want to do before we leave and on the very top of the list is… getting a video of the hens running to me (their surrogate mother…) So far we have a startled looking hen standing very still so hopefully they’re not camera-shy. If we do manage to capture momentum I’ll find a way to share it with you.

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(Very cute sign in Vouvant)

From the sunny swing, Mairead.

Being Grateful

| Mairead

2409b

(St. John’s Gate – Parthenay)

I’m sitting on the swing as I write, in a little bit of shade, it’s way too hot out there under the bright light for my pale complexion. The really surprising thing about a hot day here is how cool it is inside in the cottage. It’s almost like there’s air conditioning in there. I think it must be the thickness of the walls. Caves are like that too, so it makes them a constant temperature year round, cooler than the summer heat and warmer than the cold winter.

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(Half-timber house – Parthenay)

I realised a moment ago that we will be starting our journey home in just over a week. It was starting to feel like we could stay here forever! So it makes me think about some of the things I am grateful for here… The warmth – it’s been very hot this week and I love how sparkly everything is in the sun, including the spider’s webs (some photos of those would be nice). The garden – it’s lovely to be among green growing things. The peace – it’s so quiet, not silent, there’s buzzing and I can hear some neighbours chatting. I think I hear a farm machine in the distance and every now and then a bird singing. The trestle table – it has been (and will continue to be for the next week, I hope) fantastic to be able to work outside at this big wooden table made by human hands and planks of wood.

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(Very cute house – Parthenay)

The distance from a retail hub – well, this was a big surprise to me, that I could be grateful not to be near a village, town or city. How would I spend my days? How would I fill the time? Where would I get some chocolate or croissants? Where would we eat? For as long as I can remember I have lived in a town (or a city) and always very close to (either next door to or a few hundred yards/meters away from) a shop. In Cashel where I grew up as a child besides the shops there were so many amazing places to visit (really, they did seem amazing!) There was the Rock of Cashel where stone staircases led to turrets that let up to the battlements, hundreds of feet up in the air and unprotected… Any parent’s nightmare – fortunately our parents never knew we were up there! And Hoare Abbey, an old ruined monastery, protected by huge cows (I was/am afraid of cows, so I only ventured in when they were eating the grass round the back). The town of Parthenay reminded me a lot of Cashel.

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(Steep, unprotected steps, at the castle – Parthenay)

So I have come to understand that having no shops and castles and monasteries next door to wander around has actually been an advantage to me. Instead, I can wander around glue and paint, paper and canvas, scissors and fabric.

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(See the seashell? Symbol of Camino – Parthenay)

I am also grateful that the only cows around here are firmly behind fences, Mairead.

Just Walk

| Mairead

You might remember my budding exercise regime? I was going to walk everyday. I was even thinking of walking on the wet days.Well, it’s been faltering a bit. Now, I had read somewhere that if you can repeat something for 21 consecutive days it will become a habit. That’s what I wanted to do with the walking. It was having a shaky start. Then yesterday it got a bit of a boost. I was reading twitter (it’s shorter than email or Facebook…) last night and someone had retweeted a comment from a lady who wished “that I could wake up in the morning on the Camino and just walk.”

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(Some more free food)

It was a simple enough sentence but something about it was captivating. This woman had been walking on the Camino (the Pilgrim’s Walk in Spain) earlier this year and her love for it came through in her very few words. It was a practical example to me of how one person’s passion transfers to another. It did to me.

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(No hunting here, seen on edge of forest I passed)

I read twitter to get recipes from The Happy Pear, to look at cartoon drawings, to hear the news (in very small chunks), to be inspired by Brene Brown or to be amused by Ellen. But last night I went to sleep dreaming of what it must feel like to want to walk, even walk all day long. It wasn’t something I had really felt before… the wanting bit.

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(Big sunflower face, lots of sunflowers on my walk)

So when I woke up this morning I was raring to go. I put on my new walking shoes and set out the door. Backtrack, first I had my breakfast and then I put on my shoes and went out the door. Although my mind was very excited and ready for a long walk, my body was less than enthusiastic. So I promised it (am I the only one who talks to her body?) that we would just take one step at a time and if things got tough we could always turn back. And then I began to think about the lady and her wish to “just walk” and it was different. Just walk is much easier than exercise regime. Just walk is simple and reminds me of something old-fashioned, an older time, maybe a time when the shops closed on Sundays and a half day on Wednesdays. And walking was entertaining, fun, social.

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(One little flower popped out after the rain)

It was so easy I took another Just walk after lunch, Mairead.

I have a very little fridge and I’m not going to fill it up with rain

| Mairead

1809c

(Some perfect scraps of paper)

It seems to have rained all night so the ground was very wet this morning…. but it’s sunny now so I’m sitting outside on the swing. Since we got here I’ve been making craft stuff everyday (except at the weekend) and the weather has been nice enough to work outside. Until this week. It was hard to come back inside when I’d got used to working in the air. Even when the sun wasn’t shining it felt good to be outside. Now there were downsides. For example every piece of paper had to be weighted down so that it didn’t blow away. It’s painful fishing for those perfect scraps of paper in the rose bushes. But working inside the glue smells and the spots of paint I’ve been dropping may never come out of the rug… 

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(Bits and pieces)

So, instead of reminding myself it will be a lot colder and wetter when we get back home and how’s that going to suck… I starting thinking….. all this talking and thinking about cold weather or wet weather or bad weather gets me no closer to the thing I want to be doing. It’s just a distraction. 

1809b

(Mara came back today and she made up a vegetable basket – all from the garden. And later there’s promise of chocolate zucchini cake – no idea…)

Like when I go into the supermarket here. I bring a list, it’s a very small list because we have a very small fridge (note to self: bigger fridge is not always better fridge, you tend to fill the fridge and the only advantage is that there’s more room for things to go off…) But on the way to getting the things on the list I see lots of attractive other things. Like cute knives and forks, you can never have enough knives and forks and they have a gingham pattern. Or cake… well who doesn’t want more cake? Or those funny orange sticks in the fish section – what are they? Anyway, by the time I find the things on the list the basket is full and I’m ready for a nap. 

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(Who could pass these?)

How is that like this? Maybe not a lot but it reminds me… when I’m in the supermarket I forget why I’m there – to fill the little list. When the rain falls I forget why I’m here (in France, but maybe also in general) – to fill my other little list. My other little list has joy and love and fun and crafts and glue and paint and scissors and fabric and pins and thread and wool and other people’s hens and…..

If I fill my other little fridge with rain and cold and problems and worry it’ll be hard to get anything else in, Mairead.

Apple Tart Omelette

| Mairead

1709a

(Mmmm Bread and Butter Pudding Version 1.0)

Another wet day today which is making me kinda sleepy. I might have a little snooze after I finish this. Well, I finally made my version of a bread and butter pudding. Lets call it version 1.0. I have a feeling there might need to be more versions… It didn’t turn out all that well. But it did have some positive attributes. It smelled lovely, the apples and cinnamon, I think. It looked pretty good too. But the taste…. it tasted a bit like apple tart omelette. If you, like me, have never tasted apple tart omelette and wondered… wonder no more, it’s not great.

1709b

(More pictures of the beautiful forest walk around Mervant Lake)

You might remember I had a plan to feed it to the hens if it didn’t work, but then I worried about the ethics of feeding hens their own eggs? Well, I went back to the hen forum (still no sign of Liam) and feeding them cooked eggs is not a problem. (The eggs in this case are definitely cooked, in fact you could call them over-cooked.) The only problem it seems is letting the hens realise how delicious their eggs are in case they eat them before you have a chance to get them in the fridge.

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(Our picnic spot…. water and peach spot really)

Right so, what to do for next time… the omelette taste wasn’t so good so maybe I’ll leave the egg out… and the bread was a bit chewy so maybe I’ll leave the bread out, if there’s no bread then I’ll probably leave the butter out. And I found something that looks very like flour in the bottom of the cupboard so maybe I’ll put that in. Of course that kind of defeats the purpose of using up stale bread and finding a home for free eggs… but I do like the apples…

1709d

(Can you see the person in the red sweater sitting on the rock way, way up there?)

Watch this space for Bread and Butter Pudding Version 1.2, without the bread and the butter, probably should call it Just Pudding, Mairead.

Rain or Shine, some more hen pictures

| Mairead

1509e

(We went for a ramble around the lake at Mervant this morning)

It’s Sunday afternoon, I’ve just brought the hens their afternoon treat – porridge. They love it! Being from France they possibly haven’t tasted it  (you can only buy it here in the English section at the supermarket) but they get very excited when they realise that’s what I’ve brought. Their excitement is followed by very noisy pecking in the feeding dish. This weekend they’ve had a lot of excitement food-wise.

1509a

(Some swallows gathering on the wire outside our house)

It rained heavily all day yesterday (Saturday) which was fine as I had planned a day of answering long unanswered emails, so I sat most of the day on the sofa in front of the windows to the garden. After a while I kinda forgot where I was. You miss a lot of reality when you’re on the computer. So it was lunchtime before I realised the hens were probably drenched, I went to investigate. I had let them out of the house earlier in the morning when the rain was only starting and was surprised that they seemed very eager to be outside.

1509b

(Can you see the rain?)

Now when I reached their enclosure I couldn’t believe the state of them. They were indeed drenched, they looked like they’d been for a swim, feathers plastered against their heads, beaks to the ground. I remember the bird ‘flu crisis we had in Ireland a few years ago, so I knew birds could get the ‘flu, is this how it started?

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(The poor chicken… notice the muddy beak?)

I went straight back to the house (the one we’re in not the hens) and had Denis check if his brother Liam (he and Kate live with the hens I was hen-sitting last summer) was online to get advice. He wasn’t. So instead we searched for a hen forum (where hen owners gather on the internet to chat… really…)

1509d

(Soaking)

We found one in America. There was lots of chat about hens in the rain but the main message –  they’re fine. They love the rain. Why? Because it provides the other thing they love – worms. It has been a very dry summer here in the Vendee and so the ground is very hard, making it difficult for worms to get to the surface or hens to get through to them. Not yesterday. Soft earth. Lots of worm potential. Happy hens.

So how do birds get the ‘flu? Mairead.

Free Food! Free Food! Free Food!

| Mairead

1209a

(The sky last night and that’s a small plane up there)

I want to walk every day after breakfast while I’m here, just for twenty minutes, a budding exercise routine. So this morning I got up a bit earlier than usual (to let the girls out) and went out the back gate and down another lane. It’s a farm lane I’m guessing, because it’s not paved but perfect for walking. Unusual for my experience of France the lane is bounded by ditches and sometimes hedges of trees. They are old trees, like oak and horse-chestnut. Beyond these are crops still growing, like sunflower or wheat. There are also newly cut fields and there’s one ploughed field.

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(Droopy headed sunflowers as far as the eye can see)

On my way back I decided to pick up some cooking apples. Now, I’m talking literally “pick up” – from the ground. Before Mara left she showed me an apple tree in the next field, it didn’t seem to belong to anyone, she said, no one was picking up the windfalls. So we did and this morning I did. I felt very oddly excited by the fact that I would not have to exchange some coins for this bounty. And I wasn’t just taking them because they were lying around I have a plan.

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(Little blue butterfly)

Each day I’ve been making little treats for the hens with the bits and pieces of leftover food from our table. This always includes some bread because the bread seems to go stale very quickly. But hard stale bread seemed a poor gift so I was softening it with some warm milk. It gets lovely and mushy… and that’s when I remembered Bread and Butter Pudding. I used to love that as a child and I often have fond memories of it, I even asked my mother for the recipe once but never made it – there’s milk in it, I don’t like milk! Despite that I still like the idea of it and I love the memory of it, warm and comforting, mmmmm.

1209d

(The apple shop)

So, I’m going to make a different version of Bread and Butter Pudding. I’m usually not good at making up recipes – I worry that it’ll be awful and after all the hard work I’ll have to throw it out. No problem here – the hens eat everything, even stuff that seems really yuck. And I’d be throwing out the bread anyway (to the hens!) and the apples were free and… and it might be a good time to let go of worrying about getting something wrong! So my version will have stale bread, cooking apples, rice milk and cinnamon. Oh and eggs, of course eggs, the other thing we can just “pick up” here. Oh and blackberries, yum.

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(Soon to be Bread and Apple Pudding)

There’s one small problem, I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to start, we’ve eaten all the bread. Hang on, there’s another problem… I don’t know if it’s ethically sound to offer cooked eggs to hens?

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(Oh and free drying too)

From a cloudy with sunny spells back garden in France, Mairead.

Wake up and smell the eggs!

| Mairead

1109e

(Two of the girls… saying something in French)

A wonderful thing happened! Our host went away this morning for a long weekend and left me in charge of the hens! Well, Denis too but I don’t intend to allow him any access. The recommendation must have come through from Kate because it’s quite a specialised job and my experience in the area will definitely have helped me get a foothold into hen-sitting in France.

1109f

(Great profile)

So this morning when I heard Mara’s car pull away I rambled up the garden to the hens, just so they’d know there was someone responsible in charge. I had also prepared a bread and warm milk treat, so they’d know it was me and not Denis whom they could trust. The hen-house was open when I arrived but two of the three girls were still inside, and as soon as they saw me they came outside to see what I’d brought. While they were munching (or is it sucking?) I went to see if they had left anything for me. They had indeed left something but not eggs. Part of my role includes cleaning up their bedding area, that’s were they leave the eggs and also the droppings. There was plenty of droppings but no eggs, possibly Mara collected them before she left.

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(Front door)

By the way Mara explained something I’d rather not have known…. so if you’re squeamish about where your eggs come from, look away now. She says the eggs and the droppings exit the hen from the same slot…… I don’t believe her, I much prefer the egg magically appears story.

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(Back door)

Anyway, after the clean up job I went off for a walk and when I came back I set up my work area in the garden on the trestle table. I was hardly five minutes into my routine when I heard one of the hens squawking loudly. I hadn’t heard that before and thought maybe it was stuck in the fence, so I went up to investigate. She seemed fine but how would I know? The only contact person I have in the area is a handyman Mara introduced me to in case anything stopped working in our cottage. She said he’s very knowledgable. About hens? Could my short hen-sitting career in France be coming to an end?

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(Checking out some insects)

Just in case he didn’t know much about hens I chatted away confidently to the noisy one and the others gathered around also. Then I wandered around to see if there were any predators lurking. No, nothing. Then I went to look in the house and guess what I found? You’ll never guess – two eggs! Aren’t hens great?

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(The two eggs!)

So intelligent, Mairead.

And so the work begins….

| Mairead

1009a

(The tunnel of tress)

Last evening we went for a walk. There’s a farm lane at then end of our road and we followed it the first evening we arrived but there were signs and as we couldn’t read them (!) we turned back, rather than suffer the consequences of trespass! But our host tells us the signs only refer to hunters, so we’re welcome. We went off again last evening and found a lovely tunnel of trees. The tunnel led past a house where a man was carving a huge tree trunk into a deer with a bench. We waved our Bonjour and carried on to a lake. The lake was surrounded by other carvings by the same man. The path continued onto a paved road and eventual onto the main road where we were able to complete a circuit home. Considering how few houses we passed there are lots of paths.

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(One wood carving was in the middle of the lake, might be  a seal?)

It’s the same with the roads we’ve been driving on. There are multiple roads leading to the local town and our sat nav seems to bring us on a different one or variations of different ones each time. It does mean you can get lost very easily but it also means you are never without an option. I like options but sometimes they’re not useful to me. They make it difficult for me to start or when started they distract me from continuing. This morning I started.

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(That our nearest town in the distance)

One of the things I’ll be doing while I’m here in France is preparing for a course I intend to run back in Greystones. It doesn’t have a name yet (too many options…) but it’s about setting aside time for creativity. Lots of people think they’re not creative and the other people who know they’re creative often think their creations are not good enough. So, while the idea of spending time creating might be appealing, the mass of judgement heaped on any creative output can be painful and paralysing…. or at least that’s how it can be for me.

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(Cattle over the hedge)

Usually, I take the time to get everything out of the cupboard and set up the perfect space and enthusiastically begin. But very quickly I can see that the beautiful idea in my head is not what’s appearing on paper. So I stop, I shove everything back in the cupboard and I firmly resolve to forget the whole creating thing! Funnily, I’m always drawn back.

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(Not a great picture, the real thing is so amazing – stars in the middle of the country)

But there is another way. I am practicing that other way here. I started this morning, in the garden. Our host, Mara (from Australia…. where they speak English…) when she realised what I was up to, pointed me in the direction of her shed where a trestle table awaited. So, Denis and I took the table out and I set about doing creative time in a different way.

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(The tools)

I have formulated a little routine. First I lay everything out around me – the paint, paper, brushes, books, magazines and whatever else I think I’ll need. Then I find a nice sitting place and sit there. I ask myself some questions about what I want to reveal to myself today and then I start being kind to myself. Only then do I begin the creative stuff. Very soon, no matter how I was feeling when I started I begin to feel relaxed, calm and settled. Eventually I hear myself let out a long sigh and I remember why I love making time to create.

This is the work I’ll be doing here, Mairead.