problems

Where do all the clothes come from?

| Mairead

0810b

(We had no idea there was a lovely walled garden in Marley Park, about 30 minutes from home)

Right so we’re back where we started, everything’s the same but nothing’s the same. And my most pressing question is… where did all the clothes come from? I spent the weekend washing and drying the clothes we brought to France. Lots of clothes. Plenty for a month of warm, little chilly, warm again (in other words, mixed) weather. But as these clothes were washing and drying there was still a wardrobe full of other clothes that we had not taken to France. Somehow we had survived without them. Somehow we didn’t need them. Then what are they for? Why are they lurking in our cupboards? If I packed them up and put them in the attic for a few months would we even notice? Probably not.

0810a

(…with a fountain)

But I’m not going to do that. I already have a ton of other distractions to fill my time, de-cluttering will have to wait until my schedule allows…. ah and therein lies a problem. I need a schedule…. a schedule that allows for stuff that can’t be ignored and yet gives the important stuff (creating stuff) high priority. A schedule that notices when I am tired and insists on rest. That notices when I am spending too much time wandering around having great ideas and not enough time implementing the previous great ideas and insists (gently) on focus. Complaining bit in next paragraph, skip if you’re having a nice day and/o you have real problems and don’t need to hear my “problems”….

0810d

(… and hens! And a cockerel…)

It was so easy when I was away….

  • Grocery shopping only once a week.
  • Lovely coffee and croissants.
  • Waking in the countryside.
  • Nowhere I needed to be.
  • Able to ignore notices from Revenue.
  • In fact able to ignore all the post – what post?

0810g

(… and pigeon houses…)

Ok I’m back… I need a schedule… hang on I just realised something. I can have all (almost) of those things I’m lamenting. Right? Ok you’ll have to read the previous paragraph after all… First, I can go grocery shopping once a week – we’ll call that Eat the Fridge. Second, the coffee won’t be a problem until we run out of the supplies we brought back (probably a month)  – we’ll call this Cold Brew at Home. Third, walking – just walk – we’ll call this Just Walking. Fourth, where do I need to be? Probably not as many places as I think…. We’ll call this Staying Home. I could so ignore Revenue but we’d probably have to call it Paying the fine. So instead I could open the post once a week? We’ll call this Friday feels like the best day for post. Sorted – no problems.

0810e

(… and flowers)

I feel better now, oh hang on what about all the clothes? Mairead.

My bottle of Glue…

| Mairead

0110a

(There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light get’s in – Leonard Cohen.)

I bought a bottle of glue before we left Ireland. It’s almost empty. It has been the best glue I have ever used. Not that it’s much different from any other glue I’ve used but it’s been here with me through every creative effort, every insight every page of my journals. In a way you could say it’s really stuck by me – too obvious? Even so, it has. That glue kept me focussed on the thing I wanted to be doing.

0110b

(Green, white and gold – must be time to head home)

But back in week two when it was half-full (or half-empty…) I wondered how I would get some more here in France. I hadn’t seen an art and craft supply shop in the local town or even in the bigger towns we had visited. How would I manage without glue? And not just any glue, this particular magic kind of glue.

0110c

(All that’s left of my glue)

That worrying thought spent a lot of time wandering in and out of my thinking, distracting my focus, interrupting my intention. Should I cut down on my consumption? Should I order some from the internet? Should I ask one of my friends to post me a bottle of glue? I had heard there was a craft supply shop more than two hours drive away, should I go there?

0110d

(Free wind and heat to dry the sheets)

Fortunately, I got bored with the discussion (I was having with my thinking) and completely forgot about how little glue I had left and went back to focussing on what I wanted to be doing. And the glue rewarded my efforts and is still here with me in this last week (second last day…) It won’t be enough for next week but by then I will be able to get some more.

0110e

(Enough flowers for the bees)

And that got me thinking… What if there’s always enough. Enough glue, enough time, enough money, enough energy to do what needs to be done. No more that just enough. But also no less.

Could it be true? And what difference would it make if we believed it was true? Mairead.

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.

2509d

(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.

2509c

(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.

2509e

(Very cute sign in Vouvant)

From the sunny swing, 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… 

1809a

(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. 

1809f

(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.

1709c

(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.

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.

1209b

(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.

1209c

(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.

1209e

(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?

1209f

(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.

1109h

(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.

1109i

(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?

1109g

(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?

1109a

(The two eggs!)

So intelligent, Mairead.

How often do Ryanair fly out of Pisa? Anyone?

| Mairead

We’re leaving Florence today, well, tomorrow as I write and we’re leaving very early (read 9am…) so I anticipate having too little time then (now, to you) to write so I’m writing now…. which is in the past… which means I may have developed a time machine… it is now as you read and as I write?… Oh better yet, I’ve found a way to explain The Power of Now…. maybe later.

02 07a

(Window in Venice)

Although the Florence bit is nearly over there’s still the journey home…. Four days of wonderful riding through Italy, Austria, Germany, Holland, England and Wales… Emmm… Thing is, the trip down kinda put me off the trip home and I’m busy looking at a train to Pisa and a Ryanair to Dublin. But don’t tell Denis. He’ll be motoring along without a care until the first stop before he realises I’m not on the back. He’ll open his mail and this blog will be there, maybe I should write something nice for him, so he’ll understand…

02 07d

(Windows in Siena)

Never mind, I’m not really going to Pisa, I’m going overland and I’m going to make the journey as easy for myself as possible! First, I’m going to start by following my own advice… well, I was only sharing it because I wasn’t using it myself. So, I’ll notice what’s happening now on the journey.  Instead of imagining and getting fearful about what might happen or about how it might be as hot/tiring/sore as the last time I’ll notice how exactly it is right now. Also, I’ll appreciate stuff that happens and I’ll share with you what I’m grateful for each day…

02 07f

(Window in Duomo, Florence)

You might notice that “easy” for me doesn’t really include any physical issues…. (well, we will be stopping very regularly, in fact by the time we get home we’ll have stopped at approximately 25 motorway services/roadside cafes  over the four days, so that’s a given!) No, all my issues are mental – interesting, right? Mmm…

02 07h

(Window in Pitti Palace, Florence)

We’ll be in Austria next time I write to you, and I’ll let you know how I am then, but of course it’ll be now… again, Mairead.