It's been snowing for three days. A few inches of wet snow lay on the ground, everything is white. It's very pretty, and it feels pretty normal to me, but apparently it doesn't for the people here. Jenny says she has enough of it.
They say that it will start to get warm (about 15 degrees during the day!) in about two weeks. That sounds incredible to me. So, that's it with the Winter? Where has it been?
With this weather we haven't been going to the wood. Rather, last week for two days we cleared the incredible mess in one room of the house to renovate. Peter has hundreds of talents, but certainly not that of keeping everything tidy. But, thank god, they do not have so much stuff, and the large stone-floored room and its huge chimney is now completely empty. Ready to see new life come in.
There are so many things that I wish to tell, that I would need to spend most of my days writing. Everything is so fascinating.
I should first mention that Chris and Claire are now gone, their two-week stay was over. They are now heading south and their next farm stop will be around Toulouse, I think.
The other day a neighbor came to buy some eggs. I laughed very much, because she wanted "four eggs", and it reminded me of this joke from Coluche, where the tiny old lady in her tiny car asks for "Two fingers of oil and a thimble of gas, please", to which the big, fat, hairy pump attendant answers, puzzled, "And in the tires, I fart?" (Peter thought that of course this had to be a French joke). Anyway, she is a retired French woman, and she and Julie plan to go take walks together and to exchange their French and English skills. Julie was all excited that she has "a friend". She offered her tea and we sat down at the table and chatted for a bit.
I asked her about her relationship to the region. She grew up in the suburbs of Paris, and was introduced to La Creuse through her husband, whose family was here. So they bought a country house in a village, and they spent their summers in it for twenty years. All was fine, until they retired and came to live here permanently. Then, the neighbors started to make their life miserable, apparently mostly because they were jealous of their having the nicest house of the village and of not working anymore, even though they had not reached retirement age. Then, when this woman's husband died, nobody in the village talked to her, for the two years that she stayed there until she moved to another house - where she now is, not far from here.
She talked about the region, and explained something which I found quite interesting. She said that the Creuse 40 years ago indeed was quite an inhospitable place, and that she hated it then. Everything was gray, dead and depressive looking. The people were very close-minded and fearful of strangers - strangers being all people not coming from the same village. But since then, it has changed very much, this being, according to this woman, thanks to all the foreigners who have come to live here, who planted flowers and organized all sorts of cultural activities. Indeed, the cultural life seems to be vibrant in the region. The local newspaper is a collection of all the environmental, business and cultural initiatives of all sorts being born and developed by all sorts of individuals. To my amazement, there is even a local English newspaper! In the classified section of the last issue, there were four entries. One of them was a man asking if someone was willing to teach him how to play the guitar.
Julie started reading a book that Chris left for them, 'The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War', by Graham Robb. The guy cycled through the country and then spent four years researching the history. Julie has been delighting her reading, reading passages to us out loud. We have been struck by the descriptions of daily life in the countryside, which was apparently incredibly miserable even in the late 19th century (I don't know which region he talked about), so much so that people didn't complain that life was too short but rather that it was too long (with a life expectancy of about 40 years). Also, peasants were not allowed to hunt, as hunting was reserved to the gentry. So after the Revolution and the dismantlement of this ban, the countryside became one big huge firework, peasants having a blast at killing everything they suddenly could...
