Betsy's Blog June 27, 2011

Betsy’s Blog, June 27, 2011  Monday. Our last day here this trip.

From Sunday, June 26, 2011,   JP WILL PUBLISH WHEN HE HAS FINISHED THIS PAINTING. THERE ARE FINAL DETAILS WANTING.

Well, Elsa is out swimming, JP has gone back to paint in the blistering heat, Eric is driving back to Toulouse to catch his plane to Amsterdam, Dubai and Kabul and I am here in the coolness of the huge stone hall thinking about washing the sheets, cleaning the kitchen and polishing off the last of the green plums. Bittersweet. First off, though, for those of you on the edges of your seats, Eric is really wonderful. Elsa is very happy and they have lots of silly fun together.  The objectives of the days changed (for me, not JP) when they arrived; we have been going to the patisserie every morning for café crème and croissants and a long slow look around at the passing world.  Charles took them to all his favorite vendors in the Saturday market and bought them a selection of cheeses that was divine.  The Roquefort really is worth crawling on your hands and knees a hundred miles through the desert for.  The three of us went to Albi, saw the cathedral, Toulouse Lautrec’s museum, and then sat in one café to share a seafood salad featuring large shrimp with googley eyes, strips of salmon, some rubbery strips that were delicious and a yummy mush of something. I am not doing it justice.   Then we moved to another café where Elsa cemented all the stereotypes by putting ice cream first on her nose then on her cheeks to the ultimate delight of the people at the next table who had first tried to ignore her. We told them she was Canadian.

We saw yet another amazing farm machine. This one is big, yellow and must get contracted out for harvesting wheat all over Southern France. The driver sits in the middle of a glassed in cab way up top of the modern space age looking thing. He must have music as well as air conditioning piped in. The undercarriage can adapt to any slope, gully, whatever the land offers. The cutters on the front slice through maybe 12 feet of grain at a time. He went through field after field and was working at 11:30 last night when we fell asleep. This morning JP said they started up around 9.30. What we can’t figure out is why they cut one field and not another, in fact, there is a field right near JP where they left the last 100 feet uncut.   Perhaps fields have divided ownership.  Oh well. A byproduct is that the air was full of chaff and Eric’s allergies were in full flood. It is hot but the pool is really cold. It is a lovely combination.

This has been such a month. We are so grateful to Charles and Mandy for dropping  heaven into our laps.   It has been wonderful to write this to you all as it helped me lay down the memories as we did it. We’ll love to see you all again so soon. It is the consolation for leaving here. We plan to go from here by 5:30 tomorrow morning.. We’ll go from Toulouse to Madrid and home, Elsa will go 5 hours later to Amsterdam , Dubai and Kabul. And life will go on in its merry and surprising way. Au Revoir a toutes nous amis.