Stormy Weather

There are many signs on the roads in France. Some you expect to see – telling you when to stop, where to turn for Avignon, how much to slow down for speed bumps etc. Some are more unusual by our standards. There is my favourite, the free-standing portable exclamation mark on a yellow triangle (a generic “watch out” I believe), and there are also many many variations of the signs warning you about the condition of the road – chausee deformee, acotement dangereux, attention aux temps de pluie, inondee après orage, voie inondee. The last two mentioned come up so frequently we laughed at them as representing the work of some otherwise moribund branch of the civil service here. That was before Monday evening.

Before I get to Monday evening, however, I might report on the earlier part of the day. It was without any major incident of any kind and involved some reading, some grocery shopping, the making of another soupe au pistou and a chicken fricassee with peppers and onions and a plum galette (portions of which we delivered up the small hill to June and Paul and Rosie). All that was for dinner. Lunch consisted of the leftover pizza from the night before and a nice green salad.

At about dinner time it began to get a little blustery and overcast, then quite a bit more blustery so I brought in all the cushions etc. Sometime after 10 (I was in bed) a great rumbling started and then got louder and louder and kept up all night and well into the morning. It sounded like the storm was abating, and then it was back with even more vigour. The rain came down in sheets. All I could think of was how Fiona told me last year that the mairie used to flood everytime it rained, and this was, to my mind, not an ordinary rain but a downpour of old testament proportions. As it turned out, only the terrace was a bit flooded but the floor inside was dry. There is also a bit of a leak in the roof in the corner of the sitting room. Rosanna immediately wanted to go off and check the voie inondee to see how it looked, but was persuaded to make tomato sauce with eggplant instead. I had a linguistic revelation which those of you who travel with Rosanna in the self-catering establishments might find useful: if the dish is called soupe au pistou, I am expected to make it, but if you called it pasta e fagioli, it is in her bailiwick. Similarly, the same dish essentially might be referred to as clafoutis (mine) or a frittata (hers).

This afternoon (Tuesday if I have not been clear about the passage of time) the sun came out, but it was too gusty to ride. We hope it isnot a mistral (i.e. minimum 3 days duration) but rather something more temporary affiliated with this particular storm, which seems likely as it appears to be blowing from the south. Anyway, in view of the somewhat inhospitable weather, we took a walking path from the col de la Madeleine to Crillon le Brave instead and wandered about more of the town than is accessible in bike cleats, and then we had a cocktail at the hotel bar and read English papers (I only read the headlines as I was without my lunettes de lecture). I almost immediately on commencing the walk wandered into a vineyard (other word choices considered: “stand of grapes” and “field of grapes” – have I been here too long?), and nearly sank into my ankles in the wet clay, and the grape I tasted was not, as I had hoped, of the Muscat variety.

I believe we are about to have leftover pistou for dinner and finish off the last of the Chateau d’Hugues wines. Tomorrow I take command of the library. Today I have also finished off the life of Edith Wharton – rather a long slog at 760 pages (and endnotes in addition!). She did not buy her first French property until she was 57. Mind you, she bought two of them that year, one of which is now owned by the Prince of Lichtenstein and the other of which is owned as a parks office (with the gardens intact) of the French government. My aims (fantasies) are more modest – a terrace, a cave, a not-too-tight parking spot, a stone structure and proximity to a ville toutes commerces. That seems modest, no??