Grenoble

When we drove to Provence last week, we took the road sandwiched between the Alps on one side and the Massif Central on the other (the volcano region where we went last year in Auvergne).

You’ll wonder why I’m doing a post on Grenoble when we were just in Provence, but the truth is we couldn’t get so close to the Alps without passing through Sir’s auntie and uncle on the way home.

So we went to their house for lunch.

In the Alps.

The house that was featured in a French version of Home & Garden.

The house that is so old its massive wooden doors are held together with hand-forged nails, and you have to duck to get through the doorways because people were shorter when it was built.

A house which attracts random strangers who come and ask if they can take their wedding photos in its environ.

Can you ever imagine why that would be?

We ate a simple lunch, a sort of vegetable casserole and fruit salad.

I listened to stories about ancestors who were guillotined just 2 days before Robespierre’s beheading ended the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror.

I visited the “grange” – the stone barn

 that has been converted into apartments

with its massive beams that were chiseled and not sawed,

that has been bedecked in family antiques

and studded with history.

(Sir’s uncle by marriage is from a long line of doctors and one of his patients gave him a precious historical gift out of her gratitude for his work. When the Bolshevik revolution occurred in Russia in 1917, her family of aristocrats had their house taken by storm and were ordered to pack their clothes and go. Her father asked if he could take the household icons, and was allowed, but not before the revolutionary blinded the image of Jesus and shot the frame).

I got ideas for my garden (oh, who am I kidding?)

and tried hard to get a picture worth framing.

Mm. This is as good as it gets for these cherubs, I fear.

The kids played and fought, oblivious to their stunning surroundings;

but I …

I gazed at the overwhelming beauty of the earth until my heart couldn’t hold anymore of its treasures.

And then we went home.

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