A Day in the Country

However, spending the weekend with the in-laws provided me with a chance to borrow Belle-Mere’s camera to capture the beautiful images of our day.

Here is the back of the barn that connects the two houses to form a hamlet, viewed from the garden.

This is looking outwards:

and here

here

I walked slowly holding Petit Prince’s hand as he made his tiny way, smelling the blossoms and casting my glance as far as the eyes could see.  Vivaldi’s “Spring” was floating through my head when this idyllic scene scratched to an abrupt stop as Young Knight danced across my field of vision, waving his hand and screaming like a banshee.  Nettles.  Drat nature.

This is the back of the hamlet where we ate lunch.  For the entrée, we had avocado and cucumbers, a platter of halved hard boiled eggs surrounding stir-fried leeks, and grated carrots with vinaigrette.  For the main course we had roasted potatoes with thyme and roast chicken, followed by the cheese platter.  It was at that moment that Young Lady informed us that they get offered a cheese platter at school every day for lunch, and they can raise their hands to choose what cheese they want (camembert, gruyere, etc), and that Young Lady never raises her hand for the cheese.  But when there’s ice cream for dessert, her hand shoots right up.  I guess you can take the girl out of America, but you can’t take America out of the girl (although the girl does insist she’s more french than american, much to my dismay).

We finished with the coffee platter, which was so rustic as to be cute.  That blue mug there is serving as the coffee pot.  Someone, who shall not be mentioned, was so used to drinking out of a coffee mug as to forget this one was communal.

The grown-ups chit-chatted and Colette took out her bamboo flute and played a few songs for us.  The children shouted requests from their infantile repertoire before going off to stretch out on the rugs that were airing in the sun.

On the ride home, all three children were conked out.  Beau-Pere, who is a wealth of information and speaks perfect English from his studies in England, drove me and the kids back, while Belle-Mere drove Colette and two of my nephews.  I pointed to the clusters of tiny green leaves that surround certain branches like a gigantic dandelion puff and commented that Sir had told me that was a parasite.  Beau-Pere added, “yes it is.  As a matter of fact, it’s mistletoe.  The Dutch come and take it by truckloads because it has a much bigger market in the Netherlands for Christmas.”  I was surprised that we had managed to create a tradition of kissing under a parasite.

Later Beau-Pere said, “You see that green bird up there?  It’s a parrot.  A container of them escaped from the Orly airport and have infiltrated all of southern Paris.  It’s a very territorial bird and they won’t allow other birds to nest in their territory.  They’ve even adapted to the Parisian winters.”  I asked how many birds had escaped from Orly, and he responded by saying he didn’t know.

“But, well, you only need two.”

With Beau-Pere and Belle-Mere, and Sir Renaissance with his four brothers, plus all of the offspring between them, it seems that the parrots are not the only ones to invade all of southern Paris. 


Including the countryside.

* This post originally appeared in my former blog, Perfect Welcome, and may contain some modifications or discrepancies in the names or comments.

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