A hill and I

Introductions...

FRESH LAUNDRY...

I wrote a comment the other day in reply to a Substack post written by an Instagram friend, she has been encouraging me to write here for months but as I said to her after reading her, brilliantly written, first ever post which I am absolutely not even going to try to match;  ‘Words tumble around my head like laundry in a washing machine but they come out, not cleaner and ready for ironing but more like the pile that gets tangled up in the bottom of a duvet... knotted, muddled and confused... still dirty and more creased than ever’. But hey, here we are almost at the end of new month in a new year and everyone has to start somewhere so now feels like a good place to begin. So where do I start sorting out my mountainous pile of laundry?

Perhaps introductions would be a good prelude to my meandering’s...

I am passionate about where I live; where, being a half renovated, ancient farmhouse in a tiny hamlet, nestled on the side of a hill, in a lesser known department called the Aveyron in SW France. I have been here for almost 20 years.  Given, I arrived here with little more than school girl French and that administration in France is a well known minefield of bureaucratic red tape, that the house we bought was uninhabitable, no roof, no windows, fewer floors intact, no sanitation and buried since the early seventies in brambles and worse.  That my, then, seven year old daughter, (now 25 with a degree in Japanese and living her own life in Toulouse) had to begin school as soon as possible, that all our worldly possessions were crated and stacked in a leaky barn full of goat manure and 100 years of unwanted farm machinery, it is not difficult to comprehend the enormity of the problems encountered. But I have never regretted a single day of those years despite every imaginable obstacle and having made a trillion ‘faux pas’ along the way.

A hill and I is my story; the haphazard days of my life in pictures and words as I wander enchantedly and often deliriously through the perpetually changing seasons.

I will undoubtedly stray off piste from time to time because not every day follows the direction we envisage at the start, circumstantial happenings interfere. Also, it may be prudent to mention that I have all the usual interests of someone determined to live, as far as is possible, a self sufficient existence - think homegrown, homemade, recycled and you won’t be too far from the picture. There will be a constant though, my love of photographing the light on my hill; diaphanous, ephemeral but ever present.

I hesitate to begin writing about me, I am not extraordinary, my life here has not been in any particular way so very different from many others that have blown in from across the channel with the idea of setting up an idillic life in France. Suffice to say, like my laundry, it has been and continues to be a tangled more often than not chaotic jumble of creased, indecipherable days of confusion and misunderstanding. I have encountered many hardships and surprises, two stand out! The first being that which changed everything and the reason we still live in an unfinished, unheated and in places rapidly falling property; an unexpected pregnancy 4 years after we arrived, nine months of hideous nausea and an inability to cope with even the simplest of days without tears, resulting in the truly momentous and adored gift of a son. Now, at 14 years, he is a cool, bilingual teenager who cringes every time I even begin to speak the language he has grown up with. The second, also a life changer, an accident which disabled my husband, a master builder, sculpter and cabinet maker, for five years forcing me to find work in a country where if one doesn’t have a piece of paper stating an acceptable qualification has been achieved, the prospects are grim and of course, I had none. Not to mention the fact that even after years of trying, I still spoke French like a Spanish goat!

Miraculously I did find work and in a most unlikely place. Over the first few years of endlessly filling in documents I didn’t understand and humiliatingly, begging help from anyone whose accent wasn’t too rural - the locals here add an ‘e’ pronounced ‘uh’ or worse, somehow manage to dissolve an ‘n’ into a flat ‘y’ (‘ē’) (so bread - pain becomes pang), to the end of every word - I became very good friends with the head mistress at my daughters school in the village. From the very beginning she had requisitioned me to give English lessons on a Tuesday afternoon to the class my daughter attended, free of charge of course because, unbeknown to us at the time of registering her, it was a catholic school and budgets were very limited having no funding from the state. Having learned of my husbands accident (it was the talk of the village for many months) she offered me paid work as a replacement assistant in the ‘école maternelle’. I was relieved, grateful and utterly terrified, somehow muddled my way through the perplexities of the language barrier, (the local accent was a breeze compared to trying to fathom out what 3 year old was saying) and was eventually offered a full time position in a primary class which I subsequently lost a year later due to a change in government policy, merci M. Macron! I was liked though, both by the children and the staff, whether this was for my willingness to help no matter the situation or because, not surprisingly, I caused such uproarious laughter with my shocking anglicised French (probably the latter) and was recommended for another post teaching children learning difficulties.

A position I still hold today which I do my dizzy best to juggle with being mother, smallholder, gardener, chef, as well as ‘wannabe’ photographer, poet, writer, and end(aim)less, wanderer in the light on my hill.

My days are long but never tedious, I hope you enjoy them too…

I will just very quickly mention that the hill I live on with my family and various animals is noted on the ordinance survey maps, as ‘Le Paradis’, this was not known at the time of purchase but for me, this rocky and mostly barren mound of land will never stop being the epitome of its given name…