Lucky after all

The fates were kind to me after all! When I got up this morning and looked out, I was pleasantly surprised to see that although it was dull, there was no sign of rain. So I had a quick breakfast, took the dog around for his morning constitutional and got the mower out. I finished cutting the grass in well under an hour so that’s another job crossed off the list. Now I can concentrate on other priorities – my floor tiles and fireplace and the X-Air 🙂

My garden has changed quite a bit over the months since I’ve been here, not because I’ve made many of my own changes to it up to now, but just because everything I do gets it tidier and more under control. And also because of the changes brought about by each season. When I first saw the house it was mid-Winter and when I came back to sign the papers to buy it, there were heavy snows. I made the move here in the late Spring and then saw the Dordogne turn lush and green in the following weeks. Then the Summer drought took hold and everything became dark green and brown. Now although my lime tree has lost all its leaves, most of the trees around here are still clothed in oranges and gold and so the cycle continues as we head towards Winter again. As you can see below, at this stage of the game I think that the best I can say for my place is that it’s ‘tidy enough for now’.

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Although the forecast drizzle has not materialised, earlier I did feel a few light spots of rain on my face. I bumped into my neighbour who’d been out gathering mushrooms and chestnuts in the woods behind our houses but he said that there’s hardly any crop now compared to a few weeks ago, another sign that Winter is just around the corner. But Benjamin and Aurelie’s cat, Scratchy, wasn’t too concerned about that. He has known Toddie right from when he was a tiny kitten and knows that he won’t do him any harm, so he came across to us and started to hunt in the flower bed under my bedroom window. After creeping forward and then standing motionless for ages, he suddenly leaped forward, flicked his paw and tossed a little mouse up in the air! But he didn’t harm it as far as I could see and it hid under a clump of greenery. Scratchy then turned his attention to a hole in the ground where the mice probably live and began digging down and shoving his paws in to try to winkle out his prey.

Toddie and I left him to it and went indoors with me looking forward to a hot shower and lunch and Toddie just looking forward to… lunch. And so life goes on here in the Dordogne 🙂