Cuckoos and Owls and Lizards Oh My

We're having fun discovering the new kinds of wildlife sharing our world here in the rural Jura region of France. Yesterday the sun came out and burned off the fog after several days of gray and we shed our long sleeves for the afternoon and evening, at the same time that the little lizards who live in between rocks and in the walls of the house came out to sunbathe. The sun lit up the trees at the bottom of the pastures, the fresh leaf buds the color of chartreuse.

In the mornings when we wake up and again in the evenings we hear cuckoos out in the woods, sounding for all the world like the clock in my grandparents house when I was a kid. I didn't realize until now that there are real birds that actually make that sound. We learned the insidious origin of the term "cuckold" as well - when Walt learned that cuckoos lay their eggs in a reed warbler's nest, and pushes one of the warbler's own eggs out, in a matter of about 10 seconds. The cuckoo chicks are so big they steal all the food that the poor warbler brings to it, not realizing that her own warbler offspring have been crowded out by these cuckoo imposters. Yikes. Nature isn't always benign, is it?

Something is living above the rafters above the office where I'm on the computer, scratching and squeaking. We are seeing little tufts of insulation floating down outside above this spot, and today when Walt tried to see what was happening he thinks he spotted a little bird face, perhaps an owl face. We'll keep an eye out on this.

The long evening sunlight induced us out on a long country walk last night down the road before a late dinner, where the only sound of civilization was the occasional fighter jet, obviously on training runs while the visibility was good. There were some cows who thought, both times they saw us, that we were coming to fetch them inside for the night. There were also a couple of muddy little ponds into which dozens of frogs jumped, bloop bloop bloop, as we walked by. Some hunting dogs in an outdoor pen bayed and barked, doing their job, and the river rushed under the road down at the bottom of the hill, all muddy and swollen from the spring rain. "Chasse gardee" the sign said, amidst a swampland of standing water in the wooded, shrubby river flats. Hunting preserve. You wouldn't want to hunt down there now.

Life sounds idyllic here and indeed it is, but there is always something more trying happening outside the pages of this blog: trying to get tenants to keep our rental house full at home, worrying about sister in law Linda in the hospital in Tacoma, paying the plumber to fix the sewer line on our house in Moscow, trying to make my career as a freelance writer pay a living wage, keeping the guy whose chickens our dog killed in her temporary home from suing us, trying to make sure Reed isn't the only 2nd grader next year who doesn't know how to sit still and listen to the teacher... the list goes on. These are the things that don't always get written about, but still they're there. We haven't escaped from real life, we're just living it in a different way, perhaps.

Bois de Gand, France

We've spent our week up to our ankles in straw and horsesh*t as we've learned the fine points of caring for and cleaning up after horses at the housesit where we'll be situated for the next month, in the Jura region of France. We arrived on Tuesday afternoon after two long days of bus/train/air travel from West Cork to Dublin to Grenoble to this tiny village situated in the countryside in the foothills of the mountains southeast of Dijon. We've been too busy taking notes about which horse gets which munchies and which giant schnauzer gets which pills to have begun appreciating being back in France but now we're getting the hang of it, and although today started out miserably drizzly, by lunchtime the sky had cleared and the afternoon was gloriously warm and sunny, lasting through the long evening. Within a few days we'll be settled, the dogs and horses will have relaxed too, and we can start enjoying field trips and going to the market in Bletterans on Tuesdays for our fresh salad greens and if we're lucky some farm produced cheeses.

Our generous hosts stocked the cupboards well so we shall eat like kings and queens, and tonight Walt did himself proud with the large carp that Alex and Tomas, the neighbor boys, caught in this house's pond the other day. They took home a creel full and brought us a large one, nicely cleaned. It was surprisingly delicious, fresh and tasty, baked with garlic and dill and lots of butter, the chef's secret weapon. The carp was accompanied by a delicately sweet pinot gris, and we thought Hugh Fearnsley-Whittingstall would have been proud, having been known to eat a carp or two himself. The bones were a pain but they helped us pace ourselves, otherwise we might have gobbled everything up much too quickly.

From this large house we mostly see pastures and woods, with one pasture leading down to a large pond. The nearby villages are undiscovered and a little rough around the edges, testimony to this region's slightly struggling economy. This isn't a place overun by Brits, which has its advantages and disadvantages both, apparently, depending on who you're talking to.