Still summer

We’re nigh on a month without significant rain, which is astonishing, and makes July’s porcini, brought by one morning in M. Roullier Père’s tractor,

seem all the more nebulous.  The first walnuts are starting to drop now, school has fallen back into its usual morning and afternoon rythms, and our chickens berate me for not posting their photos on this little site.

Patience, i say, i still haven’t put up the pics of the fête du village in june.  Stella caught a baby couleuvre yesterday, which is a snake, and the two chickens fought over it for a quarter of an hour before it finally played dead convincingly enough so that she dropped it, and it slithered off to repair its wounds in some underground part of Maffay to which we are denied, thankfully, ingress.   It’s the opposite of Africa where the snakes slid off with chicks in their maws.  The chickens understand now that i work in the office with the glass door, so they can come and peck at the window during their explorations of the garden, and peer in to see how we live, retribution for the first weeks where we would come and look in through the chestnut spires of their fence to watch them scratch and cackle.  They follow us around like dogs ever since we began playing the worm game with them, where we would find worms with the shovel and give them to the ladies to eat.  They are the true ladies of Maffay, and Stella and Garfield will have their pictures up here soon, really.  Right now they’re taking a nap on the doorstoop outside my office.

Other belated photos from past months:  the piano tuning, back in July.  We found an old piano (from around 1910) at Emmaüs when Aunty C. was visiting, and bought it and had it delivered on the merit of its tone; it sounds round and golden, especially when played as it was meant to be played.

The tuner came for a visit and adjusted its notes to something closer to real-world harmonies, and i’ve been playing around a bit, G will start lessons in two weeks, and visiting musicians (like Jane) stop by and play feet-tapping tunes that warm up the whole house.