One of the things I love about Friday’s is checking in with two young men in France who, with the parents of one of them, are raising a baby daughter and renovating a huge old barn to become rental apartments. They live in rural France, have two dogs and a cat, love to grow lots of vegetables, and they are wonderfully charming and hard-working young lads. I also watch a Dutch fellow and his lovely Italian partner renovate two cabins and build a new one in the Italian Alps. I’ve been watching them both for years.
We went walking under overcast but dry skies, then Sheba and I went into the village to do chores, and then I came home to do some cleaning and tidying to get a head start on today. I’m very excited about having Kris, Steve and Nancy visit for dinner. I’ve made a schedule to follow for myself tonight because, unlike Western food I like to prep and serve, these foods cannot be made in advance and kept warm.
Once the cleaning was done, I was pooped. I lay down for a short nap and slept for ninety minutes! Then it was time to start baking. This was my second batch of roti dough, and a much larger one than I made for Ursula and Dave. This time, the dough came together beautifully without me having to add any water. Plus, to feel more authentic, I used cane sugar instead of processed sugar as the sweetener.
I’m not very dough experienced. I was far more into puff pastry than pie or bread pastry, so I am not a confident roti maker. But dough can be rather forgiving to us beginners, and so I put the ten balls of dough, covered in ghee, into the fridge for the evening feeling optimistic. I can hardly wait for tonight to stretch, fold, cook and then to smashing it up.
As the dough went to rest, Her Highness and I went for our afternoon walk together on the forest trails. It had remained cloudy all day and as we walked lonely raindrops fell separated by many seconds, so when we came home, Sheba went inside to chill, and I had a spa.
The glory days are over. The month-long run of big numbers of readers of this blog is finished. I’m back to my usual regular twenty or so readers, and I feel much better writing to my little online family. I wasn’t entirely comfortable writing so personally to strangers.
Last night, I watched a documentary called Evelyn, made by Orlando von Einsiedel, Evelyn’s oldest brother. Following the birth of Evelyn into the Einsiedel family, Gwen and Robin were born. Their parents had separated, and Harriet raised the children.
Evelyn committed suicide, and for thirteen years, the children suffered quietly alone. No one spoke of Evelyn. Orlando would not even speak his name, so Orlando proposed to his siblings that they hike undertake a series of long walks to places that they went to with Evelyn, inviting friends and family to join them on various stages of their journey.
It devastated me watching this film. At times I was sobbing loudly, but it was beautiful too. What struck me, was the compassion of strangers they meet along the way, one of whom returns to them to leave contact information and to hug everyone in the Einsiedel party. The film is full of extraordinary kindness and simple acts of human compassion that were beautiful and uplifting, and I despaired that we, the simple folk, so capable of kindness and so often acting and expressing on it, are ruled by sociopathic, greedy monsters.
Half-way through the film, I stopped and wrote my own history. I don’t know if I will post what I wrote, but it felt awfully good to write it down when so alive emotionally over the tragedy of a young man taking his own life. The father is a shocking horror story. He brought ugly make darkness into the film, but what a film it was!
And it contains a poem by Nicholas Evans entitled Walk Within You:
If I be the first of us to die, Let grief not blacken long your sky.
Be bold yet modest in your grieving. There is a change but not a leaving.
For just as death is part of life, The dead live on forever in the living. And all the gathered riches of our journey, The moments shared, the mysteries explored, The steady layering of intimacy stored,
The things that made us laugh or weep or sing, The joy of sunlit snow or first unfurling of the spring,
The wordless language of look and touch, The knowing, Each giving and each taking, These are not flowers that fade, Nor trees that fall and crumble, Nor are they stone,
For even stone cannot the wind and rain withstand And mighty mountain peaks in time reduce to sand.
What we were, we are. What we had, we have. A conjoined past imperishably present.
So when you walk the woods where once we walked together And scan in vain the dappled bank beside you for my shadow,
Or pause where we always did upon the hill to gaze across the land, And spotting something, reach by habit for my hand,
And finding none, feel sorrow start to steal upon you,
Be still. Clear your eyes. Breathe.
Listen for my footfall in your heart. I am not gone but merely walk within you.
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I almost passed out a couple of times yesterday, so I ate more than usual to be safe. I’m still loving being so careful about quantity and quality of all I eat. It feels good to do right for myself. And then, watching television I devoured way, way too much c hiking trail mix. I was a glutton last night, and so when I weighed myself this morning, I was disappointed in the lack of loss of weight. Oh well, I carry on.
Today, so far, is not becoming the sunny day that was predicted. However, the forecast calls for clearing this afternoon and then a week of sunshine and warm temperatures which will be excellent for my newly seeded clover.
Tonight, we party!
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