I recently received a nice e-mail from Anne who is starting a new website called Blue Vicar  blueVicar which will feature stories about being an expat. Right now she is posting stories about wine and I sent her one that I put up on this blog some time ago. The website is just getting started and I think those who are expats, want to become expats or who are just interested in what it is like, will enjoy reading this site.

 Speaking of being an expat, I also did an interview with a new website about expats all over the world. I think alot of people living abroad for the first time sometimes need a little help. Here’s the link to France, although there are interviews from people all over the world.Expats in France! Interviews With People Living And Working In France

 For those of you who have been following my story, we finally finished what I will call the lower terrace. It had been covered in dry, brown, ugly grass on top of cement-like dirt for two years and I hated it. Finally, one day I grabbed a pick-ax and using the broad end, dug up the grass. I was to find out later that many of the roots remained even though the grass looked dead and I am sure when it rains in the coming months I will get some green shoots coming up.

 One view of the yard after I had dug up the grass which you can see in piles. I couldn’t find a photo of the area before I started work as I was always careful to cut it out of shots.

View in the other direction. Note the rectangular rock garden.

  Most of our yard has rectangular bits, the upper terrace and a rock garden, the pool, all of them are retangular. I had drawn up a plan of sorts thinking of making a square brick area, something like this:

 Maurice looked at it and said maybe we should try something round. I got on the internet and found a garden that I really liked with a round terrace so wanted to copy that. The problem was that the area we wanted to work in was a long rectangle so I thought we could put the cirlce to one side and do some squares on the other but Maurice talked me into just putting the circle in the middle.

First we laid the bricks out to experiment a little.

 The hole we dug. This was really hard work and we discovered huge rocks underneath and many smaller stones. I’d be hacking along with my axe when I would hit a huge rock and my teeth would vibrate like a tuning fork.

 Maurice has a degree in engineering and it showed we it came time to do the circle. I would have sort of eye-balled it and made the best circle I could. He put a pole in the center and attached a string to make sure we had a true circle. It made a huge difference but I wanted to do alot of the brick work as I thought it was the fun, creative part but he did a better job. Note the pile of rocks we dug up.

The finished job. I think Maurice did such a great job.

A different angle showing our “upper terrace”.

 It turned out to be a huge job and involved weeks of heavy manual labor but we did it. Next I have to do some planting, probably using lots of lavender and some rose bushes but I have to let it cool down a little first. Now Maurice looks at it and says, “What can we do with it?” but, really, it’s only to look at and walk on when we go down to the lower area to water. I love it.

 This is not a story of my husband, a Frenchman, although French people are often called “Frogs” probably because they eat frog legs. By the way, I asked my husband if he liked frog legs and he sat there a minute, looking into space, and said that he didn’t even know if he had ever even had any, so so much for that cliche. I also wonder why, since the French are so fond of escargots, they aren’t called “Snails” or, being the producers and consumers of so much great cheese they aren’t called “Cheese Heads”.

 In fact, this should probably be called the story of a French toad as Maurice and I can’t decide if we are talking about a toad or a frog. Since the one in question lives mostly on and about our land and not in a pond, we are assuming it is a toad.

 On with the story. We have a huge collecting tank for run-off of rain water from our house measuring about five feet by five feet by five feet. Water in very expensive in Provence and we decided it would be a good way to water our plants about the place. In fact, it probably saves us about one euro a month but at least we are trying. One day I was using the water, via a little electric pump, to water my vegetable garden. The water was getting low and I climbed up on a rock to look in the hole at the top to see what was inside. There are alot of leaves getting in the water and some green clumps of mold floating around. I happened to spot a frog/toad floating in the water. A couple of weeks ago we had seen a frog/toad in the water drain that circles our house. In fact, last winter Maurice was digging in some mud and found probably the same frog/toad, I guess, hibernating there for the winter. A few days after the sighting in the drain we had the tremendous storm which knocked out our electricity. I guess the huge amount of water pushed the poor frog/toad into the pipe leading to our water tank. It had probably been floating in the water for about a week when I spotted it. I knocked on the side of the tank and it moved.

 I am not ordinarily a rabid animal lover in that I am not out there staging protests about people wearing fur coats and I happily spread poison pellets out to kill the snails about our place, but I just couldn’t let the frog die there. So, I deeply watered my vegetable garden and the six fruit trees and got the tank almost empty. We turned the tank on its side and Maurice put in a stick thinking the frog/toad would climb up the stick and out to freedom. Why he thought this, I don’t know. I didn’t think the frog/toad would climb up the stick like a cat or a monkey and I was right as he was still there the next day. (Maurice kept calling the frog/toad a “she” as frog is feminine in French.) That was when I knew I was going to have to stick my hand into the mucky interior of the tank and remove the frog. I couldn’t get Maurice to do it, the avowed chicken heart that he is, so I put on my garden gloves-I still think frogs/toads can give you warts-threw a towel over the frog and, thank God, very easily removed it from the tank. It looked very sick but sort of moved under some leaves under a near-by tree. A few minutes later we got a very nice rain which I was thinking would help revive the toad/frog.

Maurice was outside that night and he says that he is sure he heard the frog/toad croaking. So, I didn’t save the world, or even a person, but it made me feel good that I saved “her” from a certain death. Couldn’t hurt my karma, I’m thinking.

A nice little yard that I saw in Digne-les-Bains