Day Three

Day Three

Jour trios. I’m learning a tiny bit more French everyday. As long as I learn more than I knew the day before I’m content. Even if it is only one more word, it is still progress!

Today was an easier day.  I’m getting more and more comfortable here with Alain, Marie, and their sons. Marjolain is 16, very respectful and plays the piano beautifully. Timothee (accent over the first e) is 18 and is at that tender age where he likes to show off in front of girls. Me included. It’s ridiculous, but funny. He has no desire to learn English but we have both studied Spanish so we try to communicate via broken Spanish. Neither of us is very good at it. But the good thing is that I have noticed I have stopped asking myself, “What the hell are you doing here?” I woke up around 8 again, filled the water jugs to take to the horses, and helped Alain weed some grass that had taken over his potatoes. There was a lot of grass to root up, but it was raining a bit so we weren’t out there too long before we headed back to the house.

Once we got back, we saw two mama hens with their chicks on the side of the road. Not exactly the best place to let your babies play, Mother Hen… Then we saw that one of the cats was creeping up through the bushes towards the baby chicks. Instead of witnessing stock footage from Animal Planet, we intervened and had to run around catching all of the baby chicks and the mama hens to put them in a cage away from the cat. I was okay with crawling through rose bushes to catch the chicks but after Alain had caught one of the hens and just threw it at me to hold, I was a bit apprehensive. There I was, holding on to the hen’s wings for dear life. I didn’t want to drop the damn thing so he would have to catch her again. She was trying to flap her wings to get away, and I was scared that I was going to be missing an eye shortly…. Baby chicks are cute and soft. Adult chickens are scary and look at you like they are going to kill you.

But after that episode, there was a bit of a lazy mood in the air since it had been raining off and on. Alain, Marjolain, and I just sat around the table while Marjolain put wood into the oven to heat up not only the amazing ratatouille pizza, but also his pants. The pants were placed on a rack above the oven to dry. The pizza was obviously inside the oven. We ate he pizza, drank some amazing Bordeaux, and just talked. We talked about the difficulties of the English language as well as the difficulties of the French language. They did not like that the words three, free, and tree all sounded the same. They were blown away by the example sentence I gave them of, “I saw a man saw a log.” And I thought French was hard…. We talked a little about current events with the U.S. and France and I showed them a few pictures of San Diego on my phone. It was a very nice interaction.

Things are getting easier here everyday. Thank goodness…