We like the country when it is sunny, but we like the country when it is rainy, too, because then it is time for Maud to start the fire in the big room, and then we sit around all day.

It was raining when I woke this morning, and it continued to rain as we breakfasted on coffees and teas, on chocolate muesli and spoonfuls of yoghurt and apricot jam. The rain came straight down in white lines, and we watched through the kitchen window, me and Dartagnan, and he miaowed and it was hard to tell if it was because he wanted out or because it was also breakfasttime for black cats.



Monday morning we woke early to go to the market in town. Maud was one with the country roads, and we whipped round the green fields in her jaunty, junky Samba before pulling up the narrow stone paths in Pleaux. “I am going to be calm,” I said, but then, holy crap!, there were the wooden cages of chickens and rabbits and little yellow ducklings, and all restraint was lost.



At the fortnightly market:

there are sausages and round zucchini and rattan chairs and French-housewife aprons and a pink T-shirt that says Horse Fashion;

the fruit women have lips red like the summer cherries they sell;

the fish lady catches glistening trout from a tank on her truck bed, and slaps them over the head with a short wooden stick. I’d been warned, but I said “Oh!” all the same when the smack came;

we bought honey from Madame Rivière, the honey maker. One pot of miel toutes fleurs, because it has a pretty name, and one pot of treacly dark miel de chataignier, because it is hands-down my favorite honey, honey.



The triumph of the market means that back home, there is baked trout for now, a cherry clafouti for later, and homemade apricot jam for days on end. It’s not as if all we do in the country is sit about and eat—

well—

okay—

fine.

But when it is not tartines à volonté, there is piano-playing, and card tricks, and horoscopes in the free Shopi magazine, and some of us knit, and some of us do the quizzes in old issues of French Elle. And I am learning all sorts of useful things, like what to do with baked trout two days after, and the answer is, trout and spinach pie, easy-peasy, with eggs and cream and milk and curry powder mixed together in a big aluminium bowl.

What to do after trout and spinach pie is easy-peasy, too, and it is this: espressos and squares of Poulain dark chocolate, and Virginia Rodriguez on the stereo, and falling asleep in the low corduroy chairs next to the crackling fire.