Eugenia Keegan

Finally I had to call old age and take a day off. The morning was gray and damp and I thought that I had chosen badly, but by 11:00 the clouds had been blown west and the sun appeared. I headed into town to have lunch with my Maury neighbor Ron, who is an exceptional photographer www.ronscherlphotgraphy.com on sabbatical from life in the states. What a delight to sit down for a true French lunch and linger over delicious food, a hearty bottle of wine and a perfect cheese course to put the harvest in perspective. A look at the scrumptious main course:

After lunch agenda included a few errands. My phone had been acting up (turned out to be the battery) so I stopped into the Orange store (the primary French carrier) to try to resolve the problem. Being without a phone for calls and texts is sooooooooo 80’s! With little imagination one can conjure up my rudimentary conversation trying to describe the issue with the phone (sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, it shuts itself off…yeh, must be reflexive….). But thankfully I happened on a young delightful patient woman who took my challenge in stride and sorted out my issue. Well, actually the phone shut itself off and I think that did it. I left with a new phone, but not until I had done some browsing. I have heard that everything comes back into style but really?:

Next up was the purchase of a dustbuster. The apartment that I enjoy has wooden floors. They are easy to keep clean except of course for the dust bunnies (yes, they are everywhere!). I was not surprised to see such a large selection. The French are nothing if not anal about their housekeeping. The commercials on the TV are a scream:

And finally a stop at the grocery store. There are two small Carrefours (one of the big four chains) near me, each in a neighboring town (nope, no groceries in Maury). This is a new supermarche and stocked with every wonderful delicious French food imaginable. Just the square footage alone devoted to pig meat is enough to make one worship at the French table.
And the cheese…..bigger and better than our best except perhaps Murray’s, and the wine, oh la la!

I thought this a good time to update the blog as there is some odd weather here. For three days the skies have been gray with a thick layer of clouds and fog drifting along the base of the mountains.

Of course it has been a wonderful respite from the back breaking work of picking grapes.

I have done my best to keep up with the crew but as expected they are all twenty something, mostly from Spain (serious unemployment as we know) and a handful of hardy adventurous French. As I scamper like a billy goat up and down the hillsides with thighs throbbing I try to imagine the muscles that are developing along with the burning pain. By noontime I am beat. So, not really hard to imagine that one day when the wind was whipping the vines that insolently slap you in the face and I had entered some zone of delirium punctuated with the Spanish and French banter, that the one very loud American voice yelling, Oh shit, stopped the kids in their tracks. Yep, I had mistaken my index finger for a vine! I am just sorry that I did not have my camera to take a shot of the pulsating, spouting fingertip. Although, I must admit that the taste of ripe, warm grenache juice and blood was an intriguing combination. Maybe a new wine concept somewhere in there!