The Trail's Our Thing

• Your friend is expecting an important delivery from DHL. Since delivery people cannot find a house in the country, where the little dirt road doesn’t have a name and you don’t have a house number, you must sit by the phone and wait for them to call so you can drive to the post office in the village for a rendevous… assuming you can manage to communicate in French when the driver calls. But there is no rendevous because you wait by the phone all day and the DHL driver never calls….

• You find a dead bird on the second floor terrace that your husband puts in a box to take away with the day's trash. Later your daughter discovers a live bird in the living room… and you notice a huge fuzzy spider in the bathtub. And then your daughter almost steps on an enormous frog coming across the courtyard when you return home one night .

• You have strange bites on your face and your left arm and a very annoying bite on your right ear lobe. (What in the world is crawling on me in the night, you wonder…)

• Your husband awakes vaguely in the night to hear loud squealing outside. In the morning you find big chunks of grass torn up on the beautiful back lawn just twenty steps from the kitchen door. The sangliers (wild boar) have come through the electronic fence looking for food and water. (Where, you wonder, do these big creatures go during the daytime? Are they in the woods here by the house? It seems a long way for big pigs to come down from the mountain…)

• The master bedroom shower is big and beautiful with great water pressure. You don’t have to hold the shower head and there is no landlady pounding on the door to tell you that you must turn the water on and off during your shower. But when you arrived your friends told you there’s a problem with the hot water… but only in that wonderful shower. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Maybe the plumber will come and maybe he won’t. Maybe you will have nice hot shower in the morning… or more likely not.

Yes—all this is true from just the last week!!!! As we learned when we lived here for 6-1/2 months, there are definitely complexities to living in a big house in the countryside, in a foreign country where we don’t speak the language well. I’m sharing all this to ensure I’m providing a balanced perspective.

ButI do love it here-- even considering the bugs, frogs, and sangliers. (The internet problems I will have to think about... as I'm working now through the phone line.) These aren’t really big problems that drag me down… just another dimension of the local experience.