Tomorrow!

Tomorrow morning we have to be ready just too early to be real. I have been making lists, getting supplies all week, I've been doing these little mental walk-throughs of the things we are going to accomplish, trying to imagine timeframes and such.

Loic doesn't want to load the car before we leave. He wants to get up a 5am and load the car then, because he thinks that thieves will break in and steal our garage sale second hand accumulated country house stuff between the hours of midnight and 7am on a Thursday evening. That's fine with me. Although I would have preferred to load the car tonight. Because we have to leave early, we have to drive an hour and a half.


We have an appointment with the notaire, nice and early. A notaire is a little bit like a lawyer here, but they specialize in real estate and questions of heritage. There are good notaries and bad ones, something we realized when we ran into the one who is handling this transaction. Our last transaction went impeccably smoothly. This one... Let's just say there have been some silly delays, but tomorrow, it's going to happen.

We will sign the papers, and then the country house will finally be ours. We will go to the house, break open the Champagne, and pour it into the glasses we've packed just for the occasion.

This is going to be the place we escape to. You know, one of those places where we can cook an old hen in a pot for three hours on the wood fueled cast iron stove, and do nothing but read, gather wild herbs, or go for a walk while we're waiting for the old hen to cook. It will be the place where our skis will be hanging in the kitchen and we can just put them outside and glide out into the Alpine countryside during the winter. We'll ladle broth from an old hen over hand yanked spuds kept in a bin and pour a nice glass of local wine. Lamplight, candle light, who knows. Maybe we'll be able to concentrate here. This is the kind of place where things will be noted in writing. By hand. Drawings will be made. Paintings. Things will be constructed with wood. This is in stark contrast to our city home.