Preparing and trusting

When you turn right out of our back gate, you're headed north. The land slopes down toward the river valley and you walk past that big vineyard plot that is planted in Chardonnay grapes. There's an electrified fence to keep deer out of the grapes, but most of the time the fence wires are weighted down by logs, so you can turn left where the vines end and walk downhill into the woods. There's a path.

Often, the path downhill through the woods is so muddy that we don't feel it's safe to walk down there. It's slippery mud because of our clay soil, and the danger is that your feet will slide out from under you and you'll fall. This summer, however, the weather has been so dry that walking on the path is pleasant.

The downhill slope is fairly steep, and at the bottom there's a stream bed, perpendicular to the path. Here it is. It's just a dry gully right now. But when the weather is rainy, water runs through here across the path and ends up flowing into the Cher River a kilometer or so to the east.

Just a little further along, past the stream bed, another "road" — a tractor path, really — runs off to the left. It's a path that takes you up a steep hill towards a nearby settlement made up of six or eight houses.

Before the path meets up with a paved road, where you enter the hamlet, there are several piles of logs that have been cut and stockpiled for burning as firewood over the winter.

People are very trusting, I think. It would be easy for thieves to come in with a tractor or truck and just help themselves to some logs for their own fireplaces or stoves. But I've never heard about anything like that happening around here.