Spending spring preparing for winter...

...is what one of our neighbors has been doing recently. He's been cutting down trees, sawing logs into one-meter lengths, and stacking them as firewood that he'll burn in his fireplace next winter. His name is Philippe, and he lives in the next hamlet over from ours. He's about my age. His hamlet (neighborhood, or settlement) is made up of about a dozen houses, and it's called La Grand-Maison. Philippe also owns some fenced-in land on the edge of the vineyard, down a steep hillside from his house. He uses that land as pasture for his donkey. We can hear hee-hawing from our house in the summer, when our windows are open. (See my 2009 post called Nearly Trampled via this link.)

Philippe's house in the hamlet called La Grand-Maison ("The Big-House") is only about 400 meters from our house — a quarter of a mile — as the crow flies. But if you want to go there on foot, it's a 1,500-meter walk (very nearly a mile) out into the vineyard, through some vine rows up a hill, and then a hike on the paved road back down to Philippe's house. There's one other footpath that's shorter, but it taking it involves crossing a stream bed that's very muddy for much of the year. If you want to drive to Philippe's house, it's about 3,000 meters away (not quite two miles) on paved roads. So Philippe is not exactly our next-door neighbor.

P.S. I was just looking at Google maps and I found this street-view photo where you can see Philippe sitting out in his vegetable garden on a warm spring day several years ago.