Salvation

Salvation on two fronts: first, the weather is changing. A weak cold front is moving across Brittany, Normandy, the Channel, the Loire Valley, and the Paris region today. It's a beginning. Temperatures won't be quite as high. By 6:00 p.m., the temperature will be just 30ºC. Yesterday, it was more like 36ºC at that hour. We'll be able to breathe again. Maybe we won't have another extreme heat wave this summer.

Can you even tell that there's a fence on our north side of our yard? It's a fence that we had put in 20 years ago. Nobody seems to know who owns the land that is on the other side of it. Not even the mairie or the maire. We wouldn't want to buy it because we'd have to pay somebody to clear the land and make it usable.

The north side fence is 50 meters long; that's more than 150 feet. The woods on the other side of it are full of blackberry brambles and other noxious, invasive weeds.

You can see one of our apple trees in the photos above. The two are about the same size. They need pruning.

The other salvation arrived yesterday morning. It has to do with yard work. Walt sent the guy who runs the landscaping business an e-mail early yesterday and asked him if he could come over and do a walk-around out in the yard to see all the big and little jobs that need to be done. We expected him to say that he'd get over here one day soon. He lives just five miles up the road from us, and he said "I can come over this morning." That was unhoped for. After seeing everything we need done: pruning our two apple trees and the big linden tree out back; cutting back plants that are invading the north side of our property and threatening to pull the fence down on that side of the yard. And also digging up the bed of millepertuis (St. John's Wort) on the south He's going to send us what is called un devis (a bid or contract) for the job. He said almost all of it is work he'll do this winter after his crew has done the annual hedge-trimming job in the Fall. So now we can breathe a sigh of relief. The work will get done. He and his crew have always done a good job for us over the past dozen or more years, but sometimes they are hard to pin down. They know we always pay our bills and have no complaints about the work they do.

Maybe I'll finally get the greenhouse cleaned out. Now that we'll be having more comfortable temperatures and also a plan of action for all the other tasks that need to be taken care of. I just noticed that we are no longer in the MétéoFrance vigilance red zone. Hurray! (See Walt's blog today for more about this subject.)