One day in a French village
Hello! My name is Nadezhda, I am 45 years old, of which 16 I live in France, I have wanted to be a housewife since childhood and eventually realized my dream.
I have a husband and two cats, and I really want another (cat). My husband spends his life on airplanes, and I do the housework. Fourteen years ago we bought an old farm in the foothills and have just finished restoring it in general terms on our own. This included pouring concrete floors, plastering walls and laying tiles, electricity and plumbing, building walls of wild stone and dragging hundreds of tons of soil and gravel by hand. And ninety percent of the furniture in the house is also our production. But, however, you will see for yourself.
Today is September 18, 2014, Thursday. The scene is a farm with a population of thirty people in the south of France, eighty kilometers from Toulouse.
1. The main character is a Saffron cat of the Maine Coon breed, young and energetic, very affectionate and sociable. The underground nickname is Fripuy.
2. In the morning, before the first cup of coffee, I can play the role of a zombie in a horror movie without any makeup. We don't have any gadgets in the bedroom, except for an electronic reader, and my husband's alarm clock is hidden deep in the bedside shelf. That's why I check the time in the kitchen. I usually get up with the sun when the light starts coming through the curtains. It's getting light around seven-thirty now.
3. The first morning cappuccino.
4. And here is the sun, by the way. The weather promises to be good.
5. Saffron cat is already at the combat post, waiting for him to be released for a walk. He usually spends the night with a rug spread out in front of the bedroom door, and the first thing I have to do in the morning is to scratch him for a long time and intensively. Otherwise, his faith in humanity disappears.
6. Shower, brushing your teeth — and get to work.
7. Today is Thursday, the day when the beds are made. Don't ask why. This has historically happened.
8. Then — laundry. Unload one, load another, fold the third, load the first. I don't know where this amount of washing comes from. Self-generated?
9. Running with a vacuum cleaner on the first floor. Cats tirelessly drag all the garbage from the garden here, they have to vacuum twice a day. With the appearance of this vacuum cleaner in the form of a broom in the house, I realized that my entire previous life was a miserable vegetating in torment.
10. Following Saffron, Elvis woke up and also wants to go outside. He will want to go outside fifty times today, and then he will want to go home as much, and if his desire is not satisfied immediately, he will start scratching the door with his claws. I open it on demand. The duties of a housewife also include the functions of a concierge.
11. Change the water in the vases, wipe the dust in the dining room.
12.
13. Drag the laundry upstairs and put it in the cupboards.
14. At a quarter to ten, it's time to drink your second coffee.
15. I completely forgot! We need to take the trash out into the street, our garbage is taken away on Thursdays.
16. At the same time I empty the mailbox. Today the catch is not rich: mostly advertising, a couple of bills and my magazine.
17. Meanwhile, the weather suddenly deteriorates, it starts to rain, and I have to change my plans on the go. Watering the flowers.
18. Putting things in order in the attic.
19. I'm preparing a room for the guests coming soon.
20. And I'm looking through my mail.
21. Yes, I have to show what I look like in work clothes. Selfie is not my strong suit, but my husband is in Amsterdam today, on the tenth attempt it turned out like this.
22. I'm moving along the perimeter, I got to the workshops. It's a complete mess, my husband is in the process of producing his new computer desk, which he will soon give me for final polishing and finishing. I'm clearing a couple of square meters and sharpening my gardening tools. A sharp shovel is the key to successful gardening!
23. Then I sort out the rubble in the warehouse (here we still have to make cabinets and shelves), suddenly the window lights up — hooray! I can finish cleaning, I need to go to the garden urgently, I have a lot of work there today.
24. It's green, fresh and sunny there.
25. Saffron rushes with me.
26. Today we will have another lesson with the kids, I plan to plant a couple of hundred tulips with their help. But first we need to clear the site and prepare the pits. Saffron walks around.
27. Already on the fiftieth fossa, blisters form on the hands. I mentally curse the author of this blue thing, which is designed to facilitate the planting of bulbous: but guess to make a wooden handle along the entire length so that pieces of iron do not stick out from the sides — weak? I am more than sure that the vast majority of garden tool developers have never held a shovel in their hands in their lives, and they have only seen the soil on TV or in pictures in books. Remembering the unkind word of engineers, I come up with my own version of the tool. It can be pressed with your foot, there is such a spring that automatically discharges the earth from the container, as well as Wi-Fi and a coffee machine. And speakers. It should be patented.
28. Saffron tries to dig holes after me, I have to talk to him in a special educational voice. He takes offense.
29. The front of work for the kids is ready, I'm moving to another corner of the garden, where I need to do weeding and trimming curbs. I leave my tools there for now and go for a third cup of coffee.
30. On the way, I look at what else remains to be done before the fall.
31. These palm trees are already 14 years old, I planted them with seeds.
32. It's already half past twelve, we need to hurry up.
33. It gets too hot on the terrace in front of the house for lunch, I sit down in the shade with coffee and a cigarette.
34. After that, I quickly finish cleaning the flowerbed…
35. ...I throw the scraps into the pile for the fire…
36. ...and I rush home to wash and change clothes.
37. So, everything is ready here, you can start.
38. Of course, no three-year-old will reach the two hundredth tulip, we planted a couple of dozen, after which we went to water the previous plantings: lettuce, cabbage and cuttings of hydrangeas, which we did last week.
39. And check the harvest of pumpkins. Leon thinks he can't lift this pumpkin. She says that she will need Vincent's help, and then, together, they may well take her to kindergarten and eat her. My husband sometimes joins us, in rare moments when he is not on business trips, and the kids respect him very much for the fact that he constantly brings them something interesting. Especially boys: their eyes light up at the sight of all sorts of wooden crafts. The first question when they come is: where are the cats? And where is Vincent?
40. There is a real struggle for watering cans. I have only five of them, and sometimes there are a couple dozen guys.
41. About four kids leave, I spend a couple more hours in the garden — I finish with tulips and other little things, Saffron carries out technical control.
42. The summer this year was so rainy that I never watered geraniums in large tubs, there was no such need.
43. But September pleases with warm and sunny weather, and although autumn is still not far off, which can be seen already by the foliage of the trees, it is not felt in the air yet.
44. This is a view of a part of the house from the garden. The whole house does not fit into the frame, it is not visible from the garden behind the trees, and there is not enough lens width nearby. The stone part is of the original construction, more than two hundred years ago. Glazed — the former stall and hayloft, here we rebuilt everything almost completely. In a neighboring village we have a historical association whose members conduct research in the archives and then publish them in a monthly magazine published by them, there is a column dedicated to the history of houses and their inhabitants. I hope that one day they will get their hands on our house, it would be interesting to know its history.
45. The church bells are ringing at six in the evening, it's time to wrap up. That's just still need to mow the lawn in front of the house and water all the street flowers in containers.
46. Oh, Elvis is out on the street again!
47. An attempt to yawn and lick at the same time. Unsuccessful.
48. Almost seven, zumba time. Strength exercises are quite enough for me in the garden, but I have to get aerobic ones by jumping to music at home and on aquafitness once a week in a neighboring town.
49. Then back in the shower, and another attempt at a selfie. No, it's definitely necessary to attract cats!
50. At the same time, I'm looking through the French news on Yahoo. We have just a circus with horses here now, every day the government arranges another stupidity, French satirists are not in danger of unemployment.
51. Again, some little things about the household, if there is something eternal in the world, it is chaos and the fight against it. Then I sorted out the photos for this post until nine in the evening, then I remembered that I had to eat something. The refrigerator is miraculously empty, but there are tomatoes, and the day before yesterday a friend brought eggs from her chickens and guinea fowls. In the kitchen, we redid everything from top to bottom, removed old floors, stripped walls, re-sanded ceilings, and so on. Furniture authorship of the husband. The car wash was ordered from a stonecutter, I love big car washes, but they don't let them out now, all of them are small.
52. Tomatoes we have this year in the supermarket are just some kind of crazy: sweet, aggressive, you can eat without anything at all. But I still add a little sour cream and mustard there.
53. Of course, I'll wash the eggs, don't worry!
54. I wanted to make an egg glaze, but guinea fowl eggs with a very hard shell, I could not break them neatly.
55. I drove the animals into the house, otherwise the animals will be running around the surrounding fields all night and will come in the morning all wet and dirty. The animals are clearly dissatisfied, they want to continue the banquet.
56. Quarter past eleven.
57. My husband is returning from Holland. The cat has been sitting at the door for a long time, waiting.
58. Then he runs to the bathroom to help me brush my teeth.
59. A couple of years ago I caught a terrible periodontal disease, since then brushing my teeth has become a complex process.
60. Half past eleven. The husband is still sitting in his office, sorting out the correspondence that has accumulated during the day.
61. And personally, I'm going to sleep. Just read a little before going to bed, but I don't have enough for a long time. Besides, there are a lot of things planned for tomorrow, we should try to get up early.