My Blister

This morning, I looked out my window to see a tiny village in a lush valley of the Pyrenees mountains. I quickly dressed and went downstairs for my first day of work.*

Breakfast was coffee and cereal (plain cereal - flakes, no sugar.) Star and I were each given our jobs for the day. Since she is too young for the harder work, she was to trim hedges, pull weeds and clean out the chicken coop. The first part of my day was spent scraping the excess mortar from stone walls (they are in the process of repointing here.) After lime in the eyes and a decent amount of skin scraped from my hands, we broke for coffee. The second half of the day consisted of mixing a new mortar and then beginning the repointing of the next wall. At 14:00, the work day was done. Lunch was soup, bread, fresh goat cheese and a beer.

After Star's schoolwork, we were left with the rest of the day to do whatever we wanted. We were still tired from our overnight train ride from Paris, so we didn't go hiking like we had planned. Instead, we sat and talked, played with the dogs and tried to get the neighbor's donkey to come to the fence. I washed the mortar from my hair and sat outside, drinking tea and marveling over my new blister.

This blister is marvelously huge! A small sample of the work to come, but it really excited me. It's a reminder of what I'm doing here, sitting on the side of a mountain in the south of France, drinking tea and looking forward to another day of work.


* I've signed on to work on farms, and the like, to learn skills we will need to build and maintain our cabin.