They come at noon, with friends. They swim. They take the sun. Thirst creeps up on them, much to their surprise, and that’s why I’m behind the bar. My wife is in the kitchen, making lunch for six. Vivent les vacances.
The Night Walk
The dogs cope with the heat by sleeping through it, stretched out in the courtyard or curled in the shade of the rosemary hedge. They come to life as the pink in the sky is turning to darkness, sniffing the breeze, jostling each other around our feet in their anticipation of a walk. We take the flashlight and follow them into the forest.
It smells of warm pine needles and baked earth, dry and spicy when we step on a patch of thyme. Small, invisible creatures slither away from us and rustle through the leaves of the wild box that grows like a weed.
Sounds carry: cigales and frogs, the muffled thump of music through the open window of a faraway house, the clinks and murmurs of dinner drifting up from Faustin’s terrace. The hills on the other side of the valley, uninhabited for 10 months a year, are pricked with lights that will be switched off at the end of August.
We get back to the house and take off our shoes, and the warmth of the flagstones is an invitation to swim. A dive into dark water, and then a last glass of wine. The sky is clear except for a jumble of stars; it will be hot again tomorrow. Hot and slow, just like today.
Knee-deep in Lavender
I had been cutting lavender with a pair of pruning shears and I was making a slow, amateurish job of it, nearly an hour to do fewer than a dozen clumps. When Henriette arrived at the house with a basket of aubergines, I was pleased to have the chance to stop. Henriette looked at the lavender, looked at the pruning shears, and shook her head at the ignorance of her neighbor. Didn’t I know how to cut lavender? What was I doing with those pruning shears? Where was my faucille?
She went to her van and came back with a blackened sickle, its needle-sharp tip embedded in an old wine cork for safety. It was surprisingly light, and felt sharp enough to shave with. I made a few passes with it in the air, and Henriette shook her head again. Obviously, I needed a lesson.
She hitched up her skirt and attacked the nearest row of lavender, gathering the long stems into a tight bunch with one arm and slicing them off at the bottom with a single smooth pull of the sickle. In five minutes she had cut more than I had in an hour. It looked easy; bend, gather, pull. Nothing to it.
“Voilà!” said Henriette. “When I was a little girl in the Basses-Alpes, we had hectares of lavender, and no machines. Everyone used the faucille.”
She passed it back to me, told me to mind my legs, and went off to join Faustin in the vines.
It wasn’t as easy as it looked, and my first effort produced a ragged, uneven clump, more chewed than sliced. I realized that the sickle was made for right-handed lavender cutters, and had to compensate for being left-handed by slicing away from me. My wife came out to tell me to mind my legs. She doesn’t trust me with sharp implements, and so she was reassured to see me cutting away from the body. Even with my genius for self-inflicted wounds there seemed to be little risk of amputation.
I had just come to the final clump when Henriette came back. I looked up, hoping for praise, and sliced my index finger nearly through to the bone. There was a great deal of blood, and Henriette asked me if I was giving myself a manicure. I sometimes wonder about her sense of humor. Two days later she gave me a sickle of my very own, and told me that I was forbidden to use it unless I was wearing gloves.
The Alcoholic Tendencies of Wasps
The Provençal wasp, although small, has an evil sting. He also has an ungallant, hit-and-run method of attack in the swimming pool. He paddles up behind his unsuspecting victim, waits until an arm is raised, and—tok!—strikes deep into the armpit. It hurts for several hours, and often causes people who have been stung to dress in protective clothing before they go swimming. This is the local version of the Miss Wet T-shirt contest.
I don’t know whether all wasps like water, but here they love it—floating in the shallow end, dozing in the puddles on the flagstones, keeping an eye out for the unguarded armpit and the tender extremity—and after one disastrous day during which not only armpits but inner thighs received direct hits (obviously, some wasps can hold their breath and operate under water), I was sent off to look for wasp traps.
When I found them, in a droguerie in the back alleys of Cavaillon, I was lucky enough to find a wasp expert behind the counter. He demonstrated for me the latest model in traps, a plastic descendant of the old glass hanging traps that can sometimes be found in flea markets. It had been specially designed, he said, for use around swimming pools, and could be made irresistible to wasps.