Alain left for a week of vacation and Anna told me that her much younger friend Ferdinand – he’s 80 –  was going to take her to the field. When I finally figured out that he was only dropping her off to work all alone, I decided to drag my sorry ass out of bed early (6:00 a.m.) and go pick her up myself and work with her. Kevin was gone for the entire month, so it would be just us two gals. It was so much fun! I got to her house around 6:15 and first we had a big breakfast of tartines (bread and jam) et beaucoup de café. Then we hopped in their camionette – which I got to drive – and headed off to le champ.

As soon as we arrived, she started giving me orders, and I followed them. I was, in effect, her slave. She was like a general commanding an army: she surveils the field,  sees what needs to be done, and she just gets to it. As she says, “Le travail est le travail.”

Our first day together began with irrigation. They have an ever-changing web of plastic pipes that connect to a big water pump. You can connect, disconnect, and reconnect the pipes, to direct them into to troughs they’ve dug that parallel the long rows of plants. The water shoots out the pipe and flows alongside the row. You can regulate how far the water goes by damming the trough with a couple shovel-fulls of dirt, or releasing a previous dam.

If she doesn’t have a sure-fire way of doing something, she improvises.  Anna wanted to irrigate four rows of sunflowers from the top of the rows all at once, but it was set up to irrigate one row at a time. She instructed me to connect what she called “a peasant’s pipe” – a soft rubber tube – to the hard plastic tube. Then she had me cut four holes out of the soft tube as it ran along the top of the rows, et voila! The new system worked perfectly. She cried out, “C’est mon chef-d’oeuvre!” (my masterpiece). I have never seen her so happy as she was that day in the field.

And I was pretty heureuse myself because my next “task” was to pick raspberries. A lot of them didn’t make it to the basket. J’adore les framboises!

Categories: Environment, Farming, Friends, Memories, Provence
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