I’m surprisingly undaunted by the devastating damage that disguises the perpendicular progress also achieved by the same contractor responsible for making the current muddy mess, who last year promised to get us a new septic in February and against all odds actually and phenomenally showed up last week with only a slight delay, for which he was not to blame as it was attributed to Covid. I have great confidence in the rapid return of mesmerizing beauty, as it already engulfs us in the half-wilderness Les Pierres is rooted in.
Most cows by now got locked in for winter by their farmers, leaving their fields temporarily open and morphing the landscape into the masterpiece paintings I literally enter each time I take Mec for a walk. With some jealousy I admire how appealingly and attractively he belongs here, the way he plays with the deer we often encounter, not exactly chasing them but providing me with a playful pantomime too quick for a camera, just like a private dancer: “Tell me, do you wanna see me do the shimmy again?”
I usually pretend it’s this same enchantment that lured us here to begin with, consciously ignoring the local chatelaine who at the time affectively claimed our aiding efforts saved her chateau, but nowadays assigns that honor to YouTube, where she showcases the cultish lifestyle that was ours too, blameworthy, for a while, opportunistically contributing to a world where for instance the entertainment of a social gathering entailed one friend provocatively parading her barely bundled boobs around our clique and handing out a permanent marker for all of us to sign them with, while the “esprit de coterie” dictated outrage not over the ones who complied to that ridiculous request but over who dared to refuse.
We’ve come a long way, I gathered, while scanning the fields for my missing private dancer who seemed to have disappeared, but when I did finally spot him I immediately registered he must not have gotten the memo about the end of sewage smells and septic despair, since he was gloriously covering himself in manure from a grazing cow’s past, vigorously provoking a life lesson: there are shitty stories everywhere and mine are mine to tell.
