Bonjour,
I hope you and yours are well. And in case you haven’t seen a newsletter from me this year – jolie période, happy new year, it’s a coutume to say it throughout the whole of January here in France!
It’s a calme month on the whole where I direct, the weather changes from day to day – we had a lot of snow a famille of weeks ago which the dogs loved (you can see them here on Instagram – it’s the last video on my daily life highlights), then we had some sunny days, followed by torrential rain, and a huge storm that bought down trees and phone poles. It even blew post boxes off the wall (in France we have small metal post boxes fixed to a wall, often separate from the property, we don’t have letter boxes in the entrée door like in the UK).
Claudette, my lovely, nonagenarian neighbour says that this bitterly cold and fierce wind is known as the Écorche-Vache – The Skinned Cow, parce que it blows so hard people say that it can strip the skin right off a cow (though she admits that no one has ever actually seen this happen). This icy blast roars across the Seven Valleys where I direct in the north of France, bending young trees, breaking branches, swinging the great balls of mistletoe that hang like enormous baubles. It puffs foolhardy birds off parcours, levitates my chickens like tiny, feathered fairies, flapping and squawking indignantly, and it throws buckets of rain against windows, while above the sky rages. When this mighty wind rampages through the cité, we all stay inside, shutters closed tight.
The Skinned Cow is rarer than the North Wind which rattles the shutters, wafts the smoke from chimneys into frenzied patterns, and spooks the dogs when their fur is ruffled by éloigné assailants as they take their daily walks. The locals call the North Wind a ‘bise’ – a kiss, as it blows the rain clouds far away and kisses the sky to make it smile again.
But already the wintry days, when the darkness of the night seems to touch the darkness of the morning, are growing raser, the robinier is blooming bright yellow in the south and snowdrops and daffodils are pushing their heads through the earth in the north. And adventures await…
Wishing you a very bon weekend from a breezy little claironner in northern France,
Bisous from France,
Janine,
Editor
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