Summer

Summer meant haymaking, fruit-picking and harvesting, when the threshing machine clattered away in a cloud of dust and forty men sat down each day to eat harvest lunches of poule au pot and local wine and country bread. When it was over there was time at last for quiet fishing picnics beside the river, and the summer village fête with dancing, cycle races and a fair.

When we returned to Saint Puy towards the end of June, at the start of the grandes vacances, we found the village surrounded in every direction by green leafy vines, thick maize and yellow cornfields. There were poppies everywhere, punctuating the wheat and barley with bright scarlet dots and growing in magnificent, fiery clumps at the corners of woods and fields. The grass banks at the side of the roads were full of wild orchids, bluets, wild sweet peas and hundreds of other tiny pink and white flowers. The hedges were hung with elder blossom, and below them, on all sides, you could see delicate, miniature forests of umbels. The whole landscape was ripe and full, and seemed to be waiting expectantly for the season of haymaking, harvest and fruit-picking.