The cat that lost his miaow
The cat that lost his miaow
and other stories
We woke up this morning to find Dillon’s miaow has disappeared. He is 16 years old, and feeling his years. He has found some very comfortable sleeping spots behind the Lavender, which are sheltered from the sun, and close to his water bowl, but his favourite place is his wine crate which he sleeps in at night – why wouldn’t you. He is such an adorable cat.
After we had completed our morning tasks, we went on a beautiful walk through the vineyards and across into the neighbouring valley, Loches-sur-Ource. We passed a couple of ladies who were picking all on their own, with no aid from the spider like tractors that go behind the pickers collecting up the boxes full of grapes, something you think nothing of until you see those doing it without this assistance. The ladies were filling their buckets then walking up the slope to tip their valuable produce into their boxes stored at the end of the lines of vines. This they just kept repeating until that line of vines had all been picked, and they then moved to the next. Further up the rough stone track, was a family of seven people, a couple of brothers and their wives and teenage children. All working extremely hard with one goal in mind, to get the job done.
Our route took us round a view point that looked out across the Ource valley. We sat on some nicely positioned benches to eat our Chèvre et Epinard pastries with a cool can of San Pelegrino Limonata, which is often a bit tart for me, so I tend to just have a couple of sips of Brians before reverting to my bottle of water. It was a welcome break in the heat of the day, and gave us time to reflect on how hard growing grapes really is.
We thought we would explore a bit and take a different path back round into our valley, which lead us through some woodland. It was all going really well, until the path turned right and we ended up walking out onto a field, well I think that is what it was. It was covered in rocks. We knew which way we had to head, but it meant walking round the edge of the field across the rocks, which was not great under foot. Neither of us had put our walking boots on. I think we had both thought it was only going to be a bit of a stroll. So we headed back into the woodland when we saw a gap in the trees. Soon the undergrowth became impassable, but as we are not ones to walk back the way we came, we decided we needed to head down the slope to try and reach the track which we knew ran along the top of the vines. Brian told me it was only about 40 metres away. So carefully we headed down the slope, finding a path through the trees, trying to avoid the very prickly hawthorns that seem to be growing there. We took it really slowly, looking ahead to try and navigate the best route. Brian assured me it was not much further, and soon I could see through the trees and the valley beyond. Literally just as we were emerging out of the wood I caught my arm on a thorn and bled profusely. .
The view was stunning, and it was a delight to see the buzz all the way along the valley – the culmination of this years hard work coming to fruition. On the other side of the valley was a large team of pickers looking like ants cleaning the hillside. We could see the yellow boxes being collected by the ‘tractor spiders’ and driven to the lorries, which then took them to the pressoirs. No time to waste as they needed to get the grapes pressed.
