Sunday, October 29, 2006

doorbell

Climbing in Buis les Baronnies was fantastically fabulously magnificently wonderful. I found my Swiss friend Manuela again, which was fantastic. We climbed together all weekend, each of us pushing our limits just enough to have fun and feel quite accomplished and adequately exhausted by the end of the weekend. My favorite route was one that was described as “a beautiful slab climb with a bit of caving.” And indeed, slab, hole, climb in, pop out the other side. It was awesome.

I could write pages about the treasures I kept from this weekend, but many of them will unfold in the months to come, so I will let it do so. Cheap way of saying it was a fantastic weekend and so much happened that as soon as I start trying to describe all of them I’m going to get sidetracked by various philosophical tangents and fall asleep at my computer, and I want to go to bed.

So I will instead leave you with perhaps one of my favorite vignettes yet.

Having taken a side-route, we arrived first at the Buis les Baronnies parking lot. Groggy from the car ride and an obligatory lack of sleep the previous night, we loitered in the parking lot.

A darling little old lady pulled up across the street in her sleek new silver Ford Focus. She wasn’t quite pleased with her parking spot – it seemed to be a little too far from wherever she was going.

She walked up to a door, reached for a string that hung from a window on the 3rd floor, and pulled. To my surprise, it shook a little bell in the window above. We smiled at the sight. Doorbells a la France?

She waited a moment, and when she got no response walked back to her car to start carrying her goods from the car to the house.

A moment later, another darling little old lady appeared at the window above, looked down, confused to find no one there. She looked around, and finally the two women found each other. The woman on the street jogged over, and the woman in the door lowered a key on a string, leaving her just enough slack to unlock the door. Once open, she took up the key again, and the other woman resumed her lugging.

At this point we had started to get a little cold in the shade and moved across the street to profit from some sunshine. A few minutes later, a parking spot opened up, right next to us and directly in front of the door where we had watched those two women.

The woman in the Ford Focus pounced on the parking spot, backing in with the expertise and confidence (and sleek silvery style) of an Indy 500 racecar driver, maneuvering through a car on one side and a tree on the other with only inches, pardon, centimeters to spare.

That certainly warranted several raised eyebrows and a few situationally-appreciative smiles.

Again, it’s the small things in life.

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