But there was also quite a lot to keep us satisfied...the freedom of setting our own work hours and doing mostly pleasant work on a property that was really special. (I never knew that I got so much enjoyment out of clearing brambles or setting bonfires). We got to practice our rusty French with an entertaining Parisian transplant who was renting a room in the house but was also engaging in a budding romance with our hostess. Additionally, the free use of the owner's old VW campervan on the weekends was a great incentive to stick around. Without it, we would have been stranded in a rather remote spot. In retrospect, I guess this was enough to allow us to bear the insanity which swirled around the new-agey artist who inhabited some kind of parallel universe in which one hour til dinner really meant two and a half hours and priorities were based on whims of the moment ("could you help me set the privacy options on Facebook so I don't get so much email?" or "can you help me find a program so I can put smiley faces on my emails?") or whatever she was trying to "manifest" in her life (usually money).
We shared the chaotic lifestyle of someone constantly on the edge of financial ruin, who didn't have enough money to pay for the heating oil hemorrhaging out of her poorly insulated home and who ran her van only in the red reserve zone of her fuel tank. We endured (just barely) her questionable table manners (would clipping fingernails and swabbing ears at the dinner table be included in Ms. Manners' Guide to Dining Etiquette?) and her strange eating habits. We lived through the constant noise-making and ever-changing "great ideas" and even survived the steady flow of quirky friends (healers, gong musicians, etc.) and small children. In return, we enjoyed the magic of the surrounding woodland and empty pasture next door, the cuckooing of the cuckoos (and not just that of our hostess) and saw a great deal of the Tarn, Tarn-et-Garonne, and the Lot departements.
That's the honest truth with a bit of biliousness held back for propriety. It's taken a long time to decide to write this in the blog because we never sat down and talked to our hostess about our irritation...but you just can't do that. So though she was very kind, generous and extremely grateful for our assistance, it would have been better if we had left after 2 weeks - feeling less negative about her... and better about ourselves.
