Time to Leave

It's always sad to pack up and leave somewhere you love.  But this is a particularly annoying pack-up as we need to move as much as we can from the ground floor to the first floor - that includes carpets, pictures and cushions.  I must have mentioned before that the ground floors of these old stone houses in France have a damp problem.  That is probably one of the understatements of 2013 actually, as our Ozzie neighbour sometimes has puddles forming on the flagstones when it's partcularly wet outside!  One of the problems with the houses is they have no foundations to speak of and certainly no damp-proof course!  The original floors in our particular house have been removed or tiled over but still without a damp course so salt peter oozes through the exquisite French tiles making white patterns all over the ground floor!  We also have a granite staircase leading to the first floor and the first 4 or 5 steps of this become dark and slimy-looking in wet weather but as soon as the rain stops and the weather dries they go back to their nice pale grey colour.
With only 4 days left to go I got a sudden bee in my bonnet to try to get more sunshine into the field across the road.  There is an ancient stone wall all around which was hidden by thickets of hazel and beech.  When we arrived I loved this and thought it gave us "privacy" - but you don't need privacy here, so yesterday I began clearing them.  After three hours and on the verge of stopping for the night, OAP came out to give a hand and between us we cleared the whole of one side of the field.  It looks so different and hopefully the morning sun will now pour in and dry the grass and encourage the summer flowers I planted this year to grace us with as pretty a picture as was on the VERY EXPENSIVE box!   Our compost heap is now 6 feet high and is nothing a little petrol and a match won't fix!  But seeing as we are on the edge of a forest it will have to be a wet day that the deed gets done - our neighbour has promised to do it in November, the time fires are apparently allowed here.
So it's off back to Switzerland on Wednesday morning and from there a flight home to the family and our house in the bush and another titanium knee for OAP.  After all the heavy work we've done here there can't be much of the old one left!