We’ve finally made it to our Winter habitat. Villard de Touage is in the Southeast of France, at the foothills of the Alps and between the towns La Mure and Mens. This photo is taken a couple kilometers away from our house towards Mens.

Les Alpes

My aunt has been here for ~15 years and has set us up quite well for our winter stay. She will be traveling until March, thus Kate and I are hibernating together. I expected to have to buy food throughout the winter to eat, but my Aunt, who harvests a lot from her land, will be feeding us long after she flies off to India. We have frozen tomatoes, jars upon jars of quince, cassis, and plum jelly, handfuls of dried herbs, tins of confit du canard, squash, frozen soups, fish, and boudin (blood sausage, discovered after eating…). In addition we have eggs from our eleven chickens and, if we’re lucky, sanglier and perhaps other wild game.

I’ve been asked a hundred times if I was excited to get here and I never knew how to answer. I feel like I’ve been waiting to finally be here for so long that I can now simply breathe. The air is fresh, there are miles and miles to walk and nothing biting at my attention to wind me up. Of course, I’m still working a little and since my hunting society was in the new york times I’ve been flooded with email requests for everything. Somehow dealing with those things away from the city and outside an office has made them more manageable.

I wonder if all of us who don’t really need to be anywhere to do our jobs left the city, what would be left? We’d have cheaper rent, more savings, less anxiety and maybe less crowded urban areas. We might even have less vehicle miles traveled and buy fewer things as we would appreciate what we have by seeing the origins of our stuff in our rural landscape. We could appreciate the wild and want to keep wild spaces for us to enjoy now that we are out of the city. I wonder if relationships are more or less powerful in the country. If I surmount the language barrier, I might find out.