First Snow

  I was awoken at 5am by a god-almighty crashing.  Henri the farmer’s son, Lequint junior, was to my great surprise out on his snow plough piling up snow around the cedar tree in the middle of the village.  I couldn’t see his face but I could tell by the way he was handling the snowplough that he was as happy as Louis. 

When we moved to this village 14 years ago, Lequint Junior looked about 17 and he still does but must, technically, be in his early thirties.  Sometimes in the summer I catch him doing wheelies on his bicycle.  He doesn’t like me.  He’s been sulking with me for 14 years ever since we had an altercation about a right of passage.  I had taken a short cut through the village on a pathway alongside a field that I thought, as it was so well trodden, was a footpath.  Well was I in for a surprise when he came out of his gate and “had a right go at me” as they say where I come from.  Well, it must have been one of those days when I was having an overload of Swiss laws and regulations because he brought out my inner fishwife and I let him have it back.  Since that fateful rencontre I don’t exist in his eyes.  Which is a shame because as we both work from home and  bump into each other all the time it could have been a …well, at least neighbourly.

I have not only blotted my copy book, it has been torn up and thrown out the window with him.  Last summer I averted him to the fact that one of his calves appeared to be in trouble.  I ran with him down to the field and offered to help but he dismissed me with a cold “C’est bon!” and one of those backward waves.  I stood by the gate whilst he went over to the poor inert animal hoping that this would end his war of the sulks and from that day forth we could at least be on “Bonjour” terms.  I watched whilst he tenderly dragged (now there’s an oxymoron for you but you get the drift with these farm boys) the calf out of the sun and into the shade.  He sat with his back towards me and after a while I wandered off. 

I know a secret about Lequint Junior.  I know that as well as farming he has a passion for amateur dramatics.  He is a prominent feature of “La Revue” – a satirical and occasionally humorous recounting of the events of the village which is staged in the Salle Communale every two years.  His last performance took in the role of a dashing Knight in the Tudor period.  (Don’t ask me when the Tudors came all the way out here to the Jura but it must have been along with the Regents who left a fireplace in my living room.)  So picture this:  Lying in his bed at night with the soft mooing and shuffling from the cows below, Lequint Junior dreams of a part in a Scorsese movie, preferably playing the handsome hero riding into town on his snowplough.

Copyright Jules Ritter November 2007         Snow modelled by Molly.