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Published: August 4th 2009
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So many tractors...
....but these little green ones are straight out of Thomas the Tank Engine, big appealing headlamp eyes and all We’ve just had a wonderful weekend. Friends invited us over to stay with them in the Couserans, a part of the Ariège well to the west of us, and this meant that apart from exploring an area we still don’t know well, we had plenty of time in St. Girons.
St. Girons is one of the larger towns of the Ariège and the major town of the Couserans. It has the best market in the whole Department. This weekend it was especially good, because the whole town was out to celebrate ‘Autrefois le Couserans’. We’d probably call it ‘The Couserans in Times Gone By’.
The whole area is still largely agriculturural, and the procession we watched when we came back to town on Sunday morning was certainly evidence of that. But as we enjoyed the elderly tractors, the traditional costumes, the working animals, the dances, the hunting horns, the ancient machinery and tools, I thought about how hard the life of the average country family must have been. Over the last few blogs I’ve mentioned the tyranny of the fruit harvest and there have been times when it’s felt as though those fruit trees, with their abundance and their
Not part of the plan...
......a 2CV gets a helpful push own timetables have been ruling my days. But I’m just playing at it. It’s not a matter of survival for me to jam and bottle and preserve and cook. If it all gets too much, I simply give the fruit away or even don’t bother to gather it. For the families whose descendants we were watching on Sunday, it was much more important. And of course, through the summer, it wasn’t just fruit that demanded attention, but vegetables, crops, cows, sheep, pigs, chickens, rabbits….. and children and elderly relatives and mending and repairing and cooking.
For us though, as for everyone else who watched and took part, Sunday was just a chance to relax and have fun. When we were hungry, we could enjoy the locally produced croustades, cheeses, sausage, honey, bread and fruit doing nothing more strenuous than getting our money out.
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