The south of France is anything but a hardship post. As winters go, they’re the green pistes, compared with the black ones elsewhere. In fact, spring started sprouting more than a week ago. (The mimosas are exploding, as in the top photo.)
The days are getting longer and milder. The air smells doux, in all the French senses of the word: sweet, soft, mild, gentle… It’s intoxicating, making you want to fill your lungs again and again. It’s been mild enough that we can open the windows and let the perfume in the house (in addition to the daily airing that all good French people perform every morning, kind of the opposite of hygge). Snow is an hour away, if we want it, in abundance.
The bees are buzzing, the butterlies are fluttering. The weeds are invading.
The majestic plane trees are still bare. They look like tortured sculptures, though the trunks of some remind me of the trunks of elephants. 
The trees in the woods don’t yet have leaves, but greenery persists throughout winter here.
The river is robust, neither threatening nor dry. 
The baby grass is so tender. I just wanted to stay and stroke it (I did partake for a few minutes, but resisted the urge to take off my shoes and feel it between my toes, too).
Secret worlds come to life.
Welcome, spring.
Please check out Daily Plate of Crazy, who also has musings today on midwinter madness.
Autumn can be such an endearing time of year. Outdoor activities no longer soak a person in sweat just at the thought. Chilly nights with cuddling under blankets. The return to routine early-to-bed-early-to-rise after summer’s excesses. The smells of earth and leaves and the first fires lit in fireplaces. 
The colors changing on the trees, across the vineyards. Short-term art, as if 
The leaves here turn color, especially on the grape vines, which can take on riotous shades of red and orange and gold. Mostly in unison, by varietal, except for the stray syrah that wandered into a crowd of cabernet.
The trees’ leaves also change color before falling. But many of the hills are covered with pines that stay green. They aren’t the Christmas tree shapes but pins parasols–umbrella pines–that have branchless trunks giving way to rounded, clumpy tops that look like the clouds drawn by kindergartners. The spiky broom plants stay green, and laurel keeps its leaves. With rain, the grass grows back. Winter is a relatively green season here.
Sometimes the stars are shining brightly when I wake, but by the time the Kid gets out the door a gray film has descended, thickening by the minute.
Fog turns the Kodachrome-colored fall into a shades-of-gray enigma. I venture out. It’s so thick I can barely see my hand before my face. The familiar road is suddenly mysterious. It could go anywhere like this, to places unknown. I almost hesitate to even keep walking, as if I might end up in a parallel world and be unable to get home.
As the sun begins to rise, the fog, too, starts to lift.
Not uniformly, but leaving behind remnants. Clouds on the ground, here and there.
When the sun climbs triumphant above the hills, the colors return to their saturated selves. 
A metaphor for my autumn moods. 
Longing/loving. Inside/outside. Retrospective/energized. Thinking a lot about loved ones who died, but busy on behalf of those living. Bittersweet.
Except the autumn funk isn’t so much about not getting the answer right as about wishing the goods things–the good people–could last forever. This time is good. Let’s just stay like this forever.
My cousin asked whether the leaves change color here. I meant to answer, and then never got around to it. Because I didn’t want to just say “yes, they do.” Here it is, with my apologies for being late.
The fields and roadsides here in the south of France are dappled with colorful spring wildflowers. Blazing poppies, of course. And voluptuous clouds of yellow broom plant–their French name, genêt, is so much prettier.
There are so many flowers on impossibly thin stems that look drawn by a fine pen, that spread out so far.
These seemed worthy of Whoville lamp posts. Or fairy lanterns.
Long, long stems with big shapes on the end are very Seussian:
Some scary plants, too.
And some manmade help below. This one is more Barbapapa. Sometimes when I go running, I pass the owner of this place, standing at the end of the drive and waiting for a ride. One day, he was holding a big bottle of whiskey. In the morning. I teased him hard about that. “It’s a present!” he protested.
Maybe I find these amazing because I always lived in a city, where flowers are carefully chosen. Spotting these weird wonders gives me huge joy. What gives you joy?
Not the Alps. The Pyrénées. Not the highest peaks, but magnificent nonetheless.
The thing about the mountains is that already it takes a while to get there, and then it takes forever to go from one place to another. Plus, the day of de Ferme en Ferme, narrow mountain roads that rarely see a vehicle suddenly have hundreds of cars.
I couldn’t get over the vivid contrasts in greens, depending on which kinds of trees dominated a part of the forest. And those forests are dense and dark.
We crossed a high plateau and had to turn at the town of Espezel. I looked it up and the population was 209 in 2008; it was 407 in 1962. Says a lot about opportunities in the middle of nowhere. A man, wearing a big black beret without the slightest trace of irony, was about to enter a cute little bar/restaurant. Espezel might be losing residents but it’s gaining visitors who come for hiking. We pulled up quickly to ask the man for directions. They get lax about signs in the middle of nowhere.
The man told us the way to the road we wanted–not a sign anywhere–and we were on our way. However, my co-pilot kept panicking at all the signs that said the col–mountain pass–was blocked. Still snow? Don’t worry, I said, Ferme en Ferme wouldn’t send hundreds of people on a blocked road.
Even better, was the view going down:
And along the way:
The vines are almost all pruned now. The pieds de vigne, or woody parts, stand in perfect rows like so many well-behaved students at assembly. Or sentries, silent, brooding. With a little lower-back pain.
The vines are old, sometimes 30, even 70 years old. Wine takes time.
After a good frost but before the first buds on the vines, the vignerons are out pruning (tailler) the vines. It’s usually a solitary job. A beat-up car or camionette parked in an odd place (OMG, what is that car doing there? was there an accident?) is the first clue that somewhere in the expanse of row upon row, a bent figure will be clipping away.
I wonder whether the vignerons talk to their vines, which seem so much like individuals, with personalities. I would ask, but I suspect they would look at me like “this American really IS crazy.”
Plenty of people talk to their plants. My grandma had a way with African violets. One day, she confided that her secret was that she talked to them. She pulled me into her sun porch, where African violets lined the window sills, to demonstrate: “If you don’t bloom, you’re going out!” she barked at the plants. Bloom they did. Tough love.
In 2008, the European Union launched a program to reduce a glut of wine and keep prices from crashing by reducing EU vineyard area by 94,000 hectares a year. Kind of like OPEC for wine. People love to complain about the EU, but united we stand, divided we fall. Without an overall plan, everybody would have said, let the other guy tear up his vineyards. And they all would have suffered as prices fell further. Overall, vineyards in the 
Update: I wrote this a few days ago, and the very next day, leaves popped out on the vines. If they made a noise, the countryside would sound like a popcorn machine right now. They seem to open right before your eyes. I’ll try to get out and Instagram some later today. The leaves have a “just woke up and blinking in the sunshine” air about them.
Between the days of hard blue skies, sometimes we awake to discover that the fog has crept in on 
When it had lifted enough not to be treacherous to venture out on foot–the roads have no shoulders, and I didn’t want a passing car to send me into a ditch–I was enchanted by the “fog filter” on the countryside.
It’s funny to see how things turn green in winter. The wheat fields are becoming emerald carpets. The grass and weeds between the rows of vines, left to hold the topsoil in place, are lush.
The pine trees that can become kindling for wild fires in summer are now verdant, as if razzing the deciduous plants whose finery is gone until spring.
Some of the vines have leaves left, but others are bare. Wintry. The wine growers are busy trimming while the weather is mild.
As pretty as the lights and decorations are in town, I kind of like these decorations by nature, all taken on a walk in my village.
What do I miss? Baking Christmas cookies. We baked many thousands of them last year and the year before (during which my handheld mixer died and I made a zillion batches by hand because: fridge full of butter and eggs). This year? Meh. Christmas cookies are not a thing in France. Friends here were flummoxed by the boxes of cookies we delivered, almost to the point of being embarrassed: “But we don’t exchange gifts!” “It isn’t a ‘gift’–it’s cookies.”
Anyway, we ate too much dough during the process and worked too hard at Pilates since then, so, not this year. Maybe next year.
A teeny tiny part of me misses the cold and snow. Just an itsy bitsy bit. Not much. An hour would do. (It’s 62 Fahrenheit as I write this.) The way the cold pinches your nostrils and stings your cheeks. The scrunching crunch of footsteps on snow. The clean smell. The absolute hush that envelopes the world when new snow falls.
Speaking of belting, I miss going to Handel’s 
Most of all, I miss my family. After a rough 2015, we didn’t get to travel back this year. Decorations are nice, but family is what Christmas is all about.
No, I didn’t mean it THAT way (au naturel can mean nude). I meant, let’s wallow in the prettiness of the French countryside on a walk around the neighborhood.
So often I have to pinch myself when I step outside and see such that yes, I am living in a postcard. Especially lately.
Fall is one of the greenest seasons of the year here. The return of rain makes the grass grow again. Soon the plowed fields of winter wheat will be emerald seas. Many of the trees and shrubs keep their leaves all year, so it never feels quite as bare as in the north.
During the height of summer’s heat and dry spell, it was rare to see butterflies, but now they are all over, mostly flitting in pairs, and catching the sunshine in a way that reminds me of July fireworks, spilling over and over across the sky. I suspect they left us for cooler climes during the summer and now are on their way south. Our winters are mild, but not mild enough for butterflies.
Even the houses are dressed in saturated shades.
Everywhere I go, another breathtaking vista unfolds.
Fine days mean crisp nights. As fireplaces are lit again, the scent of burning wood perfumes the air. It contrasts with the wet, earthy compost smells as leaves and grass turn back into rich dirt.
Sometimes the light reminds me of the paintings of 
It’s a very busy period, yet I can’t help but stop and stare. Today, we take the time to appreciate.
Taste of France 