VAUCLUSE DIARY

Wednesday 15 April

Today our masks, ordered from a small seamstress in the next village, are ready to pick up, one female-sized, one male-sized, mine plain black with a red lining—like a cardinal. She’d stitched some cushion covers for me a couple of years ago, and I thought maybe she’d make the masks, but she was way ahead of the game. ‘I can do them for Wednesday week,’ she said. ‘We have a lot of orders; we’re going to be working all Easter weekend.’

We do have a couple of aging surgical masks that we wear to collect our daily baguette and Le Monde from the village shop, but it will be good to have something that’s more-reusable. Not that we use them that much, since we don’t often go to a supermarket, and most of our groceries we are now phone-ordering and picking up from the sidewalk in front of the small produce market (which also delivers): fruit and vegetables, cheese, meat, pasta…

Yesterday we did a superette run to Malaucène, then on the way back stopped at the goat farm, which makes cheese, and was open, and hiked to the top of the ridge above the farm, where there are some Roman ruins. hadn’t been there since mid-February when we had a couple of picnics up there.

Birds chirping in the eaves outside my attic window and in the plane tree across the street, now leafing. Small signs of more work perhaps happening—vans on the road. After Macron’s speech on Monday evening, we are now confined till 11 May. It is going to be interesting to watch ‘deconfinement’ happening in Austria, Italy and Denmark, see whether cases start to rise again.