COVID Diary, view from the attic window

Sunday 3 January 2021

We came down here by train a couple weeks before Christmas, and plan to stay through the expected winter Covid surge, grateful that this time (unlike during the spring lockdown), we can go biking. Last spring we weren’t allowed out for more than an hour and no further than a kilometre from home. The rule was enforced with fines. We were stopped and scolded twice.

This time we’ve decided to see if we can survive without renting a car, depending instead on weekly grocery deliveries from the nearby market town and the tiny village everything shop (café, groceries, bakery, post office, newstand), and in emergencies, by borrowing my husband’s brother’s car.

The épi (épicerie)-café changed management over the summer. The new managers are a young couple, who planned to make most of their money on the café side, since under normal circumstances, most villagers would shop for most of their groceries in bigger towns. They’ve managed to survive under Covid, in part by making really great, takeout pizza several evenings a week. In fact, their pizzas have been such a success some evenings they turn away customers. The wife had a baby a couple of months ago—she was back at the cash register a week later, baby in a basket.

Not having a car means we stay within walking/biking distance of home: no long drives to Sault and the north side of the Mont Ventoux with its easy (well, easier) bike route up the Ventoux, and its wonderful honey, lavender and sausage shops. No trips to Carpentras to Jouvaud, the patisserie. No newspapers (the young couple hope to start carrying the local and national press, but for the moment they don’t), except online. No Ikea on the road to Avignon, but with Covid I wouldn’t want to be milling in those crowds anyway. But I really can’t think of anything else we’d miss. My husband has his flute, we have our nice and not-so-nice neighbors (the 100-year-feud and the recent one), local family members, the ever-changing winter weather, and lots of books. Nothing to complain about, yet.