May Memoir: Ca va? Stories from Rural Life in Southern France, Chapter 11: Animals

Welcome to May MEMOIR!

Day 12

For the entire month of May, I'll be sharing part of each chapter from my memoir, Ca va?  Stories from Rural Life in Southern France.

Chapter 11: Animals

            One particularly cold evening, Christophe gets home from work, and opening the door, he stretches out his hand to me and says, “Smell this!”

            Stupidly, I do.  His hand smells like a beast.  I jump back, covering my nose, “What is that?  It smells disgusting.”

            Christophe is beaming.  “There was a boar that ran in front of my truck.  Luckily, I stopped just in time, but it still brushed against by bumper.  It’s now coated in mud.  Come out and look!”

            We both step outside and examine his truck.  He’s right: he’s lucky.  A wild boar in the region weighs up to 150 pounds, and if he had hit it, his truck would have been totaled and he could have been seriously hurt.  All that it left on the truck is mud and some random pieces of fur.

            “I often see them at the side of road on the way home, but this is the closet one ever got to me”, he explains.

            I am a bit stupefied.  I have seen wild animals before, but they are generally much smaller in nature and never that close.  In fact, outside of a friend’s domesticated cat, the animals I saw the most while living in Chicago were rats.  I am quickly brought into the reality of exactly where I am living: in the middle of nowhere.  Correction: in the middle of nowhere surrounded by wild animals.

           

Christophe went on to tell me about one evening when he found a boar in the garden about to turn over all the potatoes.  Needless to say, after this I was a bit apprehensive about running into a boar anytime I stepped outside when it wasn’t broad daylight.  Eventually, I did get over my fear, but it did take some time for me to muster up the courage to go into the garden again.