Rozoy Rocks...

So there was no sex trade to sell me off to so feel free to breath the sigh of relief I am sure you have been holding. I'm back and safe and sound! Turns out I didn't even have the right story with the other two guesses either. H, who owns the house and garden now, inherited them from her Grandmother. Her Great Aunt (Grandmother's sister) still lives in the town. She came over and had lunch with us both days. They said she was 97!! She walked over from her house without a cane and seemed to be all together. Man, what a lady...I tried to speak with her a little, she was so sweet and very easy to understand. I think the older generations here are much easier to understand, they speak slow and seem to really enunciate their words.

Here is the house...

It was built in the 18th century. Crazy eh? So about the time the Declaration of Independence was declaring my country a country; they were putting up wall paper. H said that much of the house was built using older materials taken from older houses, so the wood used for the stairs and some of the floors dates back to the early 1700's and maybe 1600's. Nutty. It's just so strange to wrap your mind around the time.

I stayed on the 3rd floor with my Brit friend Karen, there were 6 of us and there were multiple beds in the upper room so we decided to camp out together. Every time my feet would walk down the stairs (barefoot because I am completely aware of my propensity to slide down stairs on my arse when I try to walk down them with socks) I would wonder how many other feet had touched them. They were beautiful. I tried to capture the warmth that the stairs held, but I don't think the pictures do them justice of course. I don't know why I was so captured by the stairs. I loved how smooth they were from the wear of over 200 years of use. If you look at the pictures you might be able to see that in many places the nails showed through and were worn as smooth as the wood that surrounded them. Sometimes I would see a scar in the wood and make up a story of how I thought I was made. Maybe a young girl was trying to carry a tray of food up to third floor for her sick uncle and dropped it. When the tray hit the soft wood on the second floor it scared the wood it's still there today.


The house had a great back yard with a bridge made out of concrete and cave built into the side of the house that kids could play in. When H was a child she and her sister drew buffalo cave drawings on the raw rock and mud walls. You could still see two of them. I would have done the same...


I can't seem to upload anymore photos so I will have to post others tomorrow...I will make sure to include the cave as the first one!

We worked in the garden that she has on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. It's about two blocks from the main house. The garden is a lot that backs up to an old church and what used to be a castle with three towers. It is nestled in at the bottom of a slop that the church sits on and where the castle used to be and is in the shape of an L. There were tons of apple trees that were just bursting with fruit. As I type this I am wondering what all I can cook with all the apples I have. I have a few ideas, one of the girls there AS, she is an amazing cook and we had apple tart, apple cake, chicken with apples and even red cabbage and apples made by Karen!

We worked really hard in the garden and ate fantastic food all weekend. It made me wish to live in a simpler time, where people worried about keeping their land and storing enough food to survive the winter, not failing economies and wars in other countries. I know it must have been very hard, but they all had focus. Even if the focus was just to get a crop in. Ah, I have been reading too much Diana Gabaldon and her Outlander series. But if you have read the books, I did feel a bit like Claire working in her garden while Jamie (Cyriaque) was off hunting...although Jamie didn't hunt in China (where Cyr currently is) and Claire didn't have a hot shower to go back to. Now that I think about it, 2008 has been one the best years of my life. I think I'll stay...