I am sitting on the pool deck at the gite. The sun is going down over my right shoulder. There is a cool breeze in the walnut trees. In fact, there is a walnut on my table. It has just fallen from the tree overhead. It looks perfectly edible, but Marie France says that walnuts require 2-3 months of drying before they loose their bitter flavor. She and Michel harvest several hundred pounds from their trees. Some of their trees are in little plots of land adjacent to the gite, and some are in plots scattered around the hamlet. Land ownership in rural France is fragmented.

The pool is covered up and will probably remain so till next summer. It is finally autumn and the French are grateful to be done with the particularly dry and hot summer. The ears of corn are so small that they may not be worth harvesting. However, the vintners say this will be a particularly good year. There are few grapes grown locally but most people have a few symbolic vines. The local grapes are already ripe and some have started to dry up.

The International Herald Tribune is filled with letters to the editor criticizing Thomas Fiedman's editorial which probably appeared in many papers on or around September 19. The editorial was titled "France and the United States are at War". I was not able to read the original, but I get the impression that it was as inflammatory as the title sounds. The letters correctly point out that allies ought to be able to disagree, and that Bush's "with us or against us" rhetoric is inappropriate. Last night Yahoo news carried a snippet about Bush's popularity in the US taking a dive. Wish we could get the NY Times here or watch BBC news. TV is all in French.