she sounds like a remarkable woman. I hope you can continue to enjoy her company and her stimulation for many years yet.Random ramblings post !
I'll do a chicken post later today, but before I will finally write something about my aunt, Marie-Mad, who was my deceased uncle Bernard's wife. I have been wanting to write about her for a while, because she is one of the most wonderful person in my family and the type of person that is like a shining light to anyone who meets her. She is kind, listens to people, really tries to understand them even when she doesn't agree and thinks about doing things right in many aspects of everyday life. Whereas my uncle was controversial, and could be as annoying as he was sincere and passionate, I don't think anyone who meets Marie-mad can not love her.
First, I have to speak a bit about her father Lucien because it explains a lot about her. He was half belgian and came from a poor rural family who farmed land that did not belong to them. He was extremely ambitious and intelligent, so he got himself a higher education and managed to get introduced in cultural diplomatic circles. He went on to make a career as a french high school principal in various countries : Athens, Tokyo, Moscow, Istanbul...taking his wife and two daughters along with him. They had a multicultural and multilingual childhood. But, while I knew him as a very well cultivated, curious and lively old man, he was extremely hard and demanding as a father in his upbringing. Both his daughters became brilliant students, leaving him to go study in France as soon as possible.
Marie-mad became a very good friend of my mum as they were doing the same classics studies, and my mum introduced her to her older brother.
While they were very different, it is no suprise it clicked between them, because they were very complementary, and I think they shared the same vision for justice and wanting to act to change things in whatever way they could. She was also rather independent and when my uncle went to work abroad, first she followed him but when they had kids she stayed in France with them and they got used to living together for some months and separated for others.
She quit working when her children were small but when they grew up she got invested in various associations. She did a lot of language and literacy teaching ; mostly among older women from Maghreb, through cooking workshops. She learnt some algerian herself, and a lot of great recipes from many different countries. She also did some end of life assistance visiting. Then she began helping refugees to write their application request for asylum. First she worked with translators for middle east populations. But after a few years she took to studying hard to get russian back, which she had learned as a child, and she was able to interact directly with all russian speaking migrants. There was an affluence of arrivals with the wars in Chechnia in the town she lived in with my uncle, Lyon, so she did that for a long time and it became almost a full time job.
When my uncle died she went on for another year or two, and she stopped. It was very hard for her.
She went back to literacy cooking workshops but she also found herself on the late a new passion for physical geography and especially geomorphology. For the last years she has been travelling all around France for geological discovery trips and spends most of her time reading and attending conferences about that.
It sounds like a life of roses, but one thing that probably made her the thoughtful person she has become is that she lost unexpectedly a few important people. Her mother passed young, around 45, and so did her younger sister, who was a doctor and died of stomach cancer after a few years of pain. Then, my elder aunt died very fast of brain cancer : they had grown very fond of one another because they had children the same age and had spent all their holidays together for years. And finally my uncle died in Tchad, most abruptly and ironically of dehydration on a humanitarian mission to build water wells.
A nice thing she told me at Christmas is that when her own dad Lucien retired and began growing older, he completely changed and became adorable with his daughters, as he actually was with other people. So she found her dad again.
I really love my aunt and I have always felt a strong bond with her. I visited her several times after my uncle died because the national library school is close to where she lived, and I had to attend conferences and trainings for work. A few months after my uncle died, I did my first long distance race, the mythical "Saintélyon" which is a night race in December from Saint-Etienne to Lyon where my aunt lived. So I had arranged to spend two days at her home because I was doing a seminar in the middle of the week after in Lyon. My race was great, but she had anticipated what I hadn't thought about, that I would be sore to the point of not being able to get up the next day, so she had made me a bed on her sofa in the living room which was right next to the kitchen and she brought me lunch and dinner on a tray. Then the day after she took me for a small very slow walk in the parc and told me all about the time my uncle had attempted a 100 km race out of the blue and was mad because he did not finish. Wonderful memory.
My aunt is one of the few members of my family who came to spend a few days with us to see how we live, and she got my partner hooked on physical geography and they went for excruciatingly slow hikes staring at the ground. She's also the one who dug up old photos of my grandma as a child feeding hens in Algeria.
I've been much too long already so I won't go on and on but I will just finish by saying I was once again very happy to see her at Christmas, and this was the point when my mood switched from horrible, to I have to see the good in small things even though the world is crumbling.
A picture of us two when she came here in August 2021, on one of those slow educational geophysical hikes.
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but she stayed active. She quickly had heavy mudshoes from scratching around, and she moved even more sluggish than these last days. She does go to roost about an hour earlier than she normally would. Merle seems to be thinking about coming back into laying and reacquainting herself with Théo, she slept next to him for the first time in quite a while and he seemed very happy about it.
Today I saw a neighbour cat from next door as if he wanted to run and attack something near the chicken run. I distracted him.. he backed off.
