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Dayle in Limoux – Day #9
July 13, 2022F
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Pre-Bastille Day celebrations! I thought the U.S. knew how to do up fireworks. My lord. Incroyable! So many from Limoux gathered at the river with a canoe parade before the fireworks with lights and torches. I was able to see them right from my little balcony. Couldn’t believe the display; a 20-minute grand-finale. So fun! In the square before the celebrations for liquid nourishment since the temp dropped to a cool 90 at 8:30 pm.
Blanquet de Limoux, the f i r s t champagne. Sorry, Dom. We know where you found your champagne. It was the monks.
In the south of Carcassonne is a place called Limoux, next to this is the beautiful abbey of St. Hilaire. An abbey is a type of monastery that is used by members of a religious order. The St. Hilaire Abbey is one of the most renowned monasteries of the Aude department in Languedoc. Long ago, the monks produced a type of sparkling wine which Limoux became known for: the Blanquette de Limoux.
History regarding one of the most beautiful abbeys in France
The history regarding the Abbey of St. Hilaire dates back to the 8th century.In 1531 a monk from the Abbey of St. Hillaire discovered how to make the sparkling wine that Limoux would become known for: the Blanquette de Limoux. As discovered in 1531 the sparkling Banquette de Limoux is therefore much older than Champagne, which was discovered by Dom Pérignon in 1668.
Considering its history, the Blanquette de Limoux is the most famous wine in the city, it is made from Mauzac grape, which provides a unique taste of apples.
Très délicieux!
La Lune is full. Fireworks to the left of me, moon to the right, here I am stuck in the middle in Limoux!
Bonus:
And fires are flaring in France, too.
The planet is burning. The heat is extreme. 99 degrees here in Limoux today. Tomorrow and deep into next week, triple digits. How are the Tour de France bikers tolerating this. Pre-race the Jumbo Visma team was donning ice vests.
I could have used one of those today and I wasn’t climbing the Col du Galibier. Hydration!
Another intense day tomorrow for Tour de France étape 12, the Iconic Alpe d’Huez for Bastille Day. Brutal. Stage 11 was intensely hot and full of seemingly never ending climbs. And so incredibly exciting–strategies and surprises! Have to share. This is how intense the stage was today. Lance and George watching earlier:
When seasoned pros who know cycling upside down and inside out, this was pretty telling. Incredibly fun to watch and to be in France DURING the Tour de France is craziness! L O V E
The fires burning in the region are near Bordeaux. From The Independent/UK:
Apocalyptic wildfires tear through Bordeaux forest as
two major forest fires have devastated a natural region close to Bordeaux, ravaging nearly 1,000 hectares of pine forest.Around 6,000 people have been evacuated from the tourist area of Pilat, close to the city and an additional 150 people were evacuated from Landiras due to another blaze.
Footage shared by the local fire service shows the apocalyptic blaze ripping through the forest, filling the orange sky with smoke.
Southwestern France is currently going through an intense heatwave with temperatures around Bordeaux, reaching near 40C.
40 C is 104 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s Limoux’s forecast this weekend, too.
We have to save it now. 🌏 She’s tired of waiting for us, and her impatience with the human species is showing. Gaia has given us so many chances.
Remember, love is everywhere.
Demain!
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Re-Entry
April 7, 2021
Please vaccinate.
“Everyone’s tired and traumatized. Normal life is coming back slow and strange, like plant life after a nuclear blast, and we won’t know the scale of the damage until something like safety feels possible. It’s okay to feel numb right now.”
-Laurie Penny
I am suffering bereavement and feel cut off from normal life. Can you give me perspective?
Grief hurts so badly because it is about something permanent, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith, but you won’t float forever
I am suffering. Though it has been several months now, most days it still feels like more than I can bear.
I feel cut off from the rest of normal life, as though I am floating, and I don’t know how to come back to normality without the person who I have lost. Please can you give some perspective?
Eleanor says: For finite creatures – who will without doubt experience loss and then in turn be lost – we do a very good job of isolating ourselves in that experience. We do a very good job of leaving each other alone in the one thing that actually unites us.
I know the strangely unplugged feeling you describe very well. The muffling of every sound; the sense of walking through an anaesthetised dream; the disobedience of the fact that garbage trucks are still beeping and dogs are still being walked in parks, as though you could possibly be expected to perceive – let alone return to – a world that has not stopped. It’s especially acute at your current moment, after a few months, when people stop asking how you’re doing and you might feel some pressure to “move on”.
But you already know there’s no place unmarred by grief for you to move on to. I think that’s why the pain is so bad when it hits; we know it’s about something permanent. There’s no future where our loved one is alive. So we get hit by one wave of pain for the fact that they’re gone, and another for the fact that they will never not be.
Why do friends discard me when I am no longer of use?
Read more
It’s enough to make you drown.
When I am drowning I get some comfort from knowing that almost every other person has been underwater too. Some are underwater with us right now, double-taking in the street when they think they see their person, suddenly needing to turn off music they’ve never before thought of as moving.
The pain never quite goes away. Since so much of ordinary life is built on the promise of painlessness, you may never quite feel fully part of it again.
But you won’t float forever. The acuteness of this pain can be its own kind of reality – a way of relating to the dogs in the park and the sounds of the street and the people still around you as gifts that are here for a moment and then wink away. It’s all here only for a moment. How astonishing that we would get to be here with it too.
Everybody from CS Lewis to the Queen has said that grief is the price we pay for love. It is a cosmic tragedy that we cannot have that love forever, but there is another, more fragile, more vivid kind of joy inside people who know that it will all one day be gone. The tragedy will never really leave you. But that joy will move in beside it. Some days the loss will be as fresh as if it happened yesterday, but some days you will catch yourself laughing.
Your terrible pain is not the opposite of life, or a sign that you are done living. It is what happens when you see life for what it is: it’s a gift, and then it ends.
I wish you luck through your days. I – and millions of us – are with you, being tossed back and forth on the tragedy and the luck that we get to have days at all.