We arrived back in Lectoure on Easter Saturday. The journey down had been great. We took our time, avoiding the autoroutes, building in a couple of overnight stops en route, exploring some places we hadn't visited before. The car-that-thinks-it's-a-van was packed to the roof as usual, any stray empty corners filled with tins of baked beans, jars of mint sauce and boxes of man-size Kleenex. No wonder the French think the Brits are eccentric!
Opening the front door after an absence of a couple of weeks is always a bit of a tense moment. What disasters might await? Will the hall be running with water or mice, or worse still both? Will the wallpaper we put up before we left have peeled off the walls and be lying in a damp heap on the floor? Will the livebox that powers our internet have been struck by lightening, leaving us with a very dead box that takes weeks to fix? As you may gather, I do tend to be a bit of a 'glass half empty' kind of girl.
As it turned out, the only disaster was the garden. We inherited a wilderness when we bought the house. After two months of warm spring weather and April showers the weeds were triffid size. My husband settled down to a couple of days of machete wielding and I lugged the garden furniture out of hibernation. I have a vision for our garden, one that doesn't include four grubby white plastic chairs, two equally grubby matching loungers and half a dozen assorted plastic flower troughs. But I'm stuck with them. The budget won't run to replacements at present. Blame the ailing pound and the flourishing euro. Blame anyone, even the man with the machete. I stomped up the road to buy bread. Never mind the glorious sunshine, the stunning hilltop view, I wanted new garden furniture - I did, I did, I did!
Then I turned the corner and there she was, sitting on a cheap folding chair in the lane outside her house, a very elderly lady with a serene face and a peaceful air, watching the world go by. Her house has no garden, weed-infested or otherwise, but she's found her place in the sun in spite of that, and discovered the perfect way to keep track on what her neighbours are up to into the bargain.
'I have learned the secret of being content' (Philippians 4:12) Something told me that elderly lady had learnt the secret too.
Do you think contentment's something we can learn? Does modern society encourage us to be content?
No comments:
Post a Comment