Miscellany

Kepler and I watercolor sometimes. I like to try to paint pictures of our house. Often, in fact most of the time, he sees my painting half-finished and tries to get involved, making of my picture something big and smeary, with great swooping walls in all the wrong places, like the sky, and huge purple comets hurtling earthward toward our roof. But sometimes I get to paint all the way through to completion.

I didn't say I was good at it. And here's the top view:

Now, Kristi recently expressed surprise that, as you can see in the extraordinary piece of art just above, we share the back wall of our house with our neighbors. This is true. But perhaps the reason I never mentioned it is that it barely feels like we do. The shared wall is a foot and a half of solid stone, so we never hear them, and their house is sunken, and smaller, so we never see them either.

...not that we'd mind, really. They're a very laughy-smiley good-spirited retired couple from northern France, who are fixing up their place as well. Good neighbors. Their house, so the story goes, was, back in the day, a single large room with an enormous fireplace in it. It was the home of the caretaker of our place, and was given to him upon his retirement. How the estate eventually got carved up the way it has, and the lines of successive ownership, are anyone's guess.