Accepte remblai

‘Accepte remblai’. This phrase used to always baffle me.  But as it was on a sign near a house on a steep corner on the road to St Peray, I never had time to stop and find out.

And when you have an hour’s drive down to town, the ‘I must write that down and then look  it up’ urge tends to get chased away by six other urgent thoughts.

One of the joys of moving to another country is the daily or weekly delight in learning new vocabulary.  And using them.  Go on, quiz me on plumbing and building words, landscaping phrases, fuse box parts, Ardeche slang.

But you really only remember these new words if you use them.  (I’m about to call the electrician to let him know that the hot water fusible has blown in the boite a fusible. Believe me, you never forget fusible when you have the dodgy wiring that we endure.)

And today I can happily say that I have put remblai to use.  The sign means ‘I will accept hard core’ as the home owner is trying to create banks on his steep property and needs to build up the terraces.

And for most of late afternoon and early evening I was doing the same. Not with hardcore, but with soil, some small rocks and weeds.  The slow but pleasurable job of pulling the thin soil and weed off the rocks above the lawn continues.

And what to do with the landfill? Move it in buckets just a few feet away to build up the bank behind the miscanthus. Result.

The only grasses I’m going to try and keep on this very long bank (Sixty feet long? I haven’t paced it out.) are the eragrostis curvula I grew from seed.

I was so absorbed I didn’t down trowel until 8pm when Artur let me know that it was ridiculous to stay out so long.  He had conveniently plonked himself right in the path where I was walking to empty the buckets of soil.

Silly cat.  But it was that fantastic late afternoon sun which just blazed down after a week of unsettled weather.