"Savor the little moments, son, that's my advice. They're what life is. All the little things that happen while you're waiting for something else." - Joe Abercrombie
A few snapshots from our fourth week at the castle. The sun is back, which means in the afternoon, outside is about ten degrees warmer than indoors. Mornings are for gallons of coffee and painting. David always plays Cardi-B to mark the beginning of our 'work' day, partially to annoy me and partially to make me laugh. Other than this highly inappropriate track (kids are fortunatelly at school by the time we get up and going), he likes to listen to GOOD music and dance around. I prefer listening to my podcasts (the latest episode of The Astonishing Legends podcast is about 'The Beast of Gevaudan', which I often hear screeching outside the castle walls, when we climb onto our terrace, shrouded in bed sheets like ghosts, to smoke CBD in the middle of the night) or audiobooks (right now, it's the wonderfully nostalgic and clever 'The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires').
Outside the listening preferrences though - we LOVE working together. A big 'phew' as before we left on our journey around the world in 2019, this has always only been suspected, never truly empirically confirmed.
We eat our lunch at the back of the castle, by the swimming pool, kind of anytime we really feel like (although I'm sticking to the intermittent fasting, so not before 1pm for me), sometimes having two ponies for company. Charlie Magic & Rachel, who's over twenty and fully committed to finding the best tree or at least a branch to scratch herself against, sometimes looking like a very enthusiastic retired pole dancer.
The big horses (I always thought they were just grown-up ponies when I was little. I still kind of think that.) are now roaming free on the castle property, helping to keep the lawns in check. They're giant and very quiet. When you look at the front lawn from our terrace, you experience a total zen stillness, just birds collecting twigs & straws, flying in circles to confuse the cats before quickly diving into a hole in the wall or a roof to build their nests in a top secret location (they're in the old Armagnac distillery), and time seems to be only measured by rythmic silent flicking of horses' tails.
There's a couple of house cats and a couple of wild cats..a number that keeps growing by the day - as with the sun, feline urges also intensified, so we're having some new geezers lurking around hoping to climb on top of our Luna, the blue-eyed cat goddess.
Add to it a couple of bassets, extremely cute & extremely weak in regards to the temptations of gluttony. They're modus operandi is jumping continuously just in case humans carry something tasty just outside they're reach. They're 60 kilos each, so the insistant jumping is a real health hazard. The latest addition to this castle duology came unexpectedly just a few hours after my grandma passed away back home in Czech. A shock of the sad news replaced a new shock - one of the two adult goats (no one had even a clue about the pregnancy) gave birth the same afternoon to a little one called Babi Puzzle - to honour both my nan and the totally puzzling way this baby goat came to us.
It's a busy life here at the castle. With all of the land around, with all the rooms - there's still never enough space for quietness, time to be lonely or bored. But even with heart that's heavy and brain that's frazzled, I wake up every day feeling so blessed to have found this amazing family on our very first Workaway adventure. So blessed to be falling asleep and waking up next to my best friend, to laugh and be total idiots in whichever times we find ourselves in, the good/the bad/the in-between, all of those of our own making and under our own direction. If life is a simulation, we definitely unknowingly designed this game level. It's got everything we love and most importantly we're playing it together.
