Housewife In Training: Complete

Tonight is my last night here in St Michel and I realized my transformation into a housewife yesterday. As I have said before, here at St Michel, the women do the "women's work" and the men do the "men's work." After 2 months I am STILL yet to see Philippe do a single dish. Even if he needs something that's dirty, he seems to find something else that is already clean and will work well enough. So yesterday, after I went to the bakery for bread, went on a walk with Brigitte, did some laundry and grocery shopping...I decided to go back to the spot where I had seen cherries growing during our walk. A weird urge came over me to bake a cherry pie. This has never happened before. You are probably imagining me skipping down the street in a sun dress with sunflowers, rainbows and hearts on it and carrying a perfect little basket with a small dog running behind me, but I actually looked quite the opposite. Now I say, "housewife in training" because I still had not completed my certification as of yesterday. When I went to pick these cherries, I was still dressed in my walking clothes (nothing pretty) and I was jogging to the cherry tree with a plastic bag from the hardware store. When I got there, the tree was very much taller than I remembered when we had passed it earlier. I had made the trek though, so some cherries were comin' down. I climbed up a ways and found myself surrounded by sticker bushes that stuck me all over real good. I nearly fell and rolled down the hill through them trying to reach a high branch, that was just one of the close calls I had from going cherry pickin'. I managed to get some cherries into my plastic bag after lots of jumping, getting cherry juice all over me and being bitten by plenty of weird things lurking in the grass around me. Not enough for a pie though. Fail. Once I make it semi-safely back to the road I narrowly avoided being shit on by a gigantic bird. It would have taken a looooong shower to clean off after one of those. That was the second close call. Then as I am heading back, I feel rain drops and lately when it has rained, it has POURED. I get nervous and start sprinting back to St Michel. It's up hill, so I get tired quickly. Luckily though, the rain stops and the sky breaks out into sun. That would be close call  the third. It feels like a pretty good day after I realize I have at least, some cherries, did not fall into sticker bushes, wasn't shit on by an over-sized flying animal and then rained down upon as I trudged uphill home. Anyway, I am now an expert gardener, painter, bed-maker, dish do-er, table setter, grocery getter and who knows what else. But with having a cherry pie making urge and completing my last full day at St Michel, I would say I am housewife ready...if that type of crap were anything I was interested in. NOT (please see the above picture...not the one with Jessica Simpson).