A cold snowy Monday morning

Monday morning, the alarm gently wakes us up at 7:30, we have 30 minutes to get ready and go down for breakfast.  It is a cold morning, it has been snowing for the past few days and there is no school bus today.  There are hardly any cars on the road, but the major of the town phoned me last night to assure me that the school and the school canteen were going to be open.  The roads are too slidy to take the car out, so we will need to walk to school. 

Eight o’clock and we are all ready having breakfast; we need to leave at 8:30 if we want to make it on time for school.  After a bowl of hot porridge we are ready to go.  Behind our house there is a mountain path that takes us to the ancient town of Saint Marcel where the school is.  Apart from the steep heel at the start, it is a lovely walk; we need to pass through the Roman ruins and the Saint Marcel’s walls to get to the town.  It is freezing cold, but we have fun walking, following and guessing which footprints belong to what animals.   The children are delighted to identify rabbits poo.  They learnt all the different types of poo last month at school.  Now they are attentively looking around trying to spot the rabbits.

Fifteen minutes singing and hoping to school when all of a sudden we find a deer staring at us from behind the bushes.  He must think we are not danger because he comes out of his shelter and crosses the path in front of us.  We look at each other in surprise, when a second and then a third deer do exactly the same.  I feel blessed, despite the cold, we are having a great morning.  

Mornings like this one, remind me why I moved to France, why I moved from the city to a small village in the middle of  France.  Where else would my children see wild rabbits and deer running in the morning?  Where else would we have to cross a field of snow and Roman ruins to get to school?