Lo Vedo Life

Zoom for the holidays, plus a walk around town

A year ago—which feels rather like an entire lifetime ago—I could not have imagined writing this post. But here we are, near the end of 2020: the holidays are upon us, and we are spending much less time in person with other people and more time connecting via technology. Whether you’re working from home or chatting with friends and family, video conferencing has become a fact of life for a great many of us around the world.

How to look your best in a Zoom call
There is a wealth of information out there about how to look good on a video call, and I thought I wouldn’t need to add my two cents’ worth. However, I’ve noticed some issues in my own calls, so I thought I’d go ahead and write up a few tips. Everything here comes from my own experiences in video calls, plus I’ve also included a few links to other articles. There are no photos, because I didn’t ask my friends’ permission!

Gratitude and autumn color

In the United States, late November means Thanksgiving, a holiday that was intended to recognize a spirit of harmonious living and sharing during a difficult time, and a way of showing gratitude for a successful harvest. Americans have a lot of different ways of recognizing this holiday—American football is often involved—but I think of it as a time to be together with those you love, to share the bounty of good food, and to remember all that we have to be thankful for.

With this year’s confinement in France, I haven’t been able to stray far from home, and I’ll be enjoying my Thanksgiving feast solo (see a photo of last year’s dinner below). Throughout this message, I’m sprinkling in a few views of autumn leaves near my house. Here in my little corner of paradise, we don’t have the red maple trees of New England, nor the golden aspen of Colorado, but we do have an abundance of wine trees,* and they’ve given us a glorious show this year.

Old stone walls

Where there is rocky soil, there will be stone walls. I don’t know why, but I love these things that are built of stones. I have enough photographs for at least two stories, and this first one is to introduce you to some of the walls and other structures near where I live. Nearly every day, I pass one or another of these sites as I walk around the hills.

Before there were machines, anyone who wanted to farm the soil had to first do the hard work of removing the larger rocks. By hand.

You can picture it: there is a plot of land that someone would like to plant with food crops. The land is rocky, which makes farm work difficult, so the first chore is to remove all those rocks. The whole family spends as much time as it takes—days, weeks, months, a lifetime—to move the rocks away from the field. As time passes, there are growing piles of stones at the edges of the field.

Searching for the phoenix

“Burning Embers” is a close-up photograph of grape leaves in late autumn.

I’m searching for a phoenix. I’m searching for who and what will rise from the ashes of the year 2020. The world—every nation, every people, every one of us—has lost so very much this year.

The eerily quiet streets of Paris

Covid Spacing — Usually restaurants in Paris have tiny tables all crammed together against the banquette along the wall. Here’s the covid spacing in one restaurant I visited.

Paris in the time of Covid

I spent the Covid lockdown of late winter and spring 2020 in the rural South of France, in a region that had few cases and very few deaths. Ours was one of the first regions to be declared “green,” which meant that we got to ease out of the restrictions a little more quickly than other parts of France that were labelled orange or red.

As the confinement came to a close in mid-May, my friend Olivier suggested that this summer might be a good time to visit Paris. In my mind, Paris is always a good idea (thank you, Audrey Hepburn!), but I really waffled about whether to make this trip. Traveling from a region with low numbers for the disease into a red-zone city that saw a high number of cases and deaths was enough of a risk to give me pause. Eventually I decided to go, mainly to see what Paris would look like without the crowds. Today’s post is a little journal of my visit to the City of Light.

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Song of summer

Garden Toad — A toad the size of my hand surprised me one morning when I was watering my garden.

Heard from my terrace
You know that old story about how city people can’t fall asleep in the countryside because it’s too quiet? Well, that doesn’t hold water here in the South of France. It is not quiet; all manner of things are making noise. I’m here today to talk about two of the noisemakers: cicadas and frogs.

The cicadas awaken when the sun pops over the hills and begins to warm the earth. All day long, every day through the summer, the cicadas sing their amazing song. That music can get quite loud, up to 120 decibels, enough to damage human ears at close range. The cicada—cigale in French—is among the longest-lived insects, and it is recognized as a symbol of longevity and metamorphosis.

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