Last night’s home confinement excitement was the arrival of a very large John Deere tractor in our neighborhood around 18h. Those John Deere shades of mechanical green and yellow always make me think of Vermont and farms and lambing season. In another life, I would live in a oversized patchwork dress stained with red wine and full of quick hand-made repairs to loose threads and mysterious rips (like the one I bought in 2003 from a friperie in Paris). And I’d roam my garden of herbs and peonies, yellow roses and bougainvillea surrounding koi ponds – and a meadow where my lamb babies would roam and bounce and bleat. Unfortunately, this tractor wasn’t on duty to deliver anything small, furry, and cute. Rather, it was hauling a massive empty tank and a set of nasty pipes that would soon go to work pumping out all the sludge from a neighbor’s septic tank through a hole in their back yard.
Let me remind you: we’re in the middle of a pandemic. It’s complete home confinement and permission slip-controlled activity around here, which means everyone is home and looking for something to distract them. And you better believe that everyone was looking at this giant machine with great anticipation to see a late afternoon shit show. Literally.
The lone driver was a young guy who couldn’t have been more than 23. First came the noise – some kind of whirring that was probably a vacuum within the tank. Nina and I looked at each other, and I lifted her up to peek as far as we could over our fence without being too obvious that we needed entertainment. And then came the smell, one unmistakably of all things bathroom business. Prout Prout Prout we sang. A little pet here and another pet there. Here a pet, there a pet, everywhere a pet pet. (This is the kind of stuff we sing. I’m not proud. But I’m honest.) When we got to the upstairs bathroom to draw the water for Nina’s bath, I realized I had a direct shot at everything that little guy was doing in the neighbor’s yard. He was using that hose as a giant straw through which the vacuum in the tank was sucking up tons of shit sludge from a hole the size of a car tire to travel the distance of my neighbor’s house, up over a fence, and into that tank. And, who knows, maybe it’s because we are in the middle of a pandemic that this guy wasn’t wearing any gloves. It bothered me for a second. Bu then, do you care about fecal germs when this is our reality? Probably not.
I wish I could say the hose came loose and started whirling about like some Pecos Bill episode involving a lasso and a tornado. But there was none of that. Just your typical septic tank cleaning in the middle of a pandemic.
Since yesterday, a few updates have come down the line:
— No use of bicycles while exercising. Run – run with your child – but that’s it.
— The marché in Vannes is going to actually be open tomorrow. They’ve moved 40-50 food-only vendors to an open-air park and will only allow up to 100 visitors at at time. I feel for small businesses, but I don’t understand the logic here. We’re literally locked in for an indefinite period of time and need a permission slip to leave the house. But the market is okay to organize and attend? I’m confused.
Back to singing prout prout prout and wondering what’s next.
THE CACHETTE 