New vocation

We'd filled the car with drift wood before leaving Les Landes.

I waited for Nico to go off to l'Allée des soupirs to play pétanque and felt the freedom of creativity that always gets me when I'm alone at the moulin.

I'm not clever with my hands.  As a child I spent hours in Papa's workshop watching him making furniture.  Sitting on floor sifting sawdust through my fingers.  I learnt nothing from him because he was a bad teacher but I loved watching his big hands working slowly at the wood.  I'd get in his way and he'd say 'damn the maid' in his Devon accent and start working on a machine that sent sparks everywhere and sent me running down the allotment path away from the workshop and into the circle of great aunts who spent the afternoon drinking tea and smoking cigarettes and gossiping under the cherry tree.

My drift wood is still ocean wet but I'm impatient and pillaged all the workshop spaces that Nico has created in the enormous, mysterious space that's the Minotérie.


I cobbled together what I thought might do the job and set to work. 
The ocean had made the wood beautiful and I didn't want to spoil that beauty.  

Trial and error, but it worked.