Bonjour Everyone

Bonjour everyone, and hope all is well with all of you.

First and foremost, we’d like to send our heartfelt congratulations and best wishes to Andrea and Don on their upcoming marriage this week. We would be there to help you celebrate if it were at all possible, but just want you to know that our thoughts will be there for sure! Help us be a part of things by taking lots of pictures so we can see them soon. Our only advice for the two of you is to treat each other as you would want to be treated, and that takes care of most of anyone’s problems. We love you both, and hope your life together is a happy one.

After floating high on the heady cloud of the wedding, your real life begins as you land on earth again, and it’s wash day. Actually here it hasn’t been too bad at all; I don’t wash Jack’s suits, and we just have a load of whites and a load of darks to do about once a week. Drying things is more of a challenge, but we do have two of those collapsible drying racks, plus our imaginations. The chicken wire fence out back is perfect for the sheets, and when Jack pinned his blue jeans up on the roof storm drain, they were dry in record time. It’s funny though to come back home after appointments, and walk into the muggy, heavy air that hangs in the apt. from having our drying racks filled with wet things.

France is good at growing things, and they love their flowers especially. Open air flower shops are common, and the cities themselves vie for the title of Ville-Fleurie, that they win by how much they decorate their townships with flowers in every form. Each town has signs on all the major streets that show with posies how they are doing. Some towns have one posy, some have two, but Angouleme is a Four Posie Ville-Fleurie, and we’ve watched them work hard to maintain that distinction. When the spring blooms were past their prime in the round-a-bouts, and the islands in the streets, and in the parks, out came the workers to dig everything up and plant new, beautifully color coordinated beds of blooming flowers and bushes overnight. Some areas actually place planters in would-be parking spaces, in the street, to slow down traffic as well as grow more flowers, and drive motorists crazy. As soon as one flowering bush or tree stops blooming, it’s another one’s turn; I’m enjoying the sights to be seen.

As you can probably tell, summer is the slow time here; it feels like the whole country has taken a siesta! We met a bright young college student from Togo a couple of weeks ago, and had a great first meeting with her. She really is interested in reading the Book of Mormon. We have high hopes for her, but getting together again has been hard. Pray for the missionaries, they really are trying hard, but the opposition is great against them in so many ways; I am proud of their efforts.

That’s it from this part of the world for now.

Love, Mom (Joanne) Mam