Last Tango in Toulouse by Mary Moody

Author:Mary Moody
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia

20

Every weekend the children come to the farm, bringing their own children and their dogs. Our two younger sons, Aaron and Ethan, have both agreed to work around the farm in return for some financial help with establishing their own homes and businesses. Ethan is establishing a wholesale nursery in one of the paddocks behind the big old shed and, with a partner, intends to grow tubestock of local native plants for large-scale bush regeneration projects. Aaron, who lives and works in Mudgee with his wife Lorna and two small children, loves the farm and should probably have been brought up on one himself. He wears a battered bush hat and thrashes the old ‘paddock basher’ Dodge ute around the back blocks of the farm, cutting up wood for the fires and repairing the wobbly fences. Between them the boys have an impressive list of horticultural qualifications and have followed in my footsteps in their love of nature, the soil and growing things. It’s very gratifying.

I spend most of the weekends playing with my grandchildren and preparing huge family meals that we eat under the cherry tree if the weather is warm, or at the vast table in the formal dining room when it’s cold. The house is fully set up for small children, with cots and highchairs and bath toys. I have even started to accumulate a collection of ‘farm clothes’ for the children, including stacks of gumboots and spare outfits for the inevitable accidents when they get smothered in mud or fall in the creek. These weekends are sheer bliss, and I realise that the only time I feel truly, deeply happy is when I am surrounded by all the little ones. I feel safe, and needed, and well loved when there are six small people swinging around my ankles. How can this be so? By this stage of my life I should have got over this urgent need to be loved and needed. But I haven’t. When I am here alone with David I feel somehow hollow and wanting. When the entire gang is around, laughing and talking full belt and drinking beer and wrangling with the children, I feel like my old self again.

My daughter and daughters-in-law all love to cook and these weekend get-togethers are triumphs of teamwork. When I first returned from France I lugged back heavy tins of confit du canard (preserved duck) for which I paid exorbitant excess baggage charges because Air France had decided to start weighing every passenger’s hand luggage. When we finally decide to open them I tell the children this will be a very expensive lunch, but worth every mouthful.

We start with an aperitif called Fenelon, which is very typical of the southwest of France. It’s made from splash of eau de noix (walnut liquor) and a splash of cassis (blackcurrant liquor), topped up with dry red wine. I have found a recipe on the Internet for making eau de noix from green walnuts and I plan to start a batch the following season if our trees escape the frost.

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