seen at the vide grenier...

with bazouges la perouse as the center point of a 10 mile and very bike-able diameter, there are several a rolling and sometimes steeply inclining road leading to the surrounding 5 villages. of these: st-remy-du-plain, rimou, noyal-sous-bazouges, marcille-raoul, and tremblay; I recently visited a sunday vide grenier of the last, where the anticipated use of my camera replaced my wallet for a pursued value of people and their things. here I found the plaza and 2 streets of still another small town filled that day with barbie dolls in karate stances, halloween heads and costumes to match, porcelain cows grazing amongst plastic flowers, birds sold with cages, carnival games, and an oversized pikachu. then, mixed within all of this western equated garble is a plethora of plow equipment, butter churns and boots, dried flower arrangements interwoven with rusty farm tools, tractor wheels, french texts, and the people who may have read them.... and the people! the people of bretagne: those that spend their youth participating in garage sales for a parent's living, and those that have aged as many years as the rusty wheels that surround them; those that bring an eclecticism to the day's display of french culture, and those who stick to their roots while wanting just as badly to make a buck. perhaps to their dismay I hear few other tourists this morning, though maybe the occasional british family making a visit to their summerhome. still, they all want stuff... don't they? whose day (hour) (minute) will be made by an impulse buy? I linger to watch them shuffle along these blankets of the out-grown, over-used, or simply undesired, and children running for new piles of toys weave in between or around them. I see signs reading 1 euro a piece beside a collection of copper pots, but take more notice to the smile that surmises an exchange; for if I could collect all of those moments of fleeting satisfaction, I could give another a very fulfilling lifetime.
on the tight, winding street leading out of the town, I'm looking again at strange bugs and the small secrets of the architectures' alley ways. in quaint admiration, I linger on a makeshift table of vegetable crates and scrap plywood, adorned with a lace-like doily and the remnants of that days lunch: some leftover bread crumbs, a few scattered pieces of fruit, an emptied glass of cider and the bottle to match... returning home, I smile to another helpful helping of candid moments and these simple observations.