Word: vallets
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...France, however. There is, for instance, the vastly different world of the peasant, as I found out while living and working last summer on a small farm in southeast France. Life was very different there, and I learned a lot from the family I stayed with--Henri and Charlotte Vallet and their 23-year-old son Gilles...
...even in the dreariness of their lives the Garcias were cheerful. Garcia would laugh and smile, his beautiful wife would sing, and his children would play jokes on one another, their laughter defying the meagerness around them. Even when Vallet was openly contemptuous of them, taunting them because they owned no land, the Garcias ignored the insults and laughed among themselves. That they could be so cheerful with seemingly so little reason left an indelible impression...
Still, the 20th century is slowly creeping into Moras En Valloire, transforming the village. The peasants have kept their work ethic as a legacy from their ancestors, but many of them own modern conveniences very much at odds with their traditions. The Vallets, for example, own a TV, and while eating dinner we often watched detective shows (Kojak and Mannix were Vallet favorites). Two tractors stood outside the house, but the Vallets used them only when machinery could do the job better than a person; and that was rare...
Everybody dances together, young and old alike, and every now and then the whole party forms a giant human chain which cavorts about before ending in a hopeless jumble of arms and legs. The music and dancing vary from French folk to American rock. Even my patron, M. Vallet, tried boogeying to the strains of Saturday Night Fever...
This reckless tendency manifests itself in more mundane affairs, like farmwork. Not only did the Vallets let me drive the tractor on the road--reckless in itself--but they generally acted rather casually about farm safety. One day, for instance, we needed to refill the gas tank of a steaming-hot diesel engine. We were irrigating a cornfield and the engine had been continuously pumping for several hours. The engine was incredibly hot, so hot that I expected it to explode at any moment. Several hundred people had just recently been killed in a liquid propane truck explosion in Spain...