trough had weathered and cracked. This looked bad enough from the outside; but when I checked in the attic, water had been leaking in for so long that a supporting beam was seriously rotted. This repair was beyond my skills, and by the time a roofer had carefully slid a new beam in place to shore up the damaged beam and the trough was sealed once more, our budget for the summer had taken a hard hit.
• • •
I would not have believed that there was a social life at ‘la déchetterie’. That’s the French word for the garbage dump. Furthermore, I had no idea why the word used the feminine adjective la. But that aside, there was something to be learned here about life in our village. I had a mountain of small branches and twigs to dispose of after I had cut down the oak tree in the garden. So I began piling the debris onto a tarpaulin, tying it up and stuffing it, along with the broken tiles, into the hatchback of our car. This meant a number of trips, but fortunately the dump was nearby.
I had dropped off refuse there once before. That time, the man in charge had asked me where I lived. It seemed like an odd question, but I had told him Serre de Reynier in Nyons and pointed up the hill toward our house. He didn’t say anything more and just walked back to his chair by the shed. I learned later that if I had been from outside Nyons, he would have told me that I couldn’t drop off the refuse and would have sent me packing.
This time, when I drove up the ramp beside the bins with the first load of tree branches, I had barely unlatched the hatchback when the caretaker appeared beside me looking at the contents of the tarpaulin and the broken roof tiles.
“Ah, là, le ratissage . . . et là, le béton . . .,” he said, jabbing his finger toward one bin and then another.
The dump was a compound behind a high wire fence with gates that were locked after hours—not so much to prevent theft as it was unlikely anyone would want to steal junk, but to stop people from leaving trash that didn’t belong there or might be placed in a wrong bin. There were five bins in all, each huge and at least eight feet deep. A ramp had been built alongside so that cars and trucks could easily drive up and unload. There were two men in charge to make sure that everyone used the right bins.
The hours were strict. It was open from eight in the morning until noon and did not reopen again until two. I learned that one day when I drove through the gates a few minutes before noon and one of the caretakers began advancing aggressively toward my car, waving me off.
“Non, non!” he said, and then other words that I didn’t understand, all the while gesticulating energetically. It was clear he didn’t want me there.
“Pourquoi—why?”
He tapped at his watch and began to move his hands back and forth with the palms facing down. That meant no. I glanced at my watch. It was five to twelve. I had five minutes. However, the unwritten French law of ‘never work at lunch’ had already kicked in.
“Un petit moment—that’s all,” I said.
He hesitated just a moment too long, leaving me an opening that I took, and I drove up the ramp. It required only a minute to empty the tarpaulin of twigs into the appropriate bin and drive down the ramp, but he was already standing at the gate waiting to lock it behind me. I smiled my best smile and waved.
Over time, I kept running into people I knew and at first thought it was just one of those coincidences. But gradually, I became aware that there was also an active social life at la déchetterie. One day François was unloading hedge trimmings from his truck. We warmly greeted each other and passed a few words before getting on with unloading our vehicles. Another time I met our plumber, and we shook hands and chatted. Then I noticed that others were doing the same thing. Sometimes the ramp was crowded with vehicles while the drivers stood talking amiably, waiting their turn. If unloading junk was a slow process, it was even slower the moment two acquaintances showed up, for all the correct social etiquette had to be followed: the greeting, shaking of hands and some polite discussion that inevitably led to other subjects.
Once I saw a woman drive in and pull up to the back of the line. The men promptly stopped their conversation, helped her unload her vehicle and sent her on her way. This was clearly a man’s hang-out, and I slowly realized that most of these people had either a passing acquaintance with each other, or were friends, or even relatives. This was part of village life, and sooner or later everyone met here.
On another day I saw the older of the two caretakers yelling at a man who had just dropped an old bike into one of the bins. I watched as the man sheepishly crawled over the edge of the bin and down inside it. The caretaker now pointed at another bin and continued to yell at the man who climbed out and carried his bit of junk over to the correct bin.
“By now you must know that the caretaker is ‘the colonel of the dump’,” Hélène said when I told her what had occurred. “He’s the one in charge and he takes his work totally seriously. That’s his turf—and don’t mess with him!”
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