Feutre

Tuesday February 15, 2011 Day 230

Saturday when I went looking for felt, I dropped into one fabric store. When the clerk told me he did not have felt, I let the matter drop. Today I went to a different store, went in and asked for “feutre.” The clerk asked me something about “tissue, which is “fabric” in French. I wasn’t sure exactly what she said, but I gambled and told her “yes.” She took me back and showed me a marking pencil for fabric. No, I shook my head, feutre. She insisted that the pencil IS feutre. We bandied the conversation back and forth for a moment, then Roger stepped forward and tried to explain that we wanted felt to go onto the bottom of his chess pieces, but this just muddied the conversation. I looked around for a moment and spotted a sewing machine set up for sewing classes, so I went over to it. I tilted it slightly and indicated the little feet on the bottom of the machine. It turns out they were rubber (!) but that conveyed the idea. The light bulb went on in the clerk‘s eye, and she turned and pulled out a box. Opening it, she displayed squares of colored felt. Voila! We selected a green square and I asked her what it was called in French. She told me, but I didn’t get it. Nevertheless, we walked out happily with our green feutre.

From there we went to the market. I have realized that one of the things I like about the market is the opportunity of flirting with the vendors. We have our friends, who have come to recognize us from one time to the next. We carry on a light flirtation in a combination of English and French. The cheese guy is particularly amusing because he mocks us slightly in both English and French. The olive and nut vendor always tells us “taste, taste!” and so we do - a couple of nuts one time, a certain stuffed olive another, and a dried date or mango still another time.



Our cheese vendor, clowning for a photo

 We bought flowers for belated Valentine’s Day - some daffodils and a red-flowered plant similar to a gloxinia, but without the velvet leaves and with smaller flowers. Speaking of flowers, I still have no tulips in the window boxes.

I did make a woman smile at me today. Roger and I were on our way to the market, and she was on her bicycle. We were crossing the street and she was coming down it. He was ahead of me, already almost on the sidewalk. I hesitated, sort of in the middle of the street, trying to decide how to avoid her. She was still many meters away, trying to determine what I was going to do. At my pause, she let up just a bit and considered swerving right around me. At almost the same time, I reminded myself that, for my safety when bicycles are approaching, I am better off continuing on whatever path I had set, so I moved on across the street. But for a few seconds there, she and I did a little dance in the street. When I grinned at her in passing, she returned my smile.