Lavoir and Fountain 4 at St. Catherine's Church, somewhere north of Anguoleme

 

 The river flattened and broadened. Water birds trilled, screeched or bobbed like corks. A man in waders sloshed through the weeds with his fishing pole. Occasionally he threw a glance over his shoulder leading me to believe that he was the father of the little boy who was chatting to me. Dressed in a freshly ironed blue and white shirt with matching shorts, he guided his new bike down the slipway to the river's edge. He turned and pointed to a polished black Mercedes parked behind us, and said that it belonged to his father. A Dutch family in a Volvo pulled up next to the Mercedes and proceeded to unpack the equipment for a full scale lunch by the river. A hundred meters upstream the fisherman was crossing a patch of white water, using his pole to keep his balance. 

The little boy asked for the time. He said his mother spoke English and that I could go home with him if I liked then he pedaled off past the cars.

To escape the sun, I decided picnic in the lavoir. Fish scales, like tiny chips from a rainbow, dried and curled on a stone slab table. The smell of centuries' worth of fish entrails and urine, however, forced me to retreat. I kept a polite distance from the Dutch family with their long carving knife and tiny chopping block. They wrestled cheese from its packaging, spiked silver parcels of herring from a jar, and placed slices of dark rye bread onto pink plastic plates.

Thwat thwat. Tomatoes fell into quarters in a pool of juice that ran down the slip way.

St. Catherine's Church sits with a handful of houses on a little rise in the landscape. Its low tower is only marginally taller than the nave and the nearby trees. All around it the land is cultivated with a variety of crops, but mostly maize. Is a curious bit of Romanesque architecture as the central nave is 3 steps lower than the north aisle, making it feel like a dingy white tunnel where you'd expect to see abandoned brooms leaning up against the walls. At the disused west door, a pearl oyster shell was crudely plastered into the wall to serve as a holy water font for several hundred years before becoming my 4th fountain.