Spring fair

Our friends Bernard, Marie-Jo and Gaby at their stall in the village today, selling olive oil from their mill, Le Moulin de Casso, as part of a spring fair which filled the street with stalls selling cheese, wine, plants, honey, asparagus, strawberries and crafts. As well as local goats' cheese and Basque sheep's cheese, we bought Bouteillan and Picholine oils from le Moulin de Casso - both have distinctive and delicious flavours.

I blipped part of the machinery in the mill when it first opened the autumn before last - here

This is for my mother who loved Mediterranean markets, and olive oil, as much as I do. Ten years ago this evening I went home from a writing workshop in Lampeter, driving west towards a spectacular sunset, a band of red which deepened as the blue faded from the sky, to find a message telling me that my mother had been taken to hospital. I drove on through the long grey twilight of an early summer night in west Wales to be with her. My sister was there too, and Lo Jardinièr, supportive as always. By the time the sun rose again my mother had died. I still miss her.

My response to this week's 2011 Challenge - mother