Sheep and shepherdesses

The house is getting into a mess.  Stuff is gathering like dust under a bed.  It seems to have given up with us, or us with it and neither side is making much of an effort. 
The washing machine refuses to spin or drain and towels have been marinating in their own dirty water for a few weeks.  
Bernie flops his river-wet body down, leaving Turin shroudesque imprints of his tummy on the tiles.
Both he and the cats are moulting, their winter residue balling up with acacia pollen in every abandoned corner.
My bicycle seems to take up more and more space in the kitchen as if it's growing. 
Stuff gathers on the stairs, making it up to the first or second step and no further.  
The house feels like it's trying to suffocate us.
In my defence there are reports to write, final piles of work to mark, the exigences of the French education's administration system to deal with as the school year folds into summer.
It didn't take much to persuade me to leave all this behind and get into hills, although this didn't prove less stressful.
Down in the valley the Foreign Legion were doing target practice with machine guns, sheep peppered the hills, protected from the wolves by two Pyrenean mountain dogs which frighten me even more than donkeys.
We slithered down steep paths with Mu fending them off with a fence post.
In front of Etiennette's old farm a handsome man was fixing a fence.  He asked me if I'd known Madame Rouzy, so I took quite a long time recounting my memories as they came back one by one.
She called me Poupette and sat me down on the bench in front of her farmhouse.  We looked at her geese and ducks and chickens doing what they do and she said she could watch them for hours and hours.  She was 80 something when she told me, with regret and frustration, about a dream she'd had the night before.  She was making love to a man and had woken up at the moment of climax.  She looked sad and thoughtful and I put my arm around her in an effort of consolation..
I told the handsome man that hearsay claimed she would leave her husband at home in an alcoholic stupor and tend to the sheep in the fields around the farm; one field for each of her lovers.  I was glad she'd taken pleasure.
She told me that the day she married a donkey carried her to her new home with her trousseau in saddle bags.
When she died a couple of years ago, aged 93, no one told me, so I missed her funeral.
The only trace I have of her is a photo taken in the farmer's market in the '70s.  She's beautiful, full of sensual malice and stands next to a young man with her arm around his shoulder and a dead rabbit in each hand.