Down the street.

This past weekend I took a walk around the neighborhood, just to see what's there in the empty space between the freeway access road and a couple of streets nearby. It's like a hole on the map there. My whole area, it seems, used to be composed of large suburban lots or small farms, most of which have been cut up to put two or more houses where there used to be one. My own house is one of the few remaining that retains a really deep yard - most of the others on my street have put a second house in the back so that neither one has much of a yard.

I'm thinking seriously of finding a house to buy. Although I've always said I wouldn't buy the one I live in even were it for sale (because of the major work that needs to be done on it), I've come to realize it is just the sort of place I want: Lots of yard, just two bedrooms, walking distance to the town center, public transportation.

So I wandered around to see if anything like that was on the market, and ended up in this lost triangle of Aubière. There were a couple of vegetable gardens. One was meticulously cared for, and might have belonged to one of the vendors at the Market on Sundays. Farther down the dirt road, another was overgrown but you could still see where the rows were, and a little flag at the end of each one. Looking around in the trees, I noticed they were apples. Still giving fruit, though nobody was beating a path through the weeds to harvest them. Abandoned fruit trees are the saddest landscape. There were two old cabins, gone to ruin, and by the abandoned plot people had thrown junk like this old washer.

Follow another of the dirt roads there, and it rises to this abandoned vineyard, one with a great view. Auvergne is not a great wine-making region, though there are vineyards here and there (even one right in the center of town).

It too was still putting out fruit.

Along the road was the real find of the day: blackberries! At the bottom of this road there was a house and a yardful of junk and three yapping dogs, and at the top, beyond the vineyard, there was a well-kept field and cabin, so I wasn't sure that somebody didn't have claim to the berries already.
I went back later with a plastic box and collected a few anyway. Just a few. I didn't take any that weren't ripe yet.