Our Provençal villa sat at the top of a rolling hill, looking out over lavender fields toward Mont Ventoux, the mountain that cyclists climb in the Tour de France. The vista shifted with the light all day — pale and soft in the morning, then those pinky-purple clouds that turned up right around apéro hour.
This is something you only notice if you stay put. We weren't unpacking every few days or checking into somewhere new. One spacious room, one set of windows, one terrace, and a week to watch the scenery unfold.
Snowball hydrangeas framed the house and crowded the windows. We had breakfast by the pool and dinner overlooking the olive orchard, which stepped down the hillside in stone terraces. Some evenings we watched the sky change from the front lawn. Other times we walked up through the olive trees to the tennis court at the top, where the view opened all the way out to the mountains.
And many evenings, before we sat down to eat, we gathered on the patio facing Ventoux for l'apéro — spritzes and hors d'oeuvres from Bertrand, our chef's husband, who wouldn't let us so much as pour our own drinks. We were there to relax. He made sure of it.
There are worse ways to end an afternoon.
