As a reminder that we were now in La France Profonde, that mystical rural idyll which every Frenchman holds so dear, hens scurried in tiny apple orchards amid signs advertising Calvados and farm cider.
In the last 10 years, Urszula Malinowska and her husband have transformed their lives, turning a tiny farm and orchard into a wood-processing factory that employs 35 people.
We opened a tiny place on Orchard Street, had a couple of decent months, watched the block get decimated by two giant construction projects, cut our losses and got out.
One is the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, which was founded in 1988 in a storefront and now has 85,000 visitors a year who climb through the tiny rooms of its Orchard Street building.
With each mile the road narrowed, eventually turning into a single-lane dirt road that wound and wedged through olive orchards and tiny shabby gardens.
"I got tiny apricots from my local orchard and preserved them with brandy," she said.
Seated in the window of her tiny hideaway overlooking a secret orchard in central Ajaccio, Carrington described her earliest hunting memories, "when the late summer shadows lengthened and the excitement of the upcoming fox hunting season would begin to be palpable in the air.
The museum, which opened in 1988, takes visitors from around the world into tiny, historically restored apartments at 97 Orchard Street, where 7,000 people lived between 1863 and the 1930's.
That same day, five high school seniors gathered in the principal's office of tiny Bridgeport High School here among the orchards that line the Columbia River.
Although about 80 orchards make up the tiny North Carolina truffle industry, the harvest this year was probably not even 50 pounds, said Jane Morgan Smith, the recent past president of the North American Truffle Growers Association and one of the first people to grow them successfully in the state.
