A list of things I saw in 4 hours & 15 minutes from the Train à Grande Vitesse between Agen & Paris.

• Tractors. Everywhere red tractors- climbing shallow hills, furrowing chocolate fields, rumbling down country lanes.
• A short-horned deer leaping away from the tracks as we passed.
• Swollen rivers churned muddy by the recent rains.
• A soggy knot of schoolkids waiting their Friday afternoon train under the zinc eaves of a small town station.
• Slowly turning windmills, modern turbines whose strobe lights warn off low flying geese.
• Red tile roofs turning to gray slate roofs turning to cement and towered roofs.
• Vineyards. Picked, being picked and about to be picked in Sauternes.
• Fields, fields. fields.

France is a garden.