9/10/44 Corsica
Honey:
Last night I helped celebrate the anniversary of the first year of liberation of Corsica. This morning I didn’t feel much like working, as you can well imagine. So I drove all around Café Corse [Corsica]. The fresh air (and aspirins) left me in pretty fair shape.
It was an interesting trip. I saw a windmill of a most peculiar type. The vanes were mounted horizontally, and supported on top of the storage tank.
They grow a lot of field corn here, but it is used solely for feeding chickens. As there is a nearly perpetual wind, it grows on the bias, each stalking leaning about 45 degrees.
Cork trees are also common. The cork bark is stripped off to a height of about 2 meters, leaving a smooth inner bark exposed. This stripping makes the trees look like the legs of a poodle which have been sheared halfway up.
Each little town has at least once church. Over here, instead of having real bell towers which are square, these are ersatz as show in sketch. The whole business is made of stone.
The vehicles on the road were all made before 1925, many of them dating back to 1914. The enclosure is a sketch I made of a bright little red number. It was a “Moon.” There are also some old air-cooled “Franklins,” and some “Stanley Steamers.”
We stopped in a little restaurant for lunch. The people were as clean as those back home. Lunch was not bad. We had a salad of greens, tomatoes, onion, & garlic with French dressing. This was followed by some pasta (like dumplings). Then we had some corn on the cob and an omelet with more salad. Dessert consisted of a peach about 4 inches in diameter. Although the outside of the kettles in which they cook was left absolutely black by charcoal & wood fires, the inside was polished copper.
The phone on the wall, although normal in Europe, looks like something from 1900. A French sailor and his wife and little boy were also eating there. Their uniforms are quite colorful. The hats have little red puff balls on them, and their vests are white with ½ inch blue horizontal stripes.
That’s the dope for now. I hope our mail starts coming through again.
Love, Cy