Meet
Your Host
I invite you to take a journey through time with me as you discover the events in my life that have lead me to where I am today…
Judy Stewart Vidal
CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
Summers spent in our 18th century farmhouse in the French Pyrenees, cradled in the lap of the Col du Tourmalet through which the Tour de France still zips.
Monsieur Cazeaux scythes the hay by hand; women and children fan it out till it dries. The oxen bring the loaded wagon to the barn where the men carry the bundles on their backs into the hayloft.
The sheep and the cows spend the warm months up in the mountains, roaming the commons, their range. The shepherd watches over them.
Madame Cazeaux calls me “ma pauvre”—“my poor one” as I try to tell her I live in NYC, and I am not poor; my father is an actor, she’s even seen him on TV.
ADULTHOOD
College. The Sorbonne. Independent theater producer and director; performances throughout France. A husband. Children. High school English teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Illness.
HOBART, NY
My mother, a WW2 veteran, and her 30 acres beckon me. New goal: produce healthy food for family and friends. Subsistence farming. Small and slow.
From the Pyrenees to the Catskills, via New Mexico, roaming the range.