This week let me introduce – if you have not met them – some strange people. You see, I am living a few weeks in a tiny village in France. All around me are peculiar folks.

First, they are tidy. Incredibly tidy. Their yards, their gardens, their stacks of firewood. Tidy.

And I cannot imagine what they do with their rubbish. I mean, they don’t toss it out the window of their cars. In the U.S.. walk along any country road or highway. You can fill a garbage bag with beer and Coke cans and Quarter-Pounder wrappings every quarter-mile. Here, you would need to vacuum five miles of roadside to fill a shopping bag.

I waded through an outside market of 300 vendors and 10,000 shoppers. No trash on the streets! Are these people crazy? I stopped for lunch. When I came onto the street again, the vendors were gone. The crowds had disappeared. And there was barely a sign either had been there an hour before. No rubbish left behind. Do you suppose they ate it? Or took it with them? When they had a perfectly good street to fling it onto? Crazy people. Crazy.