Les Voleurs

All I can remember are a pair of tanned legs, dark shorts, white socks and runners leaping out the door. The next image is of two strapping youths leaping the 7-foot fence, one after the other - the latter heaving my laptop over at the first to cover it. Blank again until I ran out on the street and saw them get into a car waiting and speed off down the lane. Black car, yellow numberplate. Too fast to read the plate.
Book gone. Photos gone.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I wonder if they looked at my thousands of non-backed-up photos before they wiped my hard drive? Did they admire my favourites? The one of the small white yachts shimmering in the reflection at the Marseille waterfront? My son, so close up you could count the freckles on his nose, but his head twisted at an angle and smiling in a way I never seem to capture normally. The sun setting with a violet sky over olive and indigo lavender fields just out of Eyragues. My kids sitting in the grand window at Chateau La Nerthe playing on iPhones that were also stolen. They wouldn't have read my work, that's for sure. They were French, and my work was not only in English. Broken, incomplete and at some times simply sentences, feelings, words.
C'est la vie, they say. So, I start again. But I can no longer call my book 'A month in Provence' - that's for sure. How about "A month in Provence with 5 days of pictures"?
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PS - always back up your work (Preferably not on an external drive that is not connected to a computer when thieves nick off with it).