Horatio Alger Pays Me a Visit

Monsieur Boudet pere drove in the yard yesterday evening while I was cutting off old geraniums to feed to Blanche. I was hoping that the driver of the white Renault truck was Monsieur Burc, the local carpenter who I called the other day and left a message with his wife that I need the roof of the mill fixed since the tiles are now falling three stories to the ground below and the situation could be dangerous, and I don’t want our mill to look like a bag of McDonald’s French fries. Our previous caretaker told me that he had pointed out the roof problem to my husband, but my husband claims he didn’t. I believe my husband because he’s a fanatic about getting the roofs fixed immediately when leaks rear their ugly heads. Luckily, it hasn’t been raining.

When I saw that it was Monsieur Boudet, I figured that he was coming to bring me his regrets for a party I had invited him and wife to attend. He stepped out of the truck. Gave me the obligatory two kisses, one on each cheek, and we started talking about the weather, as most farmers do when they first greet each other. I brought up the corn crops that are proliferating up our valley and he said that he wasn’t growing corn and he had gotten rid of his tobacco, because he now has too many vines with which he must contend.

When we arrived three years ago, the Boudet family had fields of tobacco, and other crops, but now they’ve evolved into full-fledged vintners. If you ever wanted to meet a family that has worked to pull itself up from extremely humble beginnings, it is Guy Boudet's family. Two sons work with him building their agricultural empire, one son owns a hotel and restaurant in a nearby town, and one son is a professor of some sort of incredibly difficult discipline which I wasn't disciplined enough to remember. Guy Boudet is the Horatio Alger of our neighborhood. You never saw a harder working man. He is also a great dancer and dances with all the ladies at the community fetes. I asked him if he was working during these hot afternoons, and he thought I was crazy for insinuating that he wouldn't work in the heat. He said he keeps the same schedule no matter what the weather. He must have been an incredibly handsome man when he was young, for he's quite good looking now as he approaches seventy. He's in great physical shape from his continual labor.

Guy assured me that no one irrigates out of our little ruisseau. He said all the farmers irrigate from the large river, through an irrigation pipeline association, and so the corn crops are not the reason for the fluctuating water problems in the canal. He was stumped though, as to what was causing the water in the canal to rise in the day and fall during the evening and night. He thought the opposite should be occurring due to evaporation.

He told me that he once worked for Monsieur Reste for ten years. I didn’t know that. But it shouldn’t have surprised me because I think that just about everyone of my neighbors worked for Monsieur Reste at the mill . . . except the Dupuis family and they had their own mill, however, I’ve never met anyone that worked for the Dupuis.

Monsieur Boudet told me that he and his wife would attend the lunch on Sunday, and that he would bring wine and ratafia on Saturday so that I could refrigerate it. This news was a pleasant surprise, as ratafia is hard to come by, yet highly sought, and since it is moonshine, you can’t buy it, by law, the makers can only give it away. Monsieur Boudet and his wife have never attended one of our lunches or dinners, so I was surprised and honored that he is attending and bringing me wine and ratafia, and lending me four plastic lawn chairs.

Later: This morning, I went to the bakery and put in my order for my Sunday morning pick-up of six tarts: three apple and three strawberry. Then I went next door to the butcher and placed my meat order for a Saturday afternoon pickup. The last time I was in there he couldn't understand my French and he seemed rather exasperated with me, today we got along great. Probably because I gave him a big order. The baker and the butcher don’t ask you for a deposit, they don’t even write down your phone number, they just write down your last name in a book with your order. I had wanted to order some strawberry mousse/cakes but as I was heading to order them at the bakery that specializes in such cakes, I remembered that I have an incredibly tiny refrigerator here and that I better just stick to the tarts. My husband called and was very excited because he has one more night in San Francisco and then he’s flying out here for a month. This evening my son has a friend from Toulouse coming to spend five days. On Sunday, I have thirty people coming for lunch. I’d like to have it outside, but the weather is broiling now with no sign of letting up.

Canal 22

Yesterday morning, I drove to the bakery to get bread together with some pastries for Madame and Monsieur Dupuis. Monsieur had come over the day before to look at the mill in order to tell me why it wasn’t holding water in its basin. Just before he left, he rang the front doorbell to give me his report. Since I was getting ready for the American luncheon, I had just taken a shower, my hair was wrapped in a towel, and I was brushing my teeth. I hung out the window wearing a robe and not being able to talk since I had a toothbrush in my mouth. He told me I needed to clean the grille, but I didn’t hear the "grille" part, I just assumed he meant I needed to clean the canal. That’s a job that requires a lot of money to be forked over, and it can’t be done until the canal is totally dry, either by hiring someone or purchasing an industrial strength gasoline powered weed whacker. So there’s nothing for me to do for the moment if that is the problem. I’ll let my husband go out and compare weed whackers.

After Monsieur Dupuis left, I felt rude that I hadn’t taken the time to come down and speak to him face to face, so I delivered a box of assorted pastries the next morning. His wife, who came out in her bathrobe was very pleased. He asked me if I had cleaned the grille, and I said “no.” He then took me down to his cave and handed me a type of pitchfork with long, curved tines. So bidding au revoir I headed off to the source of the canal. When I drove in the driveway that leads to the large, abandoned, maison de maitre of the famille de Folmont, and is our access to the beginning of our canal, there was a man standing there, near his car, who asked me if I needed to get through. I replied that I was just there to clean the grille. He was a young pleasant-looking man and I wasn’t afraid to be alone with him off the road in an abandoned wooded area, because I had this huge, menacingly, sharp pitchfork that I pulled out of the car. He took off immediately.

I made my way down the steep metal stairs leading to the river and the head of the canal. I pried off and pulled up lots of leaves and sticks from the grille, along with a ripped t-shirt. The scent of urine permeated the morning air, leaving a clue as to what the young man had been doing. I was able to clear away enough leaves and sticks to allow a stronger current of water to flow. I was very pleased with myself for having mastered a small component of mill stewardship. About an hour later, the water started to arrive in a small trickle at our mill.

Now the canal needs to be cleaned of all its weeds. We paid a man a couple of thousand Euros to do that two years ago, but as soon as we accomplished that task, the water dried up for two years because of a blockage in the pipe that carries the water under the de Folmont’s driveway.

So now, we have the source fixed, but the canal needs to be cleaned out of all its weeds. I fault the previous owner of our property, who worked for us until June 1st, for not getting the sequence of work right. Following his advice we cleaned the canal, only to have the weeds grow for two years because he didn’t see that the problem was the blockage in the pipe, then we were sued by the Comte because his portion of the canal ran dry, and soon after our canal ran dry, then the problem at the source was fixed, again taking a lot of money, and the previous owner/caretaker didn’t think to mention, that the canal doesn’t flow if it’s thickly populated by tall weeds that suck up the small stream of water. So we’ve had Catch 22 after Catch 22 in dealing with this mill. Voila! The new name for the canal: Canal 22.

And I question if cleaning the canal this summer is worth it. It seems as if every farmer up our small river valley has planted corn this year, and corn takes a lot of water to grow. So the stream is already running low, and it isn’t even July 1st yet. I doubt that we will have enough water to fill the mill pond. Yesterday, the pond seemed to be filling slowly, but surely. This morning I went out and there is no pool of water as there was yesterday, it’s just a thin stream running out under the small dam, which is built to let water run out under it. Trouble is, we don’t have enough water running in to overcome the amount of water that is flowing out.

So here’s the third summer in a row which will the canal will consume more money and consume me as I attempt to establish a meaningful flow of water. Monsieur Dupuis augments his retirement income by researching mill issues for an attorney up in Souillac. When I was over at his house he held up a piece of paper with the name of an American couple from Los Angeles written on it and asked me if I knew them. I said no. He said he was working on a legal problem they were having with their mill. I told Monsieur Dupuis that the French government needs to enact a law so that when stupid Americans come to France and are considering the purchase of a water mill, they need to be handed a sheet that lists and warns them of the trials and tribulations which will inevitably befall the owner who lives only part of the year at his mill. Monsieur and Madame Dupuis laughed and agreed with me. (Come to think of it, it’s rather interesting that I know of several water mill owners and they are all Americans . . . the French aren’t buying these albatrosses. The French do like to buy the windmills and restore them. They’re easier to manage because you don’t have to deal with droughts, insane Counts who share your canal, and tree roots blocking your culverts.)

I tried to take the joke to a personal level, by telling Dupuis that when he found out an American couple was buying the Moulin de Latour, he should have moved heaven and earth to find us and warn us against the purchase. But he and his wife didn’t find it funny . . . I think they thought I might take them to court for not warning me about water mill ownership – they used to own one which they sold to the Comte and then he promptly tore it down. And it would be against Monsieur Dupuis’ financial interests if stupid Americans stopped buying albatross water mills in France.

I was so proud of my grille cleaning, that I went out almost every hour to check on the progress of the filling of the mill pond. Everything was going as it should. That was until this morning, when I discovered to my chagrin that the pool had disappeared and the water was running out as fast as it was running in. Blanche was oblivious to my despair. She was getting high eating the pods off the nearby poppy plants.

I wrote about the Pagnol novel I’m reading a few posts ago, Jean de Florette. I’m at the point in the book where Jean has lost all his crops due to a lack of water, and is on the verge of dying from sunstroke. Struggling with my own canal, I deeply, deeply feel this character’s despair.

And despair was the overwhelming emotion I felt today as I pulled a million weeds and couldn’t discern any notable improvement. Preston went out and mowed, and then the fan belt that turns the blade shredded and fell off. After the weeding, I went and cleared brush and moved decades old piles of bottles, broken tiles, pieces of pipe, and assorted trash that had been throw on the bank above the canal by the previous owners. The work was hot, my arms hurt from hand sawing and moving heavy things and there is a big pile of branches now which need to be moved and shoved into the wood chipper. I think it will be decades before my work alters the grounds here into something pleasurable to view . . . instead of their current despair-inducing state.

I’m going to go out and sit on the opposite side of my sheep’s fence and sew a tablecloth by hand. I did it yesterday and found it to be extremely relaxing.

Americans Doing Lunch

Yesterday, Preston and I went to a six-hour lunch hosted by an American couple. That’s the longest lunch I’ve ever attended. There were over a hundred Americans in attendance from primarily from New York and New Jersey, a French couple from Bordeaux with their daughter, and two British ex-pat couples. I sat with an English teacher from New York, a food columnist for a major newspaper, a retired British man, and the host’s Swedish son-in-law and his parents.

I had an interesting time with the teacher discussing Faulkner . . . she said that she had quit teaching him to her classes because they were bored by him, but this year her class seemed so bright she brought out As I Lay Dying, and they loved it. That was an inspiring story to hear. She had also read From Here You Can’t See Paris. It is a book by an American writer who lived in nearby Les Arques for a year and wrote about La Recreation, a wonderful restaurant. (I met the writer at La Recreation and told him, in my blunt American way, that I wish he would have written the book in a way that leaves the area anonymous so our area didn’t become overrun like Peter Mayle’s Provence. And he replied with typical American reasoning that I should be pleased if that should happen because the value of my property would rise greatly. I told him that wasn’t my objective.) The teacher brought up the fact that in the book, the writer said that the locals don’t bother to get to know the tourists because they figure it’s not worth their time because the tourists are just passing through. And I said that on the contrary, I felt that that the locals were more than willing to meet the tourists but that the fault lay with the tourists who often come across as brash, arrogant and frightening to the polite and quiet locals. The truth of the matter may lie somewhere between my observation and the writer’s, or the reason may be something totally different, such as the locals are too darn busy with their lives to worry about befriending tourists. I don’t bring tourists in San Francisco home to my house so there’s no reason to expect the French to be inviting the summer flood of passing tourists into their homes. However, I do believe that if a tourist wanted to get to know a local, all they have to do is make the overture and they would be welcomed with open arms.

(I made the mistake of saying after the dinner to a Jesuit-trained, ex-State Department career employee who specialized in Saudi Arabia, and was a political conservative that the truth doesn’t exist. Oh boy, did I get an earful which caused him to segue off into a lecture on Saddam Hussein and the Iraq War. Because I’m getting old and no longer have the desire to argue, and because I live in progressive France where people who hold his opinions are rare, I found his vehemence amusing and so I egged him on by asking him a few questions to make him think that I was coming around to his point of view. By the time he was finished with his lecture, I think he left happily thinking that he had converted me to his team. And maybe George Bush will get my vote, for I told my husband that if Bush wins, I’m staying in France. So you see, I have absolutely no reason to vote for Kerry.)

The food writer was a very jolly woman who I adored because she laughed at whatever I said. She was overweight, but that’s an understandable hazard of her occupation. While we were eating salad, she started choking. She raised her arms up in the air. Bob, the very pleasant Brit (who just happed to have sang in the Cahors Chorale on Friday and was very pleased that I had been in the audience) asked her if she needed help, and I thought she was nodding “yes” while she was choking, turning red, and holding her arms up in the air for a second time; but he didn’t attempt to help her and the rest of us around our end of the table just stared at her and were greatly relieved when she recovered from the blockage. I have the feeling, from the way she instinctively shot her arms up in the air, and because she had another slight attack soon afterwards, that she chokes frequently when she eats. This habit must bring panic to the restauranteurs when she shows up to eat with the intention of reviewing their establishment.

The Swedish son-in-law is a product designer in New York. He was very interesting to listen to as he told us about the products he has designed and the reasoning that went into the designs. He had the most amazing eyes. I don't know what color they were, but they were just piercing. I told him that, in front of everyone, and feel as if I might have embarassed him. When he goes back to New York, he starts work on designing a pepper mill for OXO, so the teacher and I were giving him all sorts of “brilliant” ideas which I’m sure he’ll incorporate into his design. His parents were very pleasant people who spoke great English.

The food was amazingly good, even by our high local standards, and all the more impressive, when you consider that it was prepared for such a large group. The lunch was held in an old tobacco barn on the sheep farm of an older French couple who supplement their income by renting out small, very old, and very cute houses they own and by catering large dinners. We had homemade foie gras that was the best I have ever tasted, salad with duck, grilled lamb (which I reluctantly ate, and am ashamed to admit that I enjoyed), haricots verts which were cooked perfectly, a cheese platter, lots of wine, and a dream assortment of desserts of which there was enough for all of us to eat as much as we wanted and we did in hearty American fashion: an apple strudel-type cake, a chocolate cake, a strawberry mousse cake. At the end of the meal they served coffee and a strong liquor which I didn’t drink. However, my son informed me it was tasteless but burned your insides once it went down your throat.

You might remember an earlier post I wrote about the plethora of rented, high-end BMW’s surrounding the luncheon host’s cottage when I mistakenly arrived a day earlier. At the lunch, I was surprised that as the other Americans, whom I hadn’t met the day before, drove into the farmyard for the party, all of them were driving upscale rental cars. But not one of the cars was a Peugeot or a Renault, which would be your normal brand offerings for rental cars here in France. And when I met these people, and was told what they did for a living, the high-end BMW’s became even more puzzling because not one of them had a career that would lead me to think that they make a habit of renting luxury cars when they travel. One man was a teacher from Arkansas and he was driving a high end Saab. There were some nice Volvos too.

Based on this new intelligence, and keeping in mind that no one knows the truth, I have a couple of new theories to possibly explain the oddity of seeing all these high end rental cars:
1. Perhaps the Americans rented these cars to impress the other Americans, because they’re all staying together for a week in this grouping of small cottages and feel the need to compete.
2. The Americans are boycotting French cars because of the Iraq War.
3. Hertz in Bordeaux was simply running a great deal on renting out brand new high-end luxury cars (but some of the people rented in Toulouse).
4. The Americans want a high performance car to drive on the curvy French roads.

Well, I’m acting like a jealous French peasant in a Pagnol novel over these cars. I sit and stare at them, come to all sorts of conclusions, but am too timid to probe further to find out the reason for the phenomenon. Should I find out, “the truth,” I’ll let you know.

Marcel Pagnol

I’m reading Marcel Pagnol’s novel, Jean de Florette. If you don’t know Pagnol, he was a successful film director and producer in France who wrote his own scripts, in the early days of film, when small budgets produced amazing, lucrative results. He’s the Frank Capra of France. That was American-centric! Let's say that Frank Capra is the Marcel Pagnol of the United States.

If you don’t read French, there are some beautiful English translations of his novels: My Father’s Glory and My Mother’s Castle; Jean de Florette, and Manon des Sources. Pagnol writes of the almost forgotten rural France of Provence between the Wars. You can rent a video of La Femme du Boulanger and spend an hour or so in a real, live French village of 1939. The film was shot on location at a time when LOCATION meant LOCATION. If a stray dog or child walked through the shot, they weren’t edited out.

At dinner the other night, I mentioned this movie, and Roger said that he saw the movie when it was first released in 1939, at the Hotel du Nord in Prayssac. He would have been around thirteen years old. Sadly, the Hotel du Nord was abandoned a few years ago. When I see the hotel, I sometimes romanticize opening it up again.But having once owned a bar and restaurant, realizing that I’m not a “people person,” I abandon the idea until I once again drive by the lonesome building.

We have a very sexy femme du boulanger in Prayssac, and when I called her that at a dinner at Therese’s, the table erupted in laughter. I told my first joke in French and it was a hit! She and her husband remodeled their bakery this spring, regrettably removing a very large, sexy, framed photograph of the femme that she proudly hung near the handmade chocolates. Her daughter is a younger exact replica and sometimes works behind the counter. Hopefully, there will be a continuous line of femmes des boulangers in Prayssac.

Pagnol’s body of work has often brought tears to my eyes for he has preserved the reality, and perpetuated the epic myth, of a pure, rustic, romantic, rural France in clear, poignant writing that perfectly captures the clash between the modern economic maw and the paradise that is has consumed.

Pagnol became a success both financially and artistically, owning his own large film production company headquartered in a chateau near Marseille. He understood and celebrated the immeasurable value, and complex psychology of French peasant life. This reverence for the peasant life spun his gold for him.

If you’d like a taste of Pagnol at his finest, extracting poignant beauty from the daily struggle of peasant life, take a few minutes and read the following passage from Jean de Florette:

Ten years earlier in a little village in Piedmont, Baptistine had married Guiseppe, who was apprenticed to his father. But instead of setting himself up at once in a thatched cottage and producing a brood of infants, Guiseppe, who was an adventurous spirit who had no wish to die poor, had kissed the brow of his young bride as they left the little church, and had left for France, where woodcutters – so it was said – ate meat every day. Two years later he sent for his virginal beloved.

He came to the railway station at Aubange to wait for her arrival on a train that had jolted along for thirty hours. He wore a fine pair of maroon corduroy trousers held up by a wide blue belt, a shirt with large red squares separated by thick black lines, and a handsome green corduroy jacket. A glossy curly forelock emerged from a flat hat on the back of his head; his eyebrows were shining and his moustache was as long and bushy as King Victor Emmanuel’s. On his feet—supreme luxury—he wore a pair of shoes of real leather, as beautiful as a soldier’s, and the platform resounded to the magnificent ring of the nails in them.

They exchanged scarcely a word because of all the people passing by who had no need to know their secrets, and they set off on the road, loaded with bundles and packets.

Guiseppe walked in front, and suddenly turned to the right to take the path up the hills. At the end of an hour they stopped in front of a dry stone wall that closed off the entry of a cave at the foot of a sheer drop of blue rock, high above a wild ravine. There was a door in the wall, and a little window on either side.

He entered first and opened the shutters.

In a corner was the bed covered with a thick blanket of yellow wool on a frame of strong holm-oak branches barely stripped of bark, under a copper crucifix shining in a patch of sunshine. Along the limestone wall there were some stools, two chests decorated with large nailheads, and a tin alarm clock on the lid of an old kneading trough.

On the left, near the door, in the corner where the wall joined the rock, there was a hearth, with a red plaster mantel marked with deep fingerprints. Against the wall on the right, suspended from thick wooden pegs, there were pruning hatchets, billhooks, and two big axes with narrow curved blades protected by leather muzzles.

Baptistine gazed with astonishment and joy at their wild love nest.

Giuseppe raised a finger and said: “Don’t make a sound: listen!”

They heard a twittering of birds, and from time to time a light ringing sound. He took her by the hand and led her to the bottom of the cave. There, under a mossy chink in the rock, was a little pool full to the brim with clear water.

“The spring!” he said.

The water ran along a furrow that went through the wall on the right.

He made her sit on the bed.

“Baptistine, my darling, this is where I’ve lived for two years. I don’t know who the master of this old sheepfold is—nobody has ever asked me for anything. I came here because it was convenient for my work, and besides, it saved money. But I have the money to buy a house in the village: look.”

He went and plunged his arms in a hole in the rock and pulled out a small narrow canvas bag, like a tube. He took one end of it and shook it over the blanket, and some pieces of gold fell out. Baptistine clasped her hands in ecstasy.

“There are sixty-two of these,” said Giuseppe. “I made them with the blows of my axe, and now they’re yours. I didn’t buy the house, because it’s the wife who should choose. So, this is what I say to you: if you want to, we’ll live here until you have the first sickness. Then at that moment you will go and choose a house in the village. There, that’s my idea. But if this cave doesn’t please you . . .”

“Oh, Giuseppe,” said Baptistine, “for me it is the palace of a king. It’s a cave, and for me this cave is a palace of gold and marble. But don’t say any more. I’ve been your fiancée for five years and your virgin wife for two years . . . Come quickly, so that I may be married.”

And she tore off her dress, and she gnawed at his mouth, and they stayed in this palace; they stayed all these years because the morning sickness had never wanted to come.

I know I shouldn’t have selected this excerpt . . . the next time I want to remodel some aspect of the house or buy new furniture, my husband will refer to this passage! Yes, I am a hypocrite.

We just had a brief rain shower, and now the morning sun is shining strongly as the clouds pass through. I have to close my shutters, we're in for another scorching day. And then I'm off to visit the femme du boulanger and attend a big fete of the Americans who just arrived from New York and New Jersey. Maybe I'll take Roger along . . . I'd be interested in hearing his opinion after seeing a bunch of type-A Americans having dinner.

Step Aside, Americans Coming Through

Blanche is starting to thrive in her pasture. At night she sleeps in her sheep house, with no food, so she’s happy to go out in the morning and forage as if she’s a real sheep. This morning I was very proud of her because she willingly ran into her pasture, and began making a slow munching circuit around the enclosure. Previously, she would only stay where she had a view of the house. Problem is, when she completes her circuit, which takes her about two hours, she comes to the corner of the fence nearest the house and starts yelling for me. If I would ignore her, she might stop that habit as well. But she’s hard to ignore because she’s so cute and I go running out to her with a geranium for her to eat.

Last night, Preston and I drove into Cahors to attend a chorale concert in which my friend Franciose was singing. There was a packed house in the pretty, old church. The small, rush bottom chairs were a bit uncomfortable for us (next time we’ll take throw pillows when we attend a concert in a church) but the singing was sublime. Most of the singers were retired. However, there were some young women in the group, and the director was a very pretty young woman who knew her stuff. Two of the men were in such bad physical shape that I worried they might not make it through the concert. They both brought chairs on which to sit, and winced with pain whenever they had to move off and on the risers.

The French like to add a pedantic element to all of their concerts and so before each piece, a woman read off a small essay regarding the work’s origin and history. I’m sure I would enjoy these lessons if the chairs were more comfortable.

The majority of the population in our departement is comprised of retirees and foreigners who live here part-time, although more and more foreigners are retiring here now. The younger people who have businesses make a lot of money off of us as evidenced by the new stores popping up in our small village. There isn’t a vacant storefront in our village now. Consequently, entrepreneurs are building very ugly buildings on the outskirts that are surrounded by hideous asphalt parking lots. Again, we are killing off the quaint countryside to service our voracious appetites for material goods.

Recently, an American in San Francisco commented to me that when he visited rural France he didn’t see anyone working and he figured that was because it was “such a socialist country.” But his observation is absolutely not true. The farmers and shop keepers that live here work very hard, long days, and they work well into their seventies and eighties. Tourists think the countryside is dead because they see the rural houses with their closed shutters and assume that no one is home and they pass so quickly through the countryside that they don’t notice the farmers working in their fields. The farmers here are usually not on a tractor; they’re standing working in their fields, and can’t be seen from the road. The reality is that the shutters are shut because the houses stay cooler in the summer (when the tourists are passing through) if the shutters are closed during the day. Air conditioning is very rare in France, in the house or in the car. I went out and purchased an extra fan today remembering that last year, in the middle of the deadly heat wave, there were no fans to be had. I noticed that Madame Garnier had air-conditioners to sell this year. That’s the first time I’ve seen home air conditioners for sale in France. The heat was unbearable today in the mid-nineties.

The rural French don’t think the Americans are capable of hard work, and several of our neighbors commented on that fact saying they were surprised to see us willing to tackle physical labor. They believe that all Americans are wealthy and sit in offices all day because they only see the people who can afford to take European vacations and the characters of American life on television and in film. So who can blame the French for the stereotypes they've developed of Americans. For the most part, we are fatter than the French. We are much louder. We do throw money around as if it grew on trees.

I went to visit some Americans today who had just arrived for a week’s visit. High-end rented BMW’s surrounded the house. I sat with them for two hours. I can tell you they won't discover a hint of the real France: the France that seeps into your soul. For the locals, who don’t have a lot of money but possess much wisdom on the art of living, will stay away from them, intimidated by the show of wealth; and of course, the Americans didn’t come to fraternize with the comparatively impoverished locals. They came to sit by the swimming pool, talk about the shopping they’re going to do in Paris, check their e-mails. To these Americans passing through, the locals are quaint extras populating their fantasy vacation. I know, because I used to be one of those Americans who came for a month, spent lots of money, and left, raving about my great vacation in France and my fun shopping excursions.

Living here half the year, my neighbors have taught me a humility that brings peace and calm to my life. They have shown me how to live more simply (my husband would debate this claim) and with greater joy. Paris is the center of civilization, but if you’re looking for the spiritual essence of France, you need to come to the countryside, wander the paths, lay with the sheep, drink Rataffia with the farmers.

Our French accountant told us that if someone charges a large amount on a bill people say, “Do you think I’m an American?” For example, last year when I purchased my two orphan lambs, I went in person to the farm and the farmer charged me 70 Euros for each lamb. That was highway robbery. I didn’t know what the price of lamb was but I knew that was too much for an orphan lamb that might drop dead at any moment. I didn’t argue because I had already fallen in love with the two lambs I had chosen. This year, I had Roger call his cousin and ask the price for bum lambs, and I instructed him to not reveal that I was American. The non-American price for orphan lambs is 30 Euros, although his cousin won’t have any new lambs until August.

When we first purchased our place, we were told that Roger was not happy that “Americans” were moving in. He was afraid we’d pave the entire property and put up a McDonalds. But now he’s one of our best friends. Americans have an image problem, but it is of our own making. Maybe if we just rented small Peugeots without air-conditioning when we visited, and stopped to talk when we saw a farmer out working in his field, we could undo a lot of the stereotypes of the arrogant American.

I'm probably more "anti-American" than the French because I don't want France to be Americanized. I'm trying to escape the strip malls, the housing developments, the coffee chains, but they follow me wherever I go.

Last night at the concert, the first half was comprised of French songs, the second half was dedicated to English and American composers works.

Going With the Flow

I have an endless array of house and garden projects all of them in a state of semi-completion. My kitchen doesn’t have much in the way of cupboards, so I have pots, towels, sacks of potatoes, hanging from walls and ceilings. One cupboard is old and pretty, but unusable, as it is filled with electrical wires and switches which were put in sometime just prior to WWII when electricity came to the house. The other I use as a food pantry. I store my dishware and glassware in an alcove above the sink that has three wide shelves but no doors to hide the crockery from public analysis.

For a couple of years, I have had the material laying around to make curtains for that unattractive alcove. But whenever I thought that the time was right to begin the cutting and sewing, I always had more pressing matters, like walking the sheep or running to the bakery for my morning carbohydrate fix. However, when I arrived here this May, I started sewing the curtains by hand and finished them in short order. I went to the hardware store, bought some rings and rod brackets, and let them sit around unopened for a couple of weeks. Finally, last night, Preston and I took turns whittling a branch for a curtain rod. I ironed the curtains, attached the rings and ribbons, and was very excited to hang them up and see the project completed.

The hanging of the curtains required that I clean away cobwebs that I have been ignoring ever since we bought the place back in 2001 and which I think the previous owner ignored since 1914 when the house was first built. If you remember an earlier post, I mentioned that it is not advisable to move throw rugs left by the previous owner, wadded up rags stuffed in pipes, or to peel off old wallpaper because there is always some worse horror awaiting you. I guess the same warning needs to be applied to cobwebs. In my house, they appear to be the mortar holding the place together.

About ten last night, after drilling four holes in the plaster and stone wall to attach the brackets, and wiping cobwebs off the walls and the exposed water pipes that traverse the wall, I triumphantly hung the curtains. I congratulated myself on mastering the faux French country look espoused by Pierre Deux. (The vrai French country look is to forego the curtains and just let the cobwebs drape your windows, a method I employ on all the other windows in the house.)

As I stood there admiring my artistic genius, I heard the dripping of water, a rather heavy dripping. Since the light above my sink hasn’t worked since the day after I arrived this May, and the kitchen was illuminated by a single dim bulb nestled under a dark metal lampshade hanging over the kitchen table, it took me a while to locate, with the aid of a flashlight, the source of the drip which was coming from one of the pipes running near the ceiling. A pipe that I had wiped free of cobwebs.

I went to the key rack that holds in the neighborhood of a hundred skeleton keys, a different one for each door on the property, grabbed several that looked like they might open a workroom where the tools are kept, and went outside, running a gauntlet of supplicating and in the case of one couple, fornicating cats. I grabbed three wrenches and returned to the house, kicking cats out of my way. The wrenches were the wrong size. I walked back to the workroom, walking through a gauntlet of now angry cats, and grabbed three larger wrenches and returned to the house loudly shouting ALLEZ! at the circling cats. Again, the wrenches didn't fit. I returned to the workroom, grabbed three larger wrenches, walked back to the house through cats that seemed to be hissing and baring their teeth at me, escaping with my life behind a slammed door. Thankfully, one of these wrenches fit. If it didn't, I would have had to grab a gun to make the run through the throng of cats now swarming outside the door.

Naturally, my first choice in wrench direction was incorrect as the water spurted out dousing my hair and head. I turned in the other direction, and this stemmed the profuse tide I had engendered, but now the flow was greater than the original dripping. I spotted two red valves on some nearby pipes and turned them. This increased the flow of water which was now running all over the shelves, dishes and glasses and splattering the wooden floor. Those valves were shut-off valves, but they shut the water off to the sink faucet, forcing more water pressure to build up in the offending pipe resulting in stronger jets of spurting water.

My very helpful friend Pierre-Yves, who would come down at 2 in the morning to help me if I called him, is in Paris, and since he’s dealing with some serious health problems this week, I decided I wouldn’t bother him at 10:30 at night. I needed to get the number of his favorite plumber, a man whose work and charges I had no quarrel with when he replaced the water heater that broke two weeks ago, but whose name I hadn’t bothered to write down.

I called the Tomlin’s and Pamela answered the phone. I asked if she knew the name of Pierre-Yves’ plumber and she said that she didn’t know the names of any plumbers because her husband Norman satisfied all their plumbing needs and she would put Norman on the phone if she could drag him away from the telly where he was engrossed in the world cup finals of soccer. I waited with dread for Norman to get on the phone. Demanding a European man come to the telephone during a world cup soccer finals match is probably a successful legal defense for murder over here. I was right to be apprehensive. The normally talkative and hyper-friendly Norman could be heard grumbling in the background and took a long time to get to the telephone. I think I heard Pamela forcing him to get up and go to the phone.

He told me he didn’t know what to tell me. Did I know where the valve was to shut the water off to the house? No, I didn’t. “Oh, well that’s a sorry state. I just don’t know what to tell you then.” I thanked him and said I had to go; I needed to try and locate a plumber. I am certain that if the soccer match wasn’t on, Norman would have volunteered to come down and help me. However, soccer games turn sweet men into werewolves over here.

I opened up the phonebook and dialed the numbers of several plumbers, as the water ran down the wall and over the shelves creating what might have been a pleasant calming fountain to some people who were very Zen and able to go with the flow. But for me the flow was instilling panic. Preston's electric guitar practice wasn't helping calm my nerves either.

None of the plumbers had emergency numbers. They just had answering machines which informed me that they would open at nine in the morning. Preston wandered in from playing his electric guitar in the back of the house, and decided he’d inspect the situation. After a pounding session of 20 decibels of amplified music playing, he was of calm mind. He traced the pipes and discovered what turned out to be the water shut-off valve for the house, hidden under a small table in the kitchen.

That stopped the water leaking out of the pipe. He also attempted to tighten the nut on the pipe, and was able to reduce the leak to a small, yet steady drip when we turned the water back on. So, we still had to turn the water off for the night. By the time we brushed our teeth with bubbly Pellegrino (This is unpleasant. Only resort to this in an emergency), and went to bed, it was midnight.

I don't know why, since no one here is at work at 8am, but I called Prayssac’s lesbian plumber. I remembered her sweetly painted sign in front of her aetelier across from the pizza place. To my surprise, she answered the phone. She quizzed me, and I gathered from the tone of her voice that she wasn’t very happy that I have iron pipes. It seemed to me that she would prefer plastic or copper piping. However, she will be out here sometime this afternoon if she understood the directions I gave her in French.

Thank goodness I was able to move the sheep out of the outhouse. It's coming in handy this morning.

Housekeeping Tip: Make sure to call in a structural engineer for an analysis before removing cobwebs from your walls, windows and pipes.

War and Dinner

Francine, my friend and neighbor, had Mr. Besse, Preston, and me over for dinner last night at her house. We had a fun time, starting at 7:30 and we didn’t end until midnight. Francine’s house used to be the schoolhouse for Latour, and it was the first time that Roger had returned to the interior of the building since he graduated at the age of twelve in 1940.

He told us that his diploma was signed by Marechal Petain. Excited, I asked if he still had it. He said it had been thrown out years ago. His father was a local leader in the Resistance so there wasn’t any sentimentality about keeping Petain’s signature in the house. During the war, the schoolchildren designed propaganda posters for contests, (as children in the U.S. now design dental hygiene posters for contests) sang patriotic songs, and studied a version of current affairs that they regurgitated but the teacher and their parents ridiculed.

I mentioned that I was currently reading a book about the Resistance and I was learning that it is an incredibly complicated period of history to wrap your mind around. Oui, Roger agreed, that is the problem, people think that it was black and white, the Resistance, the War, but it was terribly complicated and its complications are still evident today in the politics of France, and in the local social relationships. People hold long grudges here, and who can blame them when the grudges revolve around life and death. So you just don’t bring up the war because you may have a family at your table who fought hard in the resistance, another family that collaborated, another that just sat on the fence. They all get along socially, as long as the war isn’t mentioned.

When the Germans first invaded France, Roger’s father went up to fight and was saved by that daring British evacuation from Dunkirk. Our neighbor Paul, wasn’t so fortunate. He was taken prisoner at the beginning of the war and was kept as a POW in Germany for the next five years. Having saved the French, the British weren’t too keen on letting their neighbors stay in England and so they packed them onto a boat and dropped them off in Normandy. Roger’s father stole a bicycle and made his way back home. The trip took him weeks. Once back, Roger’s father was the head of our village’s Resistance cell.

Before I heard that Roger’s father was in the Resistance, a neighbor told me that during the war, there was a sixteen-year-old girl who was shot by the Resistance because she wouldn’t accept the advances of one of the men in their group. According to this source, they falsely accused her of being a collaborator, and then executed her near the communal laundry fountains. No one from the village would help her father bury her, and so he had to go alone with a wheelbarrow to retrieve her body. When I heard this story, I romantically thought that perhaps this incident explained why Roger never got married. Perhaps this girl was his girlfriend and he never recovered from the trauma.

Mais, au contraire. A week after I heard this story, Roger was over for dinner, and after a little wine, I was brave and in my abrupt-American way I asked him if he knew about this incident at the Belaye fountains where a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl was shot by the Resistance. He rolled his eyes and said that first of all, she wasn’t sixteen, she was in her twenties, as if revealing her advanced age destroyed any rumor that she was an innocent. And secondly, she deserved to be shot because she was sleeping with the Germans. I was surprised at the vehemence with which he said this for he is usually so mild-mannered.

People living next to each other tell wildly conflicting stories which I have no doubt, they believe to be the gospel’s truth. For all I know, perhaps Roger’s father was an instigator in condemning the woman to death. Maybe he pulled the trigger. But I don’t think this is true, because I think that the other neighbor would have mentioned his name if that was the case. Often, the stories can only be pieced together if one examines what has not been said. I greatly enjoy sitting around and drawing these war stories out from my neighbors. Yet I am always frustrated when I do, because there is no way, even for those who lived through those years, to grasp the truth in all its complexity. Historical truth is a myth.

Steady Work

Yesterday, Monsieur Besse and Miss rattled into the yard at 9am. He told me that had spoken with Monsieur Labrousse, the dead-animal man, at 8am and that Labrousse would arrive around 11:30, after he stopped by the vetertarian's clinic to retrieve the patients the vet couldn't save. Roger wanted to know if a tractor could back up to the sheep shed. I said it was impossible because the sheep shed was located in the back of a small topiary and rose garden. We walked down to regard the logistics.

Roger said he'd bring over a rope since it appeared that the only alternative was to pull Olympia out over the garden path through the box hedges. He said he would also bring a plastic tarp, to lay her on as they pulled, and a dolly. Roger said that the sheep couldn't be carried out because he had a bad leg. I told him that I would send Preston out to help, that I didn't want Roger lifting the sheep, and why did we have to help Labrousse, wasn't he a professional with such matters.

Roger and Miss returned home, and I washed my dirty kitchen French doors which were smudged badly from Blanche and Olympia looking in and pressing their sweet faces against the glass last January. I let them have the run of the place back then when I didn't have any flowers.

Housekeeping Tip: You don't need chemical-based window cleaning products, like Windex, if you just use wet, wadded up newspapers. This simple method removed a heavy layer of fly droppings and sheep drool from my windows, so I'm sure it can tackle your windows. Note: S.C. Johnson & Company attorneys can leave their comments at the bottom of this entry.

My neighbor, Francine, walked over on the footpath that connects our two houses. I invited her in and she expressed her condolences for the death of Olympia. She said she had heard the news from the man who was repairing the cemetery wall. He told her he wasn't quite sure he had understood what I said . . . I found this upsetting because I had walked away from that conversation thinking that all had gone well with him and I was proud of myself for speaking such clear and fluent French . . . he thought I had said that one of my sheep had died. I told Francine that I was doing much better than I would have expected before Olympia died, and that I was relieved that Blanche was living, because I was closer to her than to Olympia. Blanche is the cuddly one. Francine invited Preston and me to dinner the next evening (Thursday). I said I'd bring the dessert. She responded with a phrase all the French that I know use when speaking English, "As you wish." When they say this I feel as if I'm being demanding and they are just giving in to my unreasonable demands. She walked back home through the woods as I returned to my window washing and wondered if she was annoyed that I had insisted on bringing a dessert.

Preston and I were painting the hallway upstairs when we heard Roger's tractor. I sent Preston down to help him. I stood in Preston's bedroom, paintbrush in hand, looking out through the large French windows at the proceedings. Labrousse backed his truck into the driveway and parked as close as he could get to the sheep shed. From my perch, I felt like a crazy woman from one of Faulkner's novels, peering from behind the curtain of an upstairs window as the authorities came to take away a corpse she had been keeping for some time. (I think it's Absalom, Absalom where the woman keeps the corpse in a bedroom. . . but correct me if you know.) I had mixed feelings. I was sad to see Olympia go and I was thrilled that Blanche could move out of the outhouse for her night lodgings and perhaps there would be closure and peace in our little world.

If I looked like a inbred Faulkner character, Labrousse resembled the evil protagonist from a Stephen King novel, or Charles Manson's love child that perhaps Liza Minelli or Bella Abzug bore for him. I was expecting a sweet, compassionate, retired old farmer to arrive. Labrousse is a young man, with long, wavy, unkept hair. He sports a five-day-old beard, and I have to admit, if I saw him while I was walking in the woods, I would be afraid. Hell, if if I saw him walking in downtown Paris, exiting the Ritz in a tuxedo I would be afraid. If you called up Central Casting and asked them to send over someone to play an animal necrophiliac, they would only be able to send over Labrousse. But I shouldn't judge a book by it's cover, or by it's career choice. I'm sure he's a nice man. He lives nearby. I hope he doesn't enjoy walking in the woods.

Labrousse tied a rope around one of the hind legs of the very wooly, gas-filled, Macy's-Thanksgiving-Parade-Balloonesque Olympia and the three men pulled on the rope as if they were in a tug-of-war contest. Slowly, Olympia emerged from the topairy bushes. Later, I asked Preston if she smelled. He said she did. I said I had been worried that they were going to pull her leg off. Preston said that he too had worried about that happening, especially when he heard her leg joint snap.

When Olympia had progressed onto the driveway, Labrousse opened the back of his large truck. The back door was electronically controlled and folded down to become a ramp. Preston turned toward the house to get my attention and waved his hand in front of his face which I took to signify that a distinct stench was pouring out of the back of the truck. The floor of the back of the truck was covered with dead animals. Some were in plastic bags, others, several dogs among them, weren't. Labrousse scrambled up the ramp. He scampered over the pile of dead animals. He had to move one especially large dark plastic sack. The thought crossed my mind that local women must worry if their husbands become chummy with Labrousse. He grabbed a winch line, pulled it out, and attached it to Olympia's back leg.

Housekeeping Tip: When you discover you have a dead animal at your home, IMMEDIATELY place it in a plastic bag and tie tightly. You don't know when the beast removal man will be able to schedule a pick-up time. This helps prevent attracting flies,wild beasts and marauding dogs that may want to devour your deceased animal. Note: S.C. Johnson & Company, before you develop Zip-Lock Animal Shrouds, contact me to discuss royalty payments.

Slowly, Olympia was hoisted up the ramp. Her head drooping forlornly as her neck lifted off the ground. I looked out the side window of the bedroom to see if Blanche was viewing this horror, but thankfully, she was laying down looking in a different direction.

When Olympia had joined the pile of other animals in the back of the truck, Labrousse jumped up and removed the winch from her leg. He climbed down out of the truck, walked around to the side, and pressed something to raise the back door. There lay Olympia, slowly disappearing, looking very much asleep from my window vantage as the door slowly closed. I yelled out the window and asked, "How much?" I had gone to the bank that morning and took out 100 Euros because Roger told me I might need to pay the man in cash. The locals like to conduct their business in cash to avoid taxes. Roger and Preston both turned to me and made signals that no money was necessary.

Later, Roger told me that Labrousse informed him that dead animal removal is a free service provided by the departement. The French government provides lots of nifty free services. Besides the free health care, I think the best service they provide is once-a-week maid service for retired and disabled people. As a result, this has to be the only country where women lie and say they are older than they really are so they can have someone clean their house for free.

Labrousse's job is to make a scheduled circuit each week of the departement, picking up dead animals. I ended up having Olympia lay about for three days because my area's scheduled pickup falls on Tuesday. A woman's voice can be heard on Labrousse's answering machine so he is either married or living with a woman, or perhaps it is his mother or a sex slave he keeps in his cave. However, over lunch, Preston and I were imagining Labrousse's return each evening to an imaginary wife. Did he immediately rush for the bath? Did she fumigate his clothes? Or were they accustomed to the stench of rotting animals? We had lots of questions that will most likely go unanswered.

In the early evening, I cleaned out the sheep shed carting at least ten overflowing wheelbarrow loads of fusty straw bedding to my gigantic compost pile. What an efficient form of exercise . . . it works the upper body, it works the legs, it's aerobic and good for the heart. The straw on top is light and fluffy. But the stuff below is wet, compacted and heavy. Between shoveling endless pitchfork loads of wet straw and then pushing the wheelbarrow an eighth of a mile, one way each trip, to get to the compost pile, I had a great workout.

Blanche was happy to move into her newly renovated digs. Although, I was bothered by the fact that she went exactly to the spot where Olympia laid down and died, and started rooting around. This morning, when I went to take her to her pasture, I quietly walked up behind her and saw her sniffing the same spot. When I said bonjour to her, she panicked and went running around the small shed. I believe she could smell the death of Olympia, and she was frightened. She willingly went out into her pasture this morning, and seems to be grazing farther afield, perhaps having given up on the fact that Olympia is coming back to keep her company.

Throughout this ordeal, I was telling myself that animals don't understand the concept of death. Blanche didn't seem to be overly upset when she saw Olympia's body. But I think that once Blanche was in the sheep shed, even though I had cleaned it out, she understood that Olympia was gone, dead, had met a bad end.

Sheep, and other animals, understand LOVE, and now I think it's my arrogant, human delusions that made me think they don't understand DEATH. They do understand it, in a metaphysical, primal way.

When I had finished mucking the sheep shed out, I walked over to Roger's to give him a small bag of nougats from my favorite candy store in Cahors. I was hoping he would invite me in for a drink and he did. He broke out a bottle of homemade ratafia, French moonshine made with grapes. He opened a large, American-sized bag of pretzels which he keeps on hand for me and any hearty American snackers I occasionally bring to visit him. He learned early on that a small, bag lunch size of potato chips, which would tide over ten French people, isn't enough for me.

Ask Not For Whom the Bell Tolls

There is a small church near us in our commune of Latour. It's set up on an electric timer so the bells toll at 8am (time to wake up), noon (time to stop work and have a two hour lunch), and 7pm (time to stop work and drink an aperitif). I always feel as if I've missed something pure and sweet if I'm home and I don't hear the bells. If I follow the dictates of the bells, I shed my hyper-American personality, and take up the soft rhythm of rural France.

Sunday, I was returning from a long walk in the woods with Blanche, when we were walking by the cemetery that surrounds the Latour church. There was Monsieur Reste visiting the grave of his mother who died last Christmas Eve at the age of 103. He was watering the flowers he had planted at the family tomb, which he had refurbished last summer, and was talking to another man who also held a watering can.

When I stroll by the cemetery, I can read the family name plaques on the tombs . . . Couderc, Reste, Boudet, Besse, de Folmont . . . the names of all my neighbors and friends, and the de Folmont nobility that spawned my nemesis the Comte Theirry de Bersegol du Moulin de Fitzjames . . . who have a place reserved for them when even the French Paradox can't keep their bodies going any longer.

People here are very attached to their departed relatives. My neighbor Therese visits her late husband's grave every other day to water the flowers. He died five years ago. I suspect that she might be finding the visits a bit wearing now, because when I was visiting her last week she showed me a plant she was growing to put on Jean-Paul's tomb; a plant that doesn't require much water. I'll know she's found a new man when Jean-Paul's tomb is covered with cacti.

One of the Count's relatives has an impressive plaque. He was killed over in Bordeaux during the Revolution fighting for his family's right to claim superiority because of their birth. The Revolution wasn't as efficient as it has been portrayed and the ancestors of my litigious Count were able to escape the Terror and eventually relaxed, had sex, and thus guaranteed the continuation of a long line of arrogant SOB's to continue harassing peasants like me.

There are three sad plaques, two with photos, of young men killed in World War I, whose bodies were never recovered. One is Roger's uncle. They all say, "pray for him," at the bottom and then remind you that they "died for France." Based on who they left behind, the men are called "dear husband," "dear son," "dear brother," "dear father." These are the only epithets that have meaning when a man dies.

There is a grave with no gravestone. It simply has a massive, profuse, pink rosebush growing over, flooding out over the cemetery wall to hang over the road, attracting the attention of all who pass by. The rosier marks the resting place of a young (forties) Dutch woman who moved here, started a camping retreat, and then died of cancer. I have the same type of rose bush, "The Fairy," at my place, two of them, and they are puny things. When I see that huge feisty rose bush breaching the wall and road I feel as if the Dutch woman is calling out to me to tell me to stop and look at the beauty that is this rosebush, this beautiful life force that throbs around me and in me, yet, which I usually ignore because I have some mundane errand or work to complete.

Everyone, without exception, that I meet who has moved here from outside of France, says they moved here because of the "way of life," the joie de vivre, the emphasis on what's important in life: family, food, living in harmony. I have to think that this ability to clearly understand what makes the good life comes from their close proximity to death. The cemeteries, the war monuments, the plaques commemorating where people died, the walking funeral processions, the heads left on the dead rabbits in the market . . . when Therese has you over for dinner she kills one of her chickens . . .this acceptance of death is the reason they can create a life full of meaning and value.

We Americans avoid death at every turn. Our cemeteries are razed for housing developments, and are moved out of town, where the tombs are flush with the ground for easy mowing and they resemble golf courses, not a place of awe and intrigue where dead bodies rest.

Americans carry on a futile fight with the Grim Reaper that sucks away our money and our ability to accept, and enjoy, yes enjoy, the natural course of life. Here, old women ride their bicycles outfitted with "sidesaddles" to the supermarche. There are packs of seventy year old men rolling down the roads on their bikes. My divorced girlfriend was here from the U.S., and we were trailing behind one pack in the car. The men wore helmets so you couldn't see their gray and bald heads. She was marveling at how studly the men in France were. She was shocked when we passed them and saw how old the men were. You don't see packs of elderly, biker studs in the U.S. Americans are afraid of aging and death, and so we hide the elderly, and the elderly hide themselves when they feel they aren't good looking enough to go out in public. Here, I'm learning to accept aging by accepting life. This is all there is. Make the most of it . . . with the body you have.

I started these musings yesterday as I hung up laundry next to Olympia's bloating, fly-ridden body. The death beside me made life seem much more vibrant. My breathing seemed to me to be miraculous. The old wet towels and my ragged underwear were beautiful.

So here's my housekeeping tip for the day: rotting corpses on your property are much more effective than Zen rock gardens in helping you find your "center."

Waiting for Labrousse

I sit here, eating leftover strawberry tart and drinking tea. The Tomlin's came for dinner last night with their 15-year-old grandson from Marin County, California. Ross was suffering from jet-lag, but Pamela and Norman were lively and regaled us with their interesting stories of their two decades in the neighborhood. I think they must have been the first British to arrive in our hills south of Prayssac. I think of them as French though.

(A truck just pulled in the driveway. I jumped up. Excited that perhaps it could be Monsieur Labrousse, the beast removal man. But it was the carpenter and his wife, arriving to finish the sheep gate.)

Yesterday, I left a message on Monsieur Labrousse's answering machine. Granted it was Sunday, and no one in France works on Sunday, but I thought it was possible that someone who removes dead animals might respond to calm my concerns. He didn't. I tried calling this morning, and his answering machine is too full to even leave a message. I'm sure that means another day or two of Olympia inflating in the sheep house. I don't know what I'll do if she blows up. Originally, I was saying that she might blow up as a joke to the neighbors who have been coming by to express their condolences, but reading their reactions, I realized that it might not be a joke. She might really blow up because each of them nodded their heads in agreement at my joke, and they weren't laughing. An abnormal buildup of gas killed her, and when I glimpsed her body from the clothesline yesterday, it seemed to be getting much larger.

So I sit here eating strawberry tart, waiting for Monsieur Labrousse to grace me with a visit, an expanding dead sheep rotting into day-three close to my house. But my problems are few and I couldn't really complain in front of the Tomlins.

The Tomlins' dog, Sybil, died last week from eating poison . . . I have to find out what brand of effective poison that was to try it on the cats. Sybil was their second dog in three years to die from eating either poison from the dumpster or a dead poisoned animal. The Tomlins' were very sympathetic about my sheep, which I thought was magnanimous of them because they were mourning the very recent loss of their young dog. I really wasn't able to be as solicitous because I hated their dog. She always chased the sheep when I walked by. Now if only the two Rottweilers at the end of the Tomlin's lane would find some good, hearty poison, my walks would be free of harassing dogs.

Back in March, the Tomlins, who never take vacations together because someone has to stay behind and care for the horses, chickens, dog and bees, flew to San Francisco to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary. A British couple stayed in their house to watch over the house and the menagerie. One night, while the caretakers were sleeping, the smoldering fire in the fireplace downstairs set the house ablaze. The caretakers were saved by the urgent barking of the now-departed Sybil as the house was completely devoured in flames. Sybil will always be remembered as a brave heroine and so I will attempt to revise my negative opinion of her.

The four stone walls are still standing and a hearty red rose bush blooms profusely on the south wall. When you drive up to the house, your first impression is that all is well. But then you move closer, and see that the bushes and trees are hiding the caved-in roof and a lifetime of possessions and keepsakes that lie heaped in the front yard reduced to charcoal.

Pamela said she isn't falling into crying fits anymore, and soon the insurance company will have matters settled so the builders can start working. I commented that the insurance company seemed to be taking a long time, three months, to process their claim. Pamela said that, to the contrary, they were progressing faster than normal. Considering the Tomlin's trials and tribulations, I didn't feel I could spend the evening lamenting my sheep.

The Tomlins left at ten thirty. They had to put their chickens in for the night so the foxes didn't get them. Two weeks ago they went out to dinner, and came home and many of their chickens had been killed. Their necks neatly slit by the methodical foxes. When they were leaving for chez moi at 7:30 they remembered they should put the chickens in but didn't do so because that would make them late. I hope they didn't return home to find a yard full of dead chickens.

(Break because Monsieur Besse has just pulled in the driveway.)

Monsieur Besse was the bearer of good news. He called Labrousse this morning, on his own initiative, and Labrousse told him he doesn't work on Mondays. No one but farmers and my Dutch carpenter works on Mondays here. Labrousse said he will be here tomorrow morning. Fantastique that means I'll have had a rotting sheep corpse here for only three and a half days . . . thank goodness Labrousse works faster than the French insurance companies.

Roger also said that Labrousse will call him tomorrow morning so that Roger can come over and oversee the "funeral." Roger told him that I'm Americaine and it will be easier for Labrousse if Roger comes to "translate" for me. Roger doesn't speak English, but since he's used to my pas mal French, he feels he can make things smoother for Labrousse if he's here to help. I also think that Roger wants to see this sad episode to its conclusion since he's been involved from the initial diagnosis. And for that, I am grateful.

Two weeks ago, I had many of the neighbors over for an aperitif. Craig had packed a fancy "rabbit" corkscrew in my luggage that he had purchased at Costco. My guests were amazed at the ease with which the device extracted the corks, especially Roger. I told him I would have Craig bring him one. But Craig said, via the telephone, that there weren't any more at Costco. The "rabbit" corkscrews here in France are a new concept and are very expensive. The ones I had seen started at 125 Euros, four times the cost of the Costco corkscrew which is of good quality.

Friday in Toulouse, I wanted to get a present for Roger for taking the time to meet with the veterinarian. For gifts, I considered a box of chocolates, tins of foie gras, or jars of cassoulet (the famed Toulusian casserole of white beans, tomatoes, pork, and duck) but kept thinking I wanted something more enduring than food as a gift. I perused a few gift stores, and voila! I found the exact same corkscrew, albeit at twice the price Craig paid. I had it wrapped and I put it on Roger's doorstep when I returned from Toulouse and didn't find him at his home.

He came over that evening to tell me about the vet's prognosis for Olympia. When he was about to leave, I asked him if he had found the cadeau, and he said, oui. That was it, no merci. I found this odd because the French, and Roger, are very polite and Roger will drive over just to thank me for leaving him a bit of leftover tart. Today, he was in a cheerful mood, perhaps because he had solved the corpse removal problem for me, and when he was finished with the details regarding the pending funeral, he told me he had tried the corkscrew and that it was mervielleux. I said, "well now you have to have a big party with lots of . . . ." and he finished the sentence for me, "bouteilles," (bottles) and we both started laughing. He's not a big entertainer. He's a shy, life-long bachelor in his late seventies who lived with his widowed mother until she died a few years ago. He purchases all his lunches and dinners from the local restaurant. It's a big deal when he invites you over for a drink and serves some dried sausage with "chips." But now, I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't have a big party with a lot of wine bottles. I think I'm bringing him out of his shell.

Requiem for a Sheep

Olympia died yesterday, June 19th, at around 1:15 pm. I went out to check on her in her house at 1:30, and she was laying on her side, feet straight out, but still warm. I think she was standing up when she died. The flies hadn't discovered her yet.

I walked over to Monsieur Besse's to tell him the sad news, and to ask if he would call the man who picks up the dead "beasts." Later, he drove over to my house to tell me that the beast man was over on the other side of the departement today and, even though he lived in the village closest to my house, maybe he wouldn't be able to pick up the sheep for two days.

I was disappointed. I didn't relish the thought of a large sheep rotting away next to my clothesline where I must hang out two loads sometime during the day. I rounded up Preston. We put on our gardening gloves with the intention of putting Olympia in the wheelbarrow and then storing her someplace where the dogs couldn't get her, with the hope that the removal man would arrive before she blew up from all the gas that was building in her body. I had originally intended to put her deep in the woods. When my father has a dead cow on his ranch, he just leaves it on the prairie for the coyotes to eat. But Roger pointed out that I didn't want to be encouraging the numerous stray dogs to eat Olympia because then they would get a taste for sheep and would be hunting down Blanche or Madame Moulie's flock. I need a pet coyote.

Why don't you bury the sheep you ask? Well, we don't have a backhoe. The ground is so rocky here that it takes three hours to dig a hole to plant a rose bush. Preston and I didn't want to spend a day digging in a rock quarry. I thought about calling a taxidermist but the neighbors think I'm strange enough. I don't want to reinforce their prejudices with a vivid reminder everytime they visit my house.

Unfortunately, we don't have a stick of dynamite. Once, my ex-husband, a sometimes backcountry outfitter, had a packhorse that died while he was in the mountains of Yellowstone Park. The law states that you must pack out everything you bring into the federal wilderness. The expedition couldn't figure out how to pack out the dead horse. (Getting rid of dead bodies is difficult, as Scott Peterson is well aware, and I have just discovered.) They had some dynamite, for what I don't know, but they used the stick of dynamite as you would a rectal thermometer and blew the horse to kingdomcome. American ingenuity at its best.

After deciding to put Olympia in the stone/brick outhouse, I roused Preston from his reading and wheeled the wheelbarrow to the sheep shed. We both positioned ourselves to grab two legs. I took the hind legs, and lifted her up a little. But then the blood started to percolate from her nose and truthfully, I was worried about what would percolate from the hind end I was dealing with once Preston lifted up his end.

Preston was grossed out by the percolating blood which surprised me because he's a crack deer/antelope hunter. He said he was unnerved by the fact that she was a pet, and that even though he had gutted many a deer, dealing with old blood didn't appeal to him. So we let her lie on her bed of straw hoping the man who takes away the dead beasts would arrive in the not too distant future as the ants and flies were moving in quickly on Olympia's corpse.

Meanwhile, Blanche was out in her pasture wailing. I talked Preston into going to the grocery store for me while I laid out in the pasture with her to calm her down. Ironically, I'm having a dinner tonight for the family headed by the British mutton-eater. I would always tease him that if my sheep disappeared I would know who's table they ended up on. I took some beach towels, and laid out in the pasture. Blanche wanted to be petted and have her stomach rubbed. Constantly. I ended up falling asleep, and when I woke up, she was sleeping beside me. I have to find another sheep, soon, to take my place.

I would have left Blanche out in the pasture all night, like a normal sheep, but dark clouds were threatening a storm. And so after debating where to put her . . . I would have liked to put her in the downstairs kitchen, some straw on the floor would actually make the room look neater, but if my husband found out he would have a jealous fit that I had let the sheep move into the house, I decided upon the outhouse.

There is shelter for her in the pasture, but she never goes back to it and so I was worried that if a storm came upon us, she would just stand there and then die of exposure because she wasn't accustomed to being out in the rain. So, I fixed up the outhouse, which has a floor cleaner than that of my kitchen because it's never used, and Preston and I tricked her into going in by holding out a geranium for her to follow.

The outhouse is rather large and chic. It's clean because whatever you deposit in there drops through a hole and falls into the canal, which happens to be running now, finding its way into the Count's basin. (For those of you who know our trials and tribulations with the Count you'll know how satisfying this bit of bathroom engineering is for us.) And it's clean, because, big talker that I am about the Count's basin, no one uses the outhouse. Blanche spent the night in there.

I put a heavy wooden box over the toilet hole hoping to prevent her from falling into it and breaking one of her legs. This morning at 6, she woke up and was bleating loudly. I went out and was thankful that she wasn't stuck in the hole. I walked her around the back way to her pasture, a route she had never taken, through a makeshift gate that will be completed on Monday, if the carpenter shows up as promised. I took her around to where she usually hangs out and left her as she loudly bleated for someone to keep her company.

Returning to the house, I put a kettle of water on the stove for tea, then went upstairs to retrieve my glasses. Blanche had stopped her bleating and all was calm. Perhaps we could have a quiet, normal day, despite the sheep rotting away in view of the house. I opened up the windows and shutters of a front bedroom, and there was Blanche on the terrace, devouring geraniums as quickly as her little teeth could nibble. I ran downstairs and chased her away from the geraniums. She quickly headed towards the roses. The trauma of losing her life-long companion has turned her into a head-strong delinquent.

After I run to the bakery to get bread for Preston and a tart for the Tomlin family tonight, Blanche and I will take a long walk in the woods, remembering Olympia who was always lagging behind us.

As Olympia Lays Dying

I went out yesterday morning to give Olympia her medicine, and she looked worse than ever so I again drove into the vet's to ask him to make a house call. I stood in line with the worried sheepherders, perplexed rabbit lovers, indulging dog and cat owners until I could speak to the busy vet. He finally met with me, thankfully he was sans his rectal exam glove, when I asked him if he could come to visit her today. He screwed up his face in a wince that the natives use to express difficulty. Perhaps he could come out the next day, he offered. I said that was okay, I understood he was busy, but the sheep might not be living in another twenty-four hours. He glanced at his schedule and said he'd come in the afternoon or evening, but he didn't know when. I told him I had to go to Toulouse in the afternoon to pick up my son. Did he need me to have a neighbor at my farm so he could give the neighbor instructions to relay to me? Yes, he would like someone to meet him there.

Returning to the farm, I went over to Monsieur Besse's house. He was riding his tractor in from his back vineyard where he had been mowing. He agreed to call and talk with the vet and arrange to meet with the man when he came out. I thanked him and headed off to Toulouse, leaving the Blanche bleating at the top of her lungs hoping to be reunited with the ailing Olympia. I had put the Blanche out in the pasture thinking that perhaps the other sheep had something contagious.

In Toulouse, Preston met me sitting at an outdoor cafe, the Bibent, drinking tea and watching all the people at the busy Place du Capitole. He told me that he had a wonderful time in Toulouse, eating out in restaurants most every night, going to an outdoor concert, hanging out in downtown Toulouse. Toulouse is a very lively city, even by European standards. It is crowded with young people since it is a university town, and as a result, it has a very diverse, dynamic population. I prefer the elegance and orderliness of Bordeaux but both my husband and son prefer the earthy vibrancy of Toulouse . . . probably their choice is influenced by the thousands of scantily clad girls and women who promenade around that city in the summer heat.

Travel tip: Should you be driving a car in Toulouse, know that the pedestrian ALWAYS has the right of way in the old part of the city. That means that should they jump out in front of your vehicle, as they are wont to do, you are negligent for hitting them. There isn't an inordinate lot of vehicle traffic downtown, but driving in Toulouse is more stressful to me than driving around the Arc de Triumph in Paris, because you have to inch your way through mazes of human bodies who are darting in front of you. Monsieur Besse says he doesn't go to Toulouse because of the pedestrian situation. He also prefers the calme of Bordeaux.

When Preston and I returned to the farm, Roger was not at home. Later in the evening, while I was watering my roses, he came chugging into the driveway in his Deux Cheveaux, his border collie, Miss, sitting beside him in the passenger seat. She was barking wildly, driven crazy by the sight of the poison-eating cat. I was hoping that Miss would overpower Roger's attempts to keep her in the truck, come bounding out and devour the cat; but Roger is in great shape for a 77 year-old man and Miss was easily contained in the truck. She was barking so loudly, I suggested we go into my messy kitchen and talk.

"C'est grave," he said. He had two different medicines I was to administer, via syringe again, morning and night for the next two days. But, despite the vet leaving the medicine, he informed me that there really wasn't much hope. "C'est grave," he repeated. "Grave" is pronounced in French like "mauve." It isn't pronounced like the English place where you bury the dead body even though I realize now that both words are intrinsicly related.

The optimistic American that I am assumed that all would be well. The doctor had come. He had left medicine. Something could be done. Modern science would win out over the grim reaper. But Roger shook his head at my star-spangled optimism. This is France. Death exists here and it's something they pragmatically accept. The French are surrounded by death with the monuments to the dead soldiers, who "died for France," the cemeteries that surround every church, the very personal funerals where the funeral goers walk by and peer into the open tomb to pay their individual respects to the dead. Roger handed me the phone number of the man who "hauls away the dead beasts." To set my mind straight, he let me know that the doctor had listened with his stethescope to Olympia, and had determined that her digestive system had shut down. Slowly, I started to realize that the medicine the doctor left was for me, so I could feel as if I'm doing something while Olympia rots away.

"How did it happen," I asked? Roger said that the sheep is too fat, too much grain this winter, and when she was put out on the fresh grass and weeds, she ate some trefle, or clover, and that's very bad for ruminant animals. So she was saved from the orphan pen and the slaughter house only to be killed with kindness. I don't blame Monsieur Reste, even though I'm mad at him about other things. He didn't know what he was doing when he was watching the sheep this winter. One of the neighbors told me over a week ago that Reste was feeding the sheep too much grain. I probably would have overfed them as well. Although I had put them on a diet and exercise regiment when I arrived.

Roger left, grim, solemn. I went and sat in the stable with the sheep, petting Olympia as her shallow breaths rattled on. She is still living this afternoon. Sometimes she stands up and I get excited that she is making a recovery. Then she lays back down and keeps on rattling.

My husband said I should give her to our friend Norman the Brit who told me he likes mutton. But I don't want to imagine anyone eating her, and besides, you aren't supposed to eat animal meat that has been dosed with these medications. You need to wait two weeks after the last dosage. I'm in a quandry as to if we should put her out of her misery. But I keep thinking she'll pull out of it.

I'm a failure as a sheep farmer. Losing 50% of your flock is a catastrophic failure.

AAAAGGGGGHHHH . . .

Technology!
I just wrote a brilliant essay.
Pushed the button to save as a draft because I was going out to give the sheep her medicine.
And I got that "cannot find page" alert.

The essay was lost to the ages. It was simply brilliant.

I will try to reconstruct it, but it will not be the same. Stay tuned.

The Shop Owner

I drove into Cahors, our "big city," yesterday afternoon. Passed an old stone barn that had collapsed. Its beautiful hand-hewn beams sticking out like a bag of McDonald's french fries, two of its lovely old walls reduced to large piles of rubble. I felt sad, another beautiful victim devoured by the ages. Yes, it can be rebuilt, should the owner want to put in all the money and effort required to restore it. But it will never be the same pure example of peasant architecture. It will be a modern building, no matter how faithful the owner might be to the restoration.

Farther down the road, I pass the newly built, bright red aluminum car wash. The France of my dreams crumbles away and I am sad. That's the problem with getting in my car to drive to any town with commercial amenities, I have to deal with the sadness of seeing delicate, precious old France fading away and the soulless strip-mall architecture perfected by America, take its place.

Three years ago, a German couple purchased a pretty stone house down the road and started renovating it. The rumor was that they were making it into their summer home. But the construction went on non-stop for three years and the house kept getting bigger and bigger. Then the rumor morphed and the place was going to be a fancy bed and breakfast. If that was true, I guess the people must have decided that they put too much money into the house to recoup it at a future date from a simple bed and breakfast and so they added on another wing, and now the place sports an expensive restaurant. Yesterday, they finished laying down the asphalt on a large parking lot. I hear the place has great food. And if that is the case, then we will really enjoy eating there because we can drink lots of wine with dinner and walk home. But why did they have to lay down asphalt? If they had to build a big parking lot, why couldn't they lay down the small pebbles that are used around elegant chateaux for driveways? Or why couldn't they lay down cobblestones? I guess it's because they're German and as descendents of the people who invented the super-highway, the love of asphalt is in their blood. I'm trying to figure out how to get rid of the asphalt on our property. Our place used to be a commercial flour mill and so there is a lot of asphalt for the delivery trucks that frequented the place.

Cars and asphalt are the ruin of "quaint" France. The towns and roads in France are cute because the roads are small,the buildings hug the streets, and the towns are designed for WALKERS. The cities were built before the arrival of the ubiquitous voiture, and so France and Europe have this coziness that you don't get when you surround every building with a parking lot and build ramrod straight roads. I mourn every time I discover a new building going up on the outskirts of our little town because it is always a modern aluminum affair and it is always surrounded by lots of asphalt for easy parking. The idea of creating ambiance is anathema to modern commercial builders here in France.

If you ask a French person why they don't enact stricter zoning and building codes to prevent the encroachment of modern blight, they will always give you the same reply: "Why should you be allowed to build whatever you want in your country but you want us to keep living in this fantasy land?" Touche!(yes, I know that an accent should go on that word but I don't have them)> Yes, you're absolutely right Monsieur French person. You shouldn't be commercially hamstrung. Go and ruin your heritage as the Americans ruined theirs, it's only fair.

I really don't blame the French though. They've figured out how to make a Euro by building the cheapest and fastest way possible and we foreigners have only ourselves to blame for the new buildings. When I mentioned the other day to my son that all of us foreigners moving into the area were destroying it with our money (we require more home-improvement stores, wider roads, and more car washes) and our massive, often tasteless renovations, he pointed out that he felt the foreigners were saving the area.

On one hand, I agree. The foreigners buy all the old houses and do keep them from falling down by sinking massive amounts of Euros into the buildings. But we push out the French, and we bring our American, British, and Dutch tastes with us, and the result is not French no matter how much money we spend or how lovely our homes appear. We're destroying what attracted us to this area in the first place -- its unspoiled, SIMPLE, easy-going, French provincial way of life. Will the last French person to leave the departement please shoot us? We deserve it. We're a hoard of greedy locusts who are destroying your beautiful, coveted way of life.

Okay, now I got that off my chest. One of these days, I'll be jaded and I'll accept the fact that my personal dream of old France was just a foolish dream and I'll be able to drive into Cahors, or Toulouse, or Bordeaux, or Paris without drowning in a wave of nostalgic angst.

Yesterday, I walked down a small street in Cahors that I have never walked down and discovered two great shops with incredibly personable shopkeepers at the helm. The first was a new equestrian shop that has only been open three months. I was ecstatic because I have had this vision of buying a horse and riding it everyday on all the paths that wind their way through our surrounding hills. And I've always wanted to own a pair of REAL jodhpurs.

Last year, a neighbor who was paralyzed in a farm accident, told me that I could ride her horses whenever I wanted. I didn't take her up on the offer last year because I bought the two sheep, and since I didn't have a pen for for the sheep, I needed to take them for long walks each day so that they could get some exercise. Maybe the sheep would have followed the horse, but I didn't think that I could keep the sheep away from the flower beds we passed if I was on top of a horse.

So all summer I fantasized about wearing a pair of tight jodhpurs and riding a horse through the countryside. I tried to find the equestrian store in Toulouse so that I could buy the jodhpurs, but couldn't locate it. I was sure that if I bought the jodhpurs I'd start riding the horse. This winter in San Francisco, I even walked four miles to an equestrian store, I was going to buy some jodhpurs, only to find it closed. And I tried to take lessons one weekend at the Stanford Equestrian Center, but the place never returned my phone calls until a month later when I couldn't go. When I visited my family in Montana in March, it was my plan to ride a horse every day. But my father was worried that his horses would buck me off, so I just had to be content with going down to the corral each morning and sitting with the horse, or walking it around in the pasture.

I didn't buy the jodhpurs yesterday. I think the weather was too hot for me to be interested in buying a pair of heavy pants. But I view the opening of this store as an omen . . . the jodhpurs are getting closer, and soon I will have a pair, I bought the boots in Paris last autumn, and the pasture has just been fenced in for the sheep, so there's nothing to keep me from riding my neighbor's horse.

(I'm taking a break here to give the sheep her medicine and let the tow of them out into their pasture for the day.)

I now smell like a sheep . . . and Blanche is bellowing at the top of her lungs outside. Olympia looked like she was dying when I went out there. She had scratchy breathing, didn't get up, and had her eyes half closed. I took Blanche out. I had tried to separate her yesterday from Olympia so she wouldn't catch Olympia's disease, but every time Olympia cried out, Blanche would turn around and go back. I tied a piece of twine around Blanche's neck and tried to "lead" her to her pasture, but she fought me so hard that I gave up choking her and let her return to her house. This morning Olympia wasn't crying out for her, so she left . . . after hesitating a few times. Now, Blanche realizes that she is alone and is yelling.

I went back to see Olympia after getting Blanche "settled" and she had stood up and seemed better . . . or perhaps that is wishful thinking on my part. She didn't have that raspy, death breath. I'll go into the vet's office again and see if he'll come out and look at the sheep. It's easier for me to speak French when I am face to face with the person.

What a day . . . I had some flowers to plant, a stairway to paint, I need to go to Toulouse to pick up my son, and now I have a dying sheep on my hands. At least I have gotten my mind off of the evils of asphalt.

Well, the shopkeeper story will have to wait for another day.

A visit to the Vet . . .

I thought that some of my cat problems might be solved yesterday. I was on the telephone, calling a neighbor to ask about what to do with my sick sheep, when the cat came in and ate some sweetened, poisoned, grain that I put out last winter to kill the mice. I didn't see her for most of the day and so I was gleefully thinking that perhaps her corpse was starting to rot in the barn, and that her annoying habits -- rubbing her body around my ankles, begging me to feed her when I had better things to do, pooping in beds, having two litters of kittens in less than twelve months -- wouldn't be annoying me any longer. With the human-friendly Alpha-Cat out of the picture, the other 100 cats would become feral and leave me alone while they kept the farm free of mice.

But as my neighbor predicted when I told him she ate the poison, "She's not going to die. You know cats have nine lives," I laughed thinking how silly that superstition was. Sure enough, more than twelve hours after she ingested the poision, she was still up and running around.

My conscience is starting to bother me though, because after the bee infestation in the house, I worry that my evil thoughts regarding the cat will turn the cat problem into something much more menacing, much more Stephen Kingish, as I'm wishing that this perfectly nice cat, who is simply trying to build a bridge to the human world, would croak and leave me alone.

Yesterday, I consulted several neighbors regarding my sick sheep. She has diarrhea and won't eat. However, none of them have sheep, and so the only advice they had for me was to go the veterinarian. But, stubborn American that I am, I went to the farmer's cooperative thinking that they carried medicine for animals and would advise me on the best course of action. I have a book, in French, on how to care for sheep, but they didn't mention what to specifically do to treat diarrhea. They just tell you about how to prevent diarrhea, and unfortunately for the sheep, I hadn't bothered to read that chapter.

Sheep are very delicate animals, unlike cats who have nine lives, sheep possess, on average, a quarter of a life. An old sheep farmer in Montana, who died last year, told me that from the moment a sheep is born it is just looking for a way to die. That was his down-home way of saying that sheep are a pain in the ass. In the same vein of conventional wisdom, I was surfing the web looking for sheep remedies when I came across this article entitled, "A Sick Sheep is Not Always a Dead Sheep." That was comforting.

So yesterday I found myself in the ironic position of rooting for the cat to die a horrible death by poison, and working frantically all morning to save my beloved, smelly sheep. My son and I had sheared the healthy sheep a few days ago. We had a rollicking, hysterical, yet difficult time as we wrestled the sheep down, and then chopped off her wool with a hand scissors. I have a photo of Preston on the ground, on his back, holding the sheep with his arms encircling her fat belly, her legs sticking akwardly out in all directions. I told him that if he does anything to displease me I'm going to whip out the photo and show it to whoever his current girlfriend happens to be. The photo will be quite the embarassment for him as it looks like he's perhaps, well . . . if you saw Woody Allen's movie, "Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask," you'll know what I'm hinting at.

Anyway, the healthy sheep is shorn, admittedly not very smoothly, looking something like a cubist painting with many right angles cut into her wool, so if she would have been the one to get the diarrhea, it wouldn't have been quite as disgusting. The one who has the diarrhea isn't sheared, and so she has a poopy mess clinging to her backside attracting flies, which is another horrid problem according to my sheep book having something to do with maggots. But Preston is in Toulouse until Friday evening, and so I can't cut the sheep's wool for another two days. And oh, what a joy that will be.

I thought I'd have this glamorous life living in France, but the dominant theme that is running through my life, at least this week, seems to be merde. I set off for the farmer's cooperative. The clerk there always gets a chuckle out of having me show up. The americaine who owns two sheep. I love going to the cooperative because I get to see the real rural France, the old and the young farmers who joke about their difficult lives, yet seem to be the most genuinely happy people I have ever met.

Yesterday, there was an ancient couple there, they were in their nineties, or possibly they had both passed the century mark, this being the home of the French Paradox. The woman had her silver hair pulled back in a girlish ponytail, her face looked like a dark brown highway map of France, she was wearing a dirty blue house dress accessoried with dark socks and some espadrilles. Her husband looked as if he had been sent from Central Casting to fill the part of "French shepherd." He wore a black beret, had on a pair of pants that were several sizes too big cinched with a thin belt, and he had a cataract covering one eye so that when he looked at you, your first thought was of the Hunchback of Notre Dame. These are the people who are disappearing from France, and these are the people that I adore . . . this link to the ancient country way of living. The scene was ruined when instead of loading their lamb granules into a horse-drawn wagon, they shoved the bags into the back of one of those new electric cars.

My friend Therese showed up just as the old couple was pulling out. Therese backed her car towards the passenger side of the old couple's car as she angled for an advantageous position from which to load her car with chicken feed. The old woman started having a fit, thinking that Therese was going to smash into her. So she got out and was ranting at Therese. But being a French woman, she was quiet in her ranting, and so Therese couldn't hear her ranting. I pointed out the fuming old woman to Therese who was perplexed at the woman's complaining, laughed, and kissed me hello. The old man backed his car out, with great difficulty, it seemed he wasn't used to driving a car, as he wife directed his confused manuveures.

I told Therese my woes regarding the sick sheep. Both Therese and the clerk both said that I needed to go to the veterinairain. I kissed Therese good-bye and headed off towards Prayssac.

When I arrived at the vet's, he was outside with an old, handsome sheep farmer. The two of them were examining a ewe with a large milk bag, who was closely shorn and very, very clean. I didn't know that it was possible for a sheep, not a show sheep, to be so clean. I worried that if I had to haul my sheep in to see the vet, which would be very difficult for me to do in the brand new Peugeot 307, I would be embarassed that my sheep was dirty and smelly and very poopy.

I watched them, and when they were finished, they said Bonjour Madame to acknowledge me, and we went inside to wait for the vet, who was a nerdy-good-looking guy, (maybe I've been here too long without my husband if I'm starting to think that old sheep farmers and nerdy vets, wearing used rectal exam gloves, are attractive)to bring out the medicine for the sick ewe. I asked the sheep farmer what was wrong with his sheep and he said she wasn't eating. I said I had the same problem with my sheep, but that mine had diarrhea. I proudly felt like a old-native myself, being able to talk shop with the locals.

While the doctor was in his storeroom, many women with many dogs started arriving. And virtually all of the dogs seemed to be new mothers as they had very distended breasts. This reminded me that I should ask about the birth-control pill for my cat as suggested by my neighbor Madame Dupuis.

The receptionist handed me a small box. I read the box and was intrigued to discover that I can induce abortions if I feed the cat one pill a day for twelve days after I hear the blood-curdling sex screaming. Now that's a technology I can embrace. Curiously if you want to solve your cat's problems with nymphomanie you can give it one pill a day. I wonder if I can also put it in the cereal of eighteen-year-old boy? Hmmmmmmm.

The doctor finally saw me, heard the word diarrhee and said he didn't need to see the sheep (thank goodness). He gave me some sulphur-based powder that one mixes with water and then administers to the sheep by sticking a large syringe down the sheep's throat.

I raced home. Wrestled the syringe into the sheep's throat, and thought that all my old bartending jokes about sheep, sheepherders, and oral sex probably had a long tradition of fact behind them. The young sheep has a few small teeth, no sharp incisors, and was somewhat complacent after I had shoved the rather fat syringe down her throat.

Amazingly, the sheep did seem a bit perker later in the afternoon when I had to wrestle her again for her second dosage.

I told myself I'd start running again this morning, but am a bit worried about it. I have to go out and dose the sheep again, I'll smell like mutton, and I'll probably have all the stray dogs chasing me down as I run, and there are a lot of dogs running loose here. Wish me luck.