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.