The War is Over

(Before you read this, keep in mind that some of my best friends are German and that two of my grandparents were 100% German.)
 
My husband and I went to dinner last night at the fancy new restaurant/hostellerie down the road.  The weather was so warm that we sat outside under a bright full moon. The warm night breezes didn’t require that we don jackets.  The restaurant had a professional photographer taking promotional shots of the candlelit diners.

At dinner we were surrounded by Germans, which is an oddity around here.  When we purchased the property back in 2001, the realtor told us that the Germans didn’t come down to our area of France because they committed a few atrocities and the old people just wouldn’t be kind to them.  But now the old people are dying off rapidly, and this new restaurant is owned by a German and his French wife, so we’re seeing lots of cars down here emblazoned with the Deutschland “D” stickers.

I commented to my husband that I didn’t know if having an American Jewish couple in the restaurant’s brochure would attract or deter the clientele from Allemand. 

Surrounded by our visiting neighbors from the north, it wasn’t too much of a stretch to envision what France must have been like during World War II when the Germans ran the place. The Germans that sat closest to us were very tall, all were blonde, and horrors, they drank BEER with their gourmet meal.  I thought the wife of the chef, an Italian, who serves as the hostess, was going to have a heart attack when a portable phone belonging to one of the German men rang loudly, and in response, he carried on a very loud German conversation.

My husband was complaining softly to me about how loud the Germans were (if you knew me you would find this humorous) and I pointed out that I thought that we Americans had a lot more in common with the Germans than we did with the French when it came to manners.  My intelligent husband surprised me by expressing surprise that I would make such an observation.

When the bill was presented to us, it was accompanied by two fliers announcing future soirees at the restaurant.  The first was an Edith Piaf night.  But to my great shock and outrage, the second flier trumpeted the news that in August there would be two nights celebrating BAVARIA!!!!!!!  I hope the participants don’t get feisty and go looking for a kike to roast because the selection in our village only leads to one door and that’s ours.

At least the British and the Scots here have the decency not to stage Boiled Mutton Dinners and Haggis Nights. 

Next to the table of the six big, loud German beer drinkers, a group of eight British folk were seated.  I pointed out to my husband that both nations had tried unsuccessfully to take over the area (the British were here during the Hundred Years War) and now they were taking it over with their money. Seizing the opportunity, I pointed out the futility of war to my husband.

Our memories were spurred by that sage comment, and we both commented on a poster we had seen at a demonstration against the Iraq War in San Francisco last year that asked, “Why Don’t We Just Buy Their Oil?”

When you think of how many people were slaughtered in World War II, and then you look at the Germans surrounding you in a French restaurant, having a good time drinking beer with foie gras, laughing and talking loudly, and spending the same currency as the French, you can see how ridiculous, stupid, useless war is.  In my humble opinion, all wars are economic even if they are staged under the banner of religion; so therefore, there is always an economic solution to war.

The bright side to having a good French restaurant, attracting German clientele is that it’s very pleasing and hopeful to see the children of mortal enemies eating pleasantly side by side.  For added color and drama, there was a man seated at the table beside us who was old enough to have been a Nazi soldier.  Yes, I have to admit that the war is over, and one shouldn’t be xenophobic, and it’s awfully nice to eat together in peace. However, I have to draw the line at staging Bavarian Nights in the neighborhood. 

Everything You Want

I was sitting on the terrace sewing a block for my quilt when my son walked outside.  “Why aren’t you smiling,” he asked, “you have everything you want.  You should be smiling.”

And I thought to myself that he was right.  I “possessed” all the things, materially and spiritual, that I truly find important in life.

About ten eight years ago, I made a list of all the THINGS I wanted to have in life. It started out as a long list I would occasionally read over the list and strike something off of it, if it no longer seemed to be important to my well-being. 

The list was eventually whittled down to five items which I consider to be of great importance to me.  Of the five, I possess four: health, love, a farm in France, and a creative life. 

What I find so interesting about my son’s comment is that he, a materialistic eighteen-year-old, programmed by the dictates of society and the media, was able to divine that I do have everything I want.   When I first made my wish list, it was a long list filled with desires that were the result of decades of brainwashing from my family, society, and the media.  As I examined the list and weeded out what others thought I should be striving to achieve, and what my heart really wanted, the list became incredibly small and simple. 

I was writing in my journal a few years ago, that the best year of my life was when I was nine years old.  When I was nine, I felt that whatever I could dream up was mine simply for the dreaming.  I wasn’t worried about how I looked.  I was loved unconditionally by my parents. I hadn’t entered into the trauma that dealing with boys would bring into my life.  I played the violin and the piano.  I took dance lessons.  I had a pony.  I ran around our family farm building little villages.  I had my business sewing Barbie Doll clothes by hand and making good money selling them at school. Weekly trips to the small local library were exotic adventures for me. There was no greater happiness for me than to get lost in the books I devoured.  I wrote little mysteries with two girlfriends of mine.  I greatly enjoyed school and learning.

Then, in the summer before I turned ten, my best girlfriend Amy Crowe was hit by a car and died and all innocence and potential flew out of my window.  Her death made me reject religion.  On her gravestone, her parents had carved, “Thy Will Be Done,” and I didn’t want any part of a God whose will was to kill a nine-year-old girl on a busy road. By rejecting the Catholicism in which I had been indoctrinated, I ended up questioning everything.  Life now seemed abysmally short and serious to me.  If we were only going to be here such a short time, then I had to do something grand . . . like save the world.  Suddenly, I became a very serious person, passionate about everything that had meaning and no meaning. I was the somber person in a toothpaste-smiling world.

When I realized a few years ago that I considered 1967-1968 to be my best age, I went back and analyzed what made me so happy then, before Amy’s death.  What I discovered was that I was surrounded by nature, I had a loving family, I had many friends, I was creative, and I was inquisitive.  I wasn’t yet corrupted by the outside world demanding that I be sexy, that I live to consume, that I be successful in the way society defines success, that I try and please every man who crossed my path, that my teeth be incredibly white, that I weigh 110 pounds, that I always say the right thing, etc., etc., ad nausea.  When I was nine, I just WAS.  I didn’t have to meditate to find out who I really was.  I knew it with every cell of my being and that is why I was so happy.  I didn’t question who I was because I hadn’t yet been taught to question and criticize who I was.

As I started to realize that I had once possessed happiness and bliss, way back when I was nine, I compared my master LIST to the list of what made me happy when I was nine, and I was thrilled to discover that the master LIST was being whittled down mirror the same list of happy elements that filled my life when I was nine.  Love.  Nature.  Health.  Creativity.  Slowly, without conscious effort, my soul was trying desperately to pull me back to these core elements that for me constitute the foundations of my personal happiness. When I was able to crawl out from all the garbage that had been heaped upon my hapless soul over the decades, I was able to discover that I once “had it all” and if I once “had it all” that meant that having defined that past happiness, I could try to happen upon it again. Slowly, I clawed my way out from the heap to reclaim my innate joy.  This clawing required that I write daily in a journal to examine my life and that I work hard to exclude the outside media, and its incessant messages that work against my happiness.

So what great joy I felt yesterday, when a materialistic eighteen-year-old could divine that I had everything I wanted.  I felt that I had arrived.  I had been able to strip myself down to my original, unsullied soul and that perhaps the real me was becoming visible to the outside world.  What an amazing gift to be able to say at the age of forty-five that I have it all.  I’m no longer searching for anything.  What is, IS and I joyfully accept that. 

 

Definition of Gluttony

I stayed up until midnight sewing another “block” for my quilt.  I haven’t been able to get Roger’s sewing machine to work yet.  My husband bought me some new needles when he was in town, but when I tried to put one in, I couldn’t figure out how to get it to stay in there.  There seems to be a part missing that holds the needle in, and I’m hoping that I’m not the one who caused it to go missing because there was a needle firmly in place when Roger brought the machine to my house. 

So I’ve continued to sew the blocks by hand. The nice thing about sewing by hand is that you can sit outside while you work.  Last night, I sat out until it was too dark to see, listening to the frogs, birds, and the neighbor's chickens.  I have eight blocks finished and only have twenty-seven to go!  When those blocks are completed, then I need to add the batting and the piece of material for the reverse side, which I haven’t found yet but I’m sure the perfect piece will arrive in my life soon.   The three components, joined blocks, batting, and reverse side will then be joined by hand quilting.  I might, just might, be finished with the quilt by the time I leave in the autumn.

For my breakfast this morning, I just finished a fantastic piece of chocolate mousse cake which Francine brought over for lunch yesterday.  There’s a good book by Robert Arbor entitled Joie de Vivre which covers the reasons Arbor, a French native, and successful café owner in New York City, believes the French live the good life. One of these quality of life tips is to indulge in the French habit of drinking coffee in the morning and only eating a piece of bread with jam or butter for breakfast.  With my husband here, and with him being willing to make bakery runs in the morning, I’ve been eating a lot of croissants.  The other day, I ate one that was still warm. It had just slid off of the baker’s pan and I have to say it was one of the most sublime tastes I’ve ever had the pleasure to experience.  This morning I went overboard by having a piece of this leftover chocolate cake for breakfast.  I rationalized the sinning by telling myself I would walk the sheep this morning.  But that rationalization is meaningless because we’re invited to a neighbor’s for lunch today and that will be another food orgy as was the lunch I made yesterday for a few of the neighbors.  After that lunch, my son had eaten so much that he had to lay down for a few hours. 

I had told Nicole on Saturday that I would show up this morning to ride Tasha, but when I saw Nicole at the village dinner she told me that the other two women who ride the horses were scheduled to come Monday.  So I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to ride.  Today, I’ll take Blanche out for a hike.

Thankfully, Blanche has finally figured out that there are sheds she can use for shelter in the back of her pasture.  That means she will be able to stay comfortably out in the pasture during the winter.  Already, she stays in the sheds during the hottest part of the day.  For some reason, flies aren’t as bothersome to animals in sheds and barns as they are when they are outside. 

(My husband just returned from the bakery with another perfect croissant.  I sat out on the terrace in the morning sunshine and pulled it apart as I devoured it.  The chocolate cake hadn’t sated my appetite for a good croissant.)

Later . . .

At lunch, we drove up the hill to Nadine Fleury’s for lunch.  Her boyfriend of many years, Jean-Claude joined us, as well as another friend Jacqueline.  All three are very thin.  And the reason why is that they eat sensibly.  Nadine served a cucumber and yogurt salad.  She had made the yogurt herself from the milk of her goats.  The main course was a roasted chicken with roasted peaches.  Next we were served the cheese course: goat cheese that Nadine had made, with some Cantal and Camembert thrown in for variety.  Nadine’s neighbor’s homemade bread was available throughout the meal. For dessert, we devoured strawberries dusted with some sugar. 

After my husband and I arrived home, we waited about an hour, and then I ate the rest of the chocolate cake, and my husband took out the cookies.  I didn’t think I could eat dinner because I was so stuffed from gorging, but then my son and his girlfriend made duck breasts in a mushroom cream sauce with a vinaigrette salad and I did partake of the delicious meal. For dessert, my husband and I ate some more cookies, and my son and his girlfriend walked down the road to a restaurant to eat ice cream sundaes. 

After a long hard day of eating constantly, I stayed up late again sewing my quilt squares in bed.  Oh, and I'm ashamed to admit, Blanche never did get that walk I promised.

Another Perfect Day

I had one of those rare perfect days yesterday.  I successfully rounded up the horse, Tasha, and took him for a pleasant, slow two hour ride.  I marveled at how different the landscape looks from the back of a horse.  The view seems to unfold before you in a rolling panorama because you’re sitting up high.  One house that I had seen on several walks with the sheep, but hadn’t taken much of an interest in, rolled into view and I was visually pleased by the new way in which it unexpectedly revealed itself to me.  I had never noticed before that it was built from a beautiful softly burnished red stone with pink mortar holding the pile together.  The house was deep in the woods and as we went by, two red deer bounded out from behind it.  The domicile seemed enchanted, as if it had to be the site of one of those European-based fairy tales which were read to me as a child. 

The day started out overcast with the normal July-August morning fog that comes up from the river valley.  The air was cool enough to keep the flies at bay.  We didn’t encounter or hear one motorized vehicle, just a single runner puffing up a steep hill.

When we returned to Nicole’s house, she wheeled out of her house in her motorized wheelchair to greet us and to feed Tasha some stale bread. After feeding Tasha my apple core, brushing him down, and turning him out into the pasture,  I told Nicole I’d be back Monday morning, as I’d like to try to ride every other morning. I then headed off on my three-speed bicycle with the wicker basket on the front.

Nicole’s place is situated on the top of a huge hill, approximately four kilometers away from my house.  I flew down the hill, visions of Lance Armstrong dancing in my head, and didn’t have to pedal until the final half kilometer.  I stopped and chatted with Monsieur Dupuis who was starting out on a walk towards the river. 

When I drove in our driveway, past the large hedge that needs clipping again, past my beautiful antique roses that are now blooming profusely despite their leaf blight, past the ripening giant blackberry bushes, I sported a large grin.  Thrilled with the sun forcing its way through the fog, invigorated from my ride on Tasha and the bicycle run down the hill, I thought that this is how life should be:  a big dose of Nature surrounded by family and friends. 

In the evening, my husband, I, my son and his girlfriend drove back up the hill to our little, official postal village for its annual dinner.  We started out with the aperitifs while greeting all the people we knew.  At the fete, all xenophobic nationality differences disappear.  There was the manic Scottish couple, that I found entertaining this year, when last year I avoided them.  There was the sexy young German wife over who people couldn’t stop marveling over, and who my son and I spent too much time puzzling over the fact that she was married to the effeminate, homely looking older Frenchman who didn’t sit with her and their two young children at the dinner.  He has roots in the area, but now lives in Lyon.  We figured he must have a lot of money.  But that isn’t necessarily the correct conclusion.  I too was once a very sexy young woman and I married a much older man with no money and lots of debt, so I should be the last one to judge a book by its cover. I sat near one of Horatio Alger’s daughters and her Arab husband, one of “those people” who are ruining France if you listen to the right-wing politicians.  They were a very sweet couple, and were with their studly fifteen-year old son, and hip thirteen-year old daughter.  They had driven in from Toulouse for the party. 

We sat at tables set up end to end, with long benches, a seating arrangement that heightened the conviviality of the night. Sitting on my bench, I faced the gorgeous river valley as the sun set on the vineyards far below, and the lights of the farmhouses and little villages began to twinkle in competition with the stars above. As Horatio Alger poured wine in my plastic cup, and the first course of soup arrived, I thought that if there should be a Heaven, it cannot be any better than this.  

Different Views

I went horseback riding with Norman yesterday.  The morning was overcast and cool, and a rain shower approaching from the west darkly threatened to soak us.  Because it was relatively cool, the flies didn't bother us.  It was a perfect July morning for a ride. 

I rode Nicole’s horse for the first time, and enjoyed myself so much, and feel enough confidence in my riding abilities, that I’m going up to her place this morning to take Tasha for a solo ride .  It will be the first time I’ve attempted to catch a horse in a field in order to bridle and saddle it. 

Norman is a very talkative seventy-nine year old. If I’m looking for solitude, he’s not the one I should choose for accompaniment on a ride. He talks constantly.  However, his stories are very interesting and his language is rich and colorful in that Shakespearean/Chaucer-based, British  manner. I don’t believe that Norman had the benefit of any college training, but whatever education he received was far superior to the English Literature degree I received from my University. Compared to Norman, I don't know squat about English literature.  Norman is a treasure trove of information about  literature, the English language, and world history.  Norman was in the navy the last year of World War II.  He lived in Australia in the fifties, California in the Sixties and Seventies, and moved to rural France in the early Eighties, so he’s seen these wonderful locales when they were at the height of their now-stereotypical mystique. 

Yesterday, as we sat astride our horses slowly picking their way through the hills and woods, he was telling me about how much the area has changed, and while he lamented the fact that change has eaten away at the majesty of the area, he said that we have to accept it. Not too long after he had made that pronouncement, he said that the French need to accept that they must modernize.  I didn’t bother to ask him what they could possibly have left to modernize since everything seems overly-modernized to me, and in some instances, the French are more advanced than we are in America.

Amazingly, Norman doesn’t like French food and he doesn’t like to eat late.  He likes mutton.  He enjoys rice pudding. So he's not going to attend our annual village dinner tonight, depite the many pleadings from the neighbors for him to join us.

Carol from New York drove over yesterday with her two French grandchildren and she made the surprising comment to me that she thinks that the French are not very polite . . . and she’s from New York City.  I didn’t mention to Carol that just the other day I remarked to my husband that the rudest person I’ve ever met in our departement was Carol’s AMERICAN daughter. But no, perhaps the rudest person I've met here is Carol's husband. Carol seems to have forgotten that just last week, when she and her husband pulled in the driveway to announce that they were here, her husband, upon meeting my husband for the first time, shook hands and immediately blurted out, “Did you know your wife had such a big mouth before or after you married her?”

Norman doesn’t like the fact that you can’t just pop into a neighbor’s yard to drop off something, that etiquette requires you to stay and talk for a while.  

Carol thinks that the French are ruining their economy with their high taxes. She doesn’t have to pay taxes here, so I don’t believe that she knows the true situation. The income tax isn’t a great deal more than in the U.S. The property taxes are low. The VAT tax can be avoided by not consuming rabidly, and it is a tax that is imposed on all of the European Union countries, not only France.

Norman was telling me about the free, high quality medical care he received for his prostate cancer two years ago in France.

Carol, who just retired in the U.S., is trying to figure out how she and her husband, whose parents were French, can live here in France and partake of the free healthcare and retirement home system without the French taxing them.  Her husband has MS.

I point out all these observations, collected in one day, to illustrate the point that not every foreigner sees France through the same rose-colored glasses as I do.  Norman who has lived here for over twenty years complains about the food, the people, and the bureaucracy.  Carol who has spent two months here every summer for over thirty years complains about the people and the government.  I complain about development. 

All of us foreigners come to live here in France because the country offers us something that is missing in our lives in our native country.  But what exactly that “something” is, is elusive.  I don’t think you can find too many people who complain about French food.  But here’s Norman saying he hates it. I find the French to be overly polite.  But then I run into a New Yorker who finds them to be overly rude.  I tell you, it’s extremely hard to grasp the mystique that is France.  I'm trying to transcribe her siren song, but after yesterday's conversations, I'm starting to believe that will be an impossible task.

You Get What You Need

Yesterday, I was thinking about the fact that if I’m just patient, everything that I really desire and need shows up in my life.  I was thinking about getting a horse last year, and then Pierre-Yves introduces me to Nicole who has two horses, who have first-class tack, are fed, and all I have to do for them is the fun part, to ride them. Then, several days ago, Norman rides into the farm yard on his white horse, and I find out that he and his wife are very happy to let me ride their horses.  No horse showed up immediatedly when I first started desiring it, over a year ago.  But now my life resembles a Magrette painting as horses are raining down on me. 
 
The same thing happened to me last summer when I decided that I wanted a table for the dining room.  I found a man on the eastern side of the departement who crafts farm tables that look like the old ones that were used in this region hundreds of years ago.  I talked my husband into buying it.  Then the next week, Pierre-Yves’ brother-in-law gave me a bigger table for free. 
 
When I went back and re-read my daily journals, I realized that I had been writing about sheep for over a year before I bumped into an acquaintance, Inez, on the street in our big town and she mentioned that the farmer next to her was a large sheep producer.  She had no sooner got the words out of her mouth, than the farmer’s pretty daughter came walking down the sidewalk, heading towards our café table to greet Inez.  The next morning, I was standing in the sheep producer’s barn, surround by ten orphan lambs from which I ended up with the two who turned out to be Blanche and Olympia.
 
I originally chose Olympia (the one who recently died) and another lamb because both were very friendly towards me.  But the farmer’s daughter told me I shouldn’t take the other sheep because it was an uncastrated male and it would be easier for me if I took two females.  Feeling a bit devastated that I couldn’t take the friendly boy sheep, I asked her to pick another out for me.  She chose Blanche.
 
What’s so interesting to me is that when I got home with the sheep, Olympia, who was so friendly in the orphanage, turned out to be rather standoffish.  Blanche, who I didn’t want, turned out to be very affectionate and loving.  Serendipity again triumphed over my desire to control every aspect of my existence.
 
One of the qualities that I’m learning to admire about the rural French, especially the older ones who lived through the war, is that they have an acceptance of fate, destiny, whatever you want to call it.  By contrast, we Americans, and when I say “we Americans” I’m including myself, we have this very mistaken idea that we can control our lives.  “Take control” the financial ads blare. We mistakenly believe that we control our lives because the media sells us the idea that if we would just buy this product, or that drug, or this service, we will find a resolution to our problem.  We will EVENTUALLY find happiness.  The decision is ours, but, we must consume in order to perfect our lives. 
 
And so, in our mad cap quest for the good life, we never get to live it. We're too busy racing around trying to consume our way to Nirvana. Meanwhile, back at the farm, the rural French shut down their stores, stop working, and have a two hour lunch everyday, where they drink wine, eat fantastic food, laugh together, and define the good life for the rest of the world.  I can tell you that it takes quite a while for an American to get used to having a two-hour lunch every day.  Couldn’t I be DOING something productive I keep asking, when in reality, the best thing I could do for myself would be to sit back, relax, eat, and enjoy.    
 
Yesterday, we drove into our little town to eat lunch and were surprised to find an antique fair in progress.  The heat was intense, and so there weren’t a lot of buyers wandering around.  For the first time in my experience, I had French antique dealers immediately taking the listed prices down twenty percent before I even asked.  I was so emboldened that when I purchased something, I would ask them to throw in something else for free, and cheerfully complied.
 
I started out looking for chairs and small tables.  I found two lovely chairs but my husband thought they were too overpriced and delicate for a farmhouse.  He went back to the house leaving me with my bicycle in town because I had an appointment to have my nails done. He had wanted to go along to make an appointment with the woman to have his nails done, because she had told me that she needed a reference from the man’s wife before she would take a man on as a client.  She had several men show up when she opened her shop twenty-two years ago, who booked for a facial, and then took their clothes off demanding a different type of service.  Sylvie must have been the most beautiful woman in the world twenty-two years ago, because she’s still amazingly beautiful now.  Unfortunately, my husband had to return with my son and his girlfriend to the house, so he didn’t get to see how sexy Sylvie was yesterday in a very tight fitting white knit dress which showed off her perfect tan, to perfection.  
 
After my appointment, I wandered around the antique stalls in blistering heat, looking for chairs and small tables. I didn’t find any that I liked, other than the two that my husband had nixed.  However, I did find six beautiful linen napkins with my mother’s initials embroidered on them, and a pair of satin, green and yellow stripped curtains.  I kept eyeing the curtains every time I walked by the woman’s stall.  I thought they were perfect for my bedroom, and they looked as if they would be long enough.  I hesitated though because I didn't really want to buy used curtains.  I finally purchased them after the vender took the price down twenty percent.
 
I took the curtains home.  I hung them up.  They are so perfect, that I’m convinced they were the custom-made curtains that Madame Reste removed from that same bedroom when she moved out of our house. 
 
I didn’t plan to go into town for lunch.  That was my husband’s idea.  I didn’t know that there was an antique sale in progress.  I wasn’t looking for curtains.  Yet, the perfect pair of curtains for that bedroom found their way into my house yesterday.  In the same way that Blanche entered my life.  My son entered my life.  My husband entered my life. The same way the horses entered my life. 
 
The best things in my life were never planned.  The worst fiascos have all been plotted and planned by me. I’m throwing out my organizer and then I’m off to Pamela and Norman’s to pick up Nicole’s horse to ride this morning.  Tally-ho!  (I’ll let you know when the perfect jodhpurs show up in my life.)  Vive la destinee!
  
  
 

A Horse Comes Calling

Yesterday morning, Norman rode his white horse down the hill from his place.  I was in the bathtub when he arrived. I had taken Blanche for a three mile walk earlier in the morning.  I heard Norman’s hearty British accent hailing from below the window.  Throwing a towel around my head, wrapping another one around my body, I hung out the window to talk with him.  My husband wants to put screens on the windows but I feel they’re too modern and they keep you from being able to truly commune with nature, or from hanging out the window to chat with people.
 
Norman had waited at his house for me to come up and go riding with him, but I had forgotten, so he came down to get me.  By the time I quickly finished my bath, my husband had returned from his morning bakery-run and had invited Norman in for coffee. I had to split my croissant with him. I didn’t want to do it, but it was the neighborly thing to do.  He said I could take the horse for a little spin so I unhitched her from one of the poles of the sheep’s pasture, Blanche was bawling at the huge animal jealous that I was lavishing attention on another, I walked the horse over to the house, positioned her near the edge of the terrace so I would have a step up in order to mount her, and then we walked around the farm yards and a neighbor’s walnut grove.  I had to get her out of the walnut grove because she was interested in eating the low hanging branches.
 
It was obvious that she was an easy-going old horse and so I asked Norman if I could ride her up the hill to his house.  He agreed, and my husband agreed to drive Norman home.  The horse ride took half an hour. 
 
I haven’t ridden a horse for years.  I haven’t ridden since 1991, and then, I rode on a long, painful for my backside, pack trip into the mountains that border Yellowstone Park to the north.  As you know, I have wanted to start horseback riding here in France, because there is an endless system of old roads/paths that crisscross the countryside that are perfect for horseback riding.  Nicole up the hill once went by herself and her horse on the trail of St. Jacques de Compostelle which traverses hundreds of miles through France and crosses over the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain.
 
I feel safe walking these trails with my sheep.  But I felt supremely safe and comfortable astride this tall, powerful horse.  When walking with the sheep, I have to look down at the ground a lot so that I don’t trip over rocks and logs, or step on snakes; but on the horse, I was free to look around at the countryside so that entirely new vistas and discoveries were revealed to me. 
 
I can see why young girls enjoy riding horses. Riding a horse gives the adolescent female rider a sense of power that isn’t attainable to them in any other way.  One controls this giant animal that can kill you if it so desires.
 
Well, I was hooked, and I’ve arranged to ride again tomorrow morning.  Norman’s wife Pamela is going to round up Nicole’s horse and show me how to get him saddled and haltered, and then I’ll ride off by myself.  (I bought a horse helmet yesterday.) When I return from my ride, Pamela will show me how to brush down the horse and put away the tack.  After this lesson, I will be free to take Nicole’s horse on a regular basis.
 
Last year, I had told Pierre Yves that I wanted to buy a horse and so wisely, he intervened with my wild fantasies and took me to meet Nicole.  Her spine was badly injured in a farm (not a horse) accident, and now she is bound to a wheelchair and can’t ride.  She has two beautiful horses, and she wants people to take them out to ride.  I didn’t take her up on her invitation last year, because I had the sheep and it was necessary for me to walk them every day because they didn’t have a pasture, so there was no time left in the day to ride a horse. 
 
Nicole provides everything, so it’s the perfect arrangement for me, when I’m not living here full-time to borrow her horse.  Because of her generous offer, I can see how intent I am on horseback riding without shelling out the thousands of Euros of investment that a horse initially requires.  Besides, I need to get better at taking care of animals.  My rabbit and sheep death count is high and so I hesitate to take on a horse at this stage of my farm learning curve.  Amazing how cats that I’m starving and poisoning and shooting at just won’t die, but the animals I like drop over like flies. 

A Normal Day

A fierce lightening storm destroyed the Grand Battle of the Confetti at the nearby village.  My son said that an hour after the band started playing, the bandstand was blown down by the strong winds and people screamed as they ran away from the destruction, their cigarettes blowing through the air as they scattered.  He and his visiting girlfriend had to walk home in a driving rainstorm as lightening crashed around them.  The much-anticipated confetti battle didn’t have time to mature.  It was a sad evening for my son, because he had given me five days of drinking in order that he could go wild at this party which he had looked forward to for months.
 
Blanche was so wet in the morning that I was wringing her wool out like a sponge.  She was the whitest I’ve ever seen her since she was a lamb.  She’s quite beautiful when she’s washed up.
 
Some of the neighboring farmers had walnut trees blown down by the storm.  We had a part of a tree, not a walnut, fall down right where Blanche sleeps.  I’m lucky it didn’t hit her or I’d have another dead sheep on my hands. However, if she would have died during the storm, she would have fit into the dead animal removal man’s schedule and could have been picked up on Tuesday.  Thankfully, she’s looking good and I don’t have to deal with that trauma.
 
After a day of our resident rapist cat howling continually, and raping young kittens on our terrace, my husband had had enough and drove into the big town to buy an air gun.  My son’s a crack shot. Nevertheless, the two of them managed to maim several cats in the rear end.  They did kill one, but it was a sordid affair, requiring a drowning where the victim didn’t go willingly to the great beyond.  My husband and son are going to drive to the big town again today to buy a bigger gun. My husband tried poisoning the cats the day before but that didn’t work. The air gun does seem to be keeping the cats away from the house. Hopefully, we’ll have a lot of dead cats for the dead animal removal man on Tuesday.
 
Yesterday, while in the greengrocer, I was trying to order a quarter kilo of new potatoes and just couldn’t find the right words . . . at one point the clerk thought I was demanding four kilos.  The only other customer in the store stepped in to help and told the woman that I wanted “four hundred grams.” Then the helpful lady asked me if I was American.  I had to admit that her suspicions where right.  She told me that she was also born an American, in Pennsylvania, but had lived here since 1989 as a travel writer, with her American travel writer husband.  We had a nice chat about how the area has changed since she moved here fifteen years ago, “before any Americans had arrived,” and I was jealous that she lived here before the metallic buildings and the housing developments, and the foreigners had started overtaking the countryside; and, that she was able to live here when there were still some characters breathing from the First World War.  She did point out that one improvement was the fact that the greengrocer now existed.  She told me that it used to be you couldn’t find fresh produce unless you grew it yourself. Ah, I longed for those good old days, as I clutched my bag of newly purchased vegetables and cheese, and didn't think of my two foundering tomato plants back home.  (My friends Pierre-Yves and Marylen told me that it wasn’t too many years ago that you had to purchase your groceries from a man who came by your house once a week, dropped off your purchases and took your order for the next week.)
 
For dinner, I prepared a tasty pork roast with onions and new potatoes, accompanied by roasted green beans. We ate outside on the new outdoor table, which my husband scratched the day before while repairing a parasol that had blown away in a wind storm the previous week. The table was decorated with a very pretty, delicate bouquet of roses that I had picked from my rose garden. We drank a tasty, label-less bottle of local wine which a friend had given my husband.  We ate an Alsatian apple tart and we all complained that the crust was soggy. I think that was because yesterday was an uncomfortably humid day the result of all that rain the night before and no crust could stand up to that. 
 
After I had cleaned the kitchen, I took some geraniums out to Blanche.  It was late dusk, and she was already lying down for the night. She sleeps out of sight of the house, near a torn, white canvas hammock.  My theory is that she imagines that the hammock is a giant sheep, and it keeps her company. She gobbled down the geraniums.  I scratched her neck and belly and commented on how beautiful she was now that she had had a shower.  She didn’t follow me when I left, which I found surprising.  She watched me walk out the gate, and then settled herself in for the night.  I would have assumed that she would always follow me, but she was ready for bed and she wasn’t interested in going with me.  
 
My son’s girlfriend has had some experience with 4-H sheep and she said that Blanche is the fattest sheep she has ever seen.  It’s a good thing that she didn’t see Blanche before she was sheared, was cut off her grain rations and turned out onto the pasture, because she was a lot fatter then.  
  
 

Admitting Defeat

Yesterday afternoon I had to run outside and pull the half-dried laundry off of the line as a thunderstorm moved in over the farm.  I set up the sechoir in the living room.  A few hours later, a woman from New York, whose daughter married one of the local boys, came to pay me a visit.  I didn't notice until the end of her visit, when I walked her to the door, that she was sitting in the chair with the view of all our underwear hanging on the sechoir. 
 
The village which is nearest our home, but not our official, postal village, is celebrating their annual three day fete.  The first night is an outdoor dinner with duck roasted over grape vines. The tables are placed end to end and the entire village turns out; even the people who grew up in the village but now live in the big cities, make an annual return pilgrimage.  The day after the dinner, just before lunch, the village has what my son calls the "hangover aperitif." He rode his bike there, drank a Coke, and chatted with the neighbors.  They couldn't believe that he didn't want to have a beer.  But he told them that he has an agreement with his mother that if he doesn't drink, she won't drink.  He was mad at me on Friday night because I mentioned at the dinner with Norman and Pamela that my son wasn't circumcised. So, telling me that I'm stupid when I drink, we made the no-drinking deal. My son returned from the aperitif and said he wanted to revise our deal so that he could drink for remaining two nights of the fete with its bands and dancing.  I agreed, but for his two nights, he had to give me five, which he willingly did.   
 
We didn't go to the village dinner this year because we had another dinner invitation, but my husband and son did walk to the village last night to listen to the two bands play.  They returned home at 12:30am and my husband told me that he had spoken with two anti-American French men, and that he couldn't disagree with what they were complaining about.  And then my husband went on and on about how sweet our neighbors Jose and Evelyn Boudet are.  So I couldn't get back to sleep for a while because I kept wondering what made Jose and Evelyn were so very kind and sweet.
 
Jose is a vintner, son of our local Horatio Alger and Evelyn works in the big town in an office. When she was a child, she lived in a house by the side of the road outside her small village.  The house was connected to her parent's gas station and small grocery. Today, she lives in a house that abuts the side of our road.
 
I lay awake and wondered why personalities such as Jose's and Evelyn's weren't the norm in life.  Why is it so unusual to meet people who are gentle and kind?  My husband is an options trader on the floor of an exchange, and I was one, so I suppose that being exposed to raw capitalism every day, and its attendant greed and deceit, we are extremely amazed by and appreciative of kind, giving people. 
 
Two years ago, a small parcel of land, which borders one side of our driveway near the road, came up for sale. Our ex-caretaker told my husband that the land could be purchased, and my husband readily agreed to buy it.  One of the problems with our ex-caretaker is that he talks constantly, and as soon as we had agreed to buy it, he ran across the street and blabbed the news to Roger and Jose, who live side-by-side with their front windows facing this field. Then the busybody ex-caretaker, ran back and told us that Roger and Jose were unhappy that we were buying the property.  The caretaker explained that since we were Americans, Roger and Jose were worried that we would pave the little piece of land.  I found this all amusing, because we wanted to buy the terrain expressly to prevent anyone from building on the property.  We wanted to preserve it as agricultural land.
 
The ex-caretaker said that if we wanted to preserve peace in the neighborhood, we needed to only buy a third of the property, the third closest to our driveway.  Roger and Jose would each purchase another section.  I told my husband not to do this.  I warned him that no good deed goes unpunished and that the ex-caretaker was probably exaggerating the animosity that was festering in the minds of Roger and Jose.
 
But my husband, who isn't as cut-throat as I am, was convinced by the caretaker to allow the division of the land into three tiny parcels.  We found out after the purchase papers were signed, that since the land is so near the ruisseau that it would be against modern law to build a house there; and, we discovered that the tiny piece of land had been for sale for a long time, but that Roger and Jose, knowing that a house couldn't be built there, and that the small parcel wasn't of interest to any other farmer, didn't want to spend the money, so they just let the situation remain as it was year after year. 
 
The next summer, Roger had us over for aperitifs with the Boudets.  He went to a lot of trouble, having Evelyn bring in pizzas from the big town for the event. We were having a good time, enjoying Roger's ratafia and peach wine when, simply to make conversation, I asked if they thought it was a good idea for us to plant fruit trees on our little patch.  Roger didn't think that fruit trees would do well there.  Evelyn Boudet perked up and announced that they were going to either put in a swimming pool or a garage on their part.  I kept a smile plastered on my face, but inside I was fuming.
 
When we returned home, I let go of a rant directed at my husband telling him, "I told you so. You should have bought that entire parcel."  We were trying to prevent anything being built on that land, and now some ugly garage would be built there.  For about a month, I just seethed whenever I drove out of our driveway, envisioning a garage materializing on the pasture.  Then, when one of our very nearby neighbors built a very ugly, asymmetrical garage behind her house, built by the same local carpenter I assumed the Boudets would hire, my annoyance was acute.
 
But time has passed and I'm slowly beginning to realize that I can't stop the countryside from being raped and pillaged, and if anyone deserves to have a garage, it's the very sweet Evelyn and Jose.  And so I am forced to learn to go with the flow, as the flow overwhelms my miniscule abilities to control the order of the world.  Everyone is my teacher, and I couldn't have a sweeter pair to teach me than Evelyn and Jose.
 
(Correction:  My son read this post and said that I had said that his member was "large and uncircumcised, and he wanted me to correct my mistake.)

Sheep Eat Flower

At midnight we returned from having dinner at a friend's house , to find a bag of lettuce tied to the front door handle with an attached note:
 
Sheep in little house
Sheep eat flower
Good night
Thérèse 
 
I thought it was a nice little bit of haiku from the neighbor.  The three of us headed for our beds. 
 
This morning, as I was stepping out on the terrace to drink my first cup of tea, I heard Blanche bleating.  I looked over at her pasture, to the corner nearest the house where she usually stands if she wants to communicate with me, and didn't see her.  I remembered the cryptic midnight note.  I glanced down at my geraniums and noticed that there were a lot of stems, without flowers, sticking out of several pots.
 
Yes, it was true:
Sheep in little house
Sheep eat flower
 
While walking towards the little house, hot tea sloshing over my hand, I passed by the ateliers and I saw in the distance that one of the large gates was hanging wide open.  Some male member of my family had not shut the gate. I have to wait until they get out of bed to find out who was the culprit.  I didn't go to close the gate, because I was in a hurry to respond to Blanche's insistent bleating.  She does not have any food in her sheep house because she doesn't go in there any more, and I wanted to get her out while the morning was still cool, and the flies were still sleeping, so that she could eat without being harassed. 
 
Blanche was happy to see me approaching her house, and when I let her out, she followed me as a well-behaved sheep should.  I had one tense moment when she stopped for a moment on the driveway to glance wistfully back at the geraniums that she hadn't finished off last night when Thérèse put an end to her vandalism.  Poor Thérèse, she innocently walked over to bring me a head of lettuce, only to discover that she had to herd sheep.
 
Thankfully, Blanche did placidly follow me into her pasture through the little foot path gate.  She ran out towards the walnut grove. She was out of sight, so I decided to quietly sneak over to the large gate, hoping the trees and bushes would hide my movements from the ever-clever Blanche.  I arrived at the other end of the walnut grove.  She spotted me, and came running.  I started running; we arrived at the gate at the same time, so I wasn't able to close the gate in time to prevent her from pushing me aside and running out of the pasture.  In May I ran a 7.25 mile race in ten minute miles, so I would have thought that I could have outrun a fat sheep. In my defense, I hadn't even had a full cup of tea yet.
 
I just spent the last half hour chasing Blanche around the yard.  The neighbors, if they were awake, heard me yelling continually, "Allez mouton, allez." Blanche is very smart, for a sheep. She always wants me to pet her and hug her and rub her belly, except when she's misbehaving and then she won't let me come near her. I can't wait to hear what Therese had to go through to get Blanche in her little house.
 
Finally and thankfully, Blanche let me approach her so that I was able to grab her around her neck.  I had read in a sheep book that if you can grab a sheep's neck and pull their head back and up, they will go willingly with you.  She didn't exactly go willingly, she weighs as much as I do and I sort of dragged her, but she did go.  Now she's standing in her favorite corner of the pasture yelling at me.  
 
People wonder why I lose weight when I'm here in France eating cheese with every meal, visiting the bakery every morning, and sloshing down wine with every morsel I inhale.  I'm convinced that it's my exercize regimen.  Foot racing and wrestling with sheep in the early morning burns a lot of calories.
 

A Sweet Day

I had a sweet day yesterday. 
 
In the afternoon, Preston and I drove into the big town to look at the July sales.  The French stores are only permitted to have sales in January and July.  I don’t know the reason why this is the law, but when they do have markdowns, they are meaningful.  I purchased a pillow and an outdoor table candle for half price. I would have shopped more but Preston had to critique everything I wanted to buy so I ended up not buying anything.  I spied a pair of lime green stretch jeans which he hated, but perhaps I’ll drive back to town today without him and purchase them.  He has to sort tiles today to prepare for the repairing of the mill roof which will commence next week.
 
We visited our favorite candy couple at the Belgian chocolate store.  They have one of the few air conditioned places in our departement so it’s a pleasure to go in there on a hot day.  The lady always jokes with me by asking if I’m going to eat the chocolate right away and I say certainement.  She laughs, because I’m so honest about my bad manners.  The French don’t eat while walking down the street.  You may see the young doing it now and then in Paris, but it’s a rare sight.  They also don’t eat in their cars. They don’t eat between meals and they eat only when sitting down.  In their opinion, only animals eat standing up.
 
Earlier in the day, I had asked Roger if he had an old sewing machine I could use for my patchwork.  Since I started another project by hand, I figured that the piecing together of the patches could be more efficiently done by machine, and I could still achieve my Zen-sewing states with the other mountain of hand-sewing I needed to accomplish. 
 
He said he did have his grandmother’s old sewing machine, but that it wasn’t motorized, it was foot-powered.  I said that was fine.  He said he would need some help bringing it down the stairs, so I said that I would send Preston over in the evening, and then Roger could join us for dinner.  He agreed.
 
At eight, Preston went over and then returned in the back of Roger’s Deux Cheveaux, holding the machine so it wouldn’t fall over.  He had taken the place of Roger’s dog, Miss, who now ran beside the vehicle.  The machine is very beautiful, with lovely designs painted in gold on the black body, and the iron legs were artfully crafted by the Singer Company.  Without a manual I figured out how the machine works, although I can’t thread the extremely small hole of the needle.  I don’t know how Roger’s grandmother managed the task, and I’m sure she had worse lighting than I do.  What is amazing is how fast the machine runs without a motor.  I kept repeating to my husband that I don’t understand why Singer even bothered to attach a motor to their later designs, the pedal power runs the machine quickly and smoothly.
 
Our other neighbor, Francine, joined us for dinner.  She arrived with a jar of giant green olives.  Roger brought a bottle of homemade peach wine.  We all thought it was too sweet so he added more red wine, and then it was very tasty.  We sat outside in the warm evening air.  The cats didn’t bother us.  A neighbor’s dog lay on the lawn and watched us, wagging it’s tale in the hopes that we would fine it adorable and throw it some food. As the sun was setting, the birds started singing loudly.  Darkness fell upon us and I lit the new candle.  My son serenaded us with his guitar. The evening was perfect.
 
During the dinner, we were talking about Roger’s Deux Cheveux and I mentioned that I had seen a pretty bleu Deux Cheveux.  Francine and Roger were puzzled and Roger repeated what I had said.  And I was confused because I didn’t understand why they couldn’t understand me. They thought I had said that I had seen two pretty blue horses. I hate it when I’m chattering along in French, then I say something incredibly simple and clear, and no one understands me. 
 

Happy Bastille Day

It’s Bastille Day here. They’ve got the guillotine set up in the town square, and after I’ve had my morning tea, in honor of the day, I’m going to try and round up an annoying comte or our local purveyor of asphalt.

A friend of ours from San Francisco, who just retired to Italy, spent the night here Sunday. Monday night we ate at the newly asphalted restaurant down the road before we took him to catch his midnight train to Paris.

The food was sublime. Amazingly, within stumbling distance of our farm, there is now a gourmet restaurant in a village where the only other businesses are vintner caves and another very bland, family style, restaurant. If it just had a bakery the village would have the perfect mix of shops.

This assortment of businesses highlights the many wonders of living “in the last forgotten part of France.” We have the most amazing restaurants, in towns that don’t even have bakeries or gas stations. The local music festival in the other little village near us presents us with a week of world-class cello concerts. And to think that Balzac thought and the Parisians think that their compatriots down here in the provinces are all hillbillies: hillbillies that make the finest wines and food in the world, and spend their evenings listening to cello concerts.

The first year we arrived, I sat in the church listening to the concert, and realized this was exactly what I was looking for by coming to France: To sit in my little village, in a beautiful ancient building, surrounded by my neighbors, listening to cello concerts. As I constantly repeat, the French know how to live well on very little money: good food, good music, good wine, surrounded by family and friends.

Back at the asphalt palace, we started our dinner with an assortment of amusé bouches: caviar on top of a fish mousse, smoked salmon on tiny crepes, sautéed mushrooms in little pastries, and a light green gazpacho. The first course was a mousse of foie gras with figs on a bed of lentils. That was followed by a real slab of melt in your mouth foie gras with pumpkin bread and a sweet chutney of exotic fruit. The main course was roasted pork tenderloin with a light Armagnac sauce. Dessert was a clever crepe purse filled with vanilla ice cream surrounded with sliced oranges and drizzled with an orange glaze. Then to push us over the gastronomic cliff, they brought out a plate of cookies. All of this for the extremely reasonable price of 28 Euros. Our bottle of local wine was an astronomical 20 Euros.

The ambiance was formal and the peach walls made me feel as if I was in the southwestern United States at a Holiday Inn, and I was a bit edgy knowing that I was surrounded by all that newly-laid asphalt, but my displeasure with the decorating was overcome by the sublime food. So here I find myself being a hypocrite again as I support the paving of my beloved France.

The Secret to Happiness

Bonjour! What a beautiful sunny morning. The birds are singing loudly. The bees are buzzing in the flowering tree outside the kitchen windows; a thick layer of pollen covers the driveway below them. The roses are blooming, and close-by the raspberries and figs are ripening. The grape vine I planted last month is stretching out its new, grasping tendrils.

Blanche is out in her green pasture munching grass. The cats haven’t made an appearance yet. My husband is in bed drinking the coffee I brought him and reading a book. The four teenagers sleep soundly. Peace will reign until they wake up at noon. After I’m done with this writing, I’ll go out and clean the rabbit cage. All is bliss.

Yesterday, I finished hand stitching a large tablecloth. I also went into town and purchased some material with which to sew a quilt. I wanted to purchase two large pieces to quilt together: a simple project. But the woman shopkeeper only sells material for what the French women call “patchwork,” the sewing together of small pieces of material. So she didn’t have enough material for me to buy large pieces for my simple project. A month ago, I had fallen in love with a green and pink paisley. For the past four weeks, this material kept creeping back into my thoughts, but since I had more than enough projects to finish, I didn’t purchase the material. I didn’t have the desire to spend the time to piece together little scraps of material. Patchwork seemed like a good winter project, something to do when it was raining and you couldn’t go outside and work on the garden or walk with the sheep. I only wanted to make a quilt out of this material to which I was attracted. However, after making the trip to the store, and looking at the other attractive choices of materials, I decided I’d give “patchwork” a try. I’ll report back on my progress. I sat up until Midnight cutting the squares. I expect I’ll finish the quilt in ten years.

I enjoy sewing by hand. When I was in the fourth grade, the neighbor girl and I had a business making Barbie Doll clothes from her mother’s sewing scraps. We earned about twenty dollars a week to split between the two of us. That was a lot of money in 1967 for 9-year-olds. I have very fond memories of sitting with my girlfriend on the weekends and sewing clothes by hand. I was thinking yesterday about the old five-and-dime where we would buy our miniature snaps and hooks and buttons. To this day, I am attracted to fabrics and sewing notions and even if I’m not sewing something, I like to wander about fabric shops just to look, just to smell the heady scent of the sizing on the material.

I’ve often tried to meditate and have found it to be impossible for me. However, when I sew by hand, I believe that I come awfully close to the perfect Zen state of mind. My mind is emptied of all worldly cares, yet I’m producing something of value.

While I was sewing the tablecloth, I would often take a laundry basket outside to keep the material off of the ground and I would sit by Blanche while I stitched. I had to sit on the opposite side of the fence because she likes to chew on fabrics. She didn’t like this arrangement at first and would stick her head through the wire fence as far as she could and baaaa at me. She came to accept the fact that I wasn’t going to join her on her side of the fence and I wasn’t going to let her out to join me on my side. She finally decided it was best to lie down pushing against the fence, as close as she could get to me, and chew her cud. Now that’s the true definition of “bucolic:” a woman sewing by hand with her sheep lying nearby chewing its cud.

Yesterday afternoon, as I was making the final turn around the very long tablecloth with my needle, I sat in the living room on the old discarded sofa my girlfriend gave me, and my husband sat in one of the old stuffed and fringed chairs that I fell in love with and purchased at a local antique dealer’s. My husband reminded me that I had purchased the material I was sewing about seven years ago. He found it amusing that I had finally decided to make something out of it. (It’s the same material that I made the kitchen curtains out of, the ones that led to the busted water pipe.)We sat there with no television (we don’t have one here), no radio, no cars, no intrusion from the outside world, and discussed our life and what it’s been and what we’d like it to be. We weren’t hurried or impatient as we usually are when we talk in the U.S., when we’re overwhelmed with his work and my work. I think that one of the best gifts a woman can have in life, besides not having her children in jail, is to have a husband who has the same desires and aspirations in life. And that I have been given that gift.

When I was younger, I had so many “goals” and “objectives” none of which, thankfully, came to pass because none of they would have pleased me. (Except for finding someone to love and be loved by.) All my material and career goals were fueled by the external world. They weren’t the real expression of me. And so I flitted from one thing to another, not able to pay attention to any one thing because it all bored me. I don’t understand modern, corporate society, and living on this farm is my admission of that fact.

I look back and see my entire life as a struggle against what the world was telling me I should want, and what my soul was trying desperately to make clear to me. I had to destroy a lot of mental flotsam, which only happened when I followed the two sheep into the woods here and realized that what I really wanted was what I already possessed: a farm to roam, sheep, a rabbit, a husband and son to love, and something to sew.

I’ve also learned a lot by observing my French neighbors. They live frugal lives, they raise their own food, and they are the happiest people I’ve ever met. They have taught me that happiness is found in simplicity. All you need is someone to laugh with, a bottle of wine, a good loaf of bread, and a chunk of strong cheese. Everything else is just useless clutter in your life that requires dusting, insurance, taxes, or worrying.

Last night, at midnight, I was standing over my bed, I had turned the bedside light on so that it was dim and wouldn’t disturb my husband who had gone to bed at ten after a long day of wrestling with irrigation pipes, sorting roofing tiles, and sorting heavy discarded junk. I felt a great pleasure in seeing him curled up in bed sleeping soundly. The teenagers were downstairs laughing and drinking hot chocolate while painting a wall with a graffiti design. My bedroom floor was covered with books and clothes and shoes and my husband’s suitcases. Spider webs hung from the corners. The nightstands were covered in a fine layer of dust. I stood there, and this intense feeling of peace washed over me, and I understood the perfection of that moment. I understood the perfection in all the imperfection. My bedroom didn’t look like a Martha Stewart K-Mart ad. I wasn’t coming to bed looking like a Victoria Secret’s model; I was wearing my husband’s white t-shirt and some light sweats he had bought at Costco. My French house didn’t have the tower I had always dreamed of, and the attic above my head was filled with dead rats, dead flies, piles of old dusty rotting magazines, and the roof most likely had a leak in it which we’ll discover in due time. But I was so overcome with the beauty of the moment I wanted time to stop. I wanted to be frozen together forever in that beautiful moment. . . healthy, happy, contented. There wasn’t anything more I desired than what was contained in that moment.

The perfection of this morning overwhelms me with sadness, as I realize that as I’ve been hurtling towards my inevitable grave, and I haven’t had the vaguest clue about what really matters in life. I’m just starting to peel off the societal/materialistic garbage that has been smothering my soul and as I do so I’m beginning to see tiny glimpses of Valhalla/Heaven/Nirvana/Bliss.

I’m off to find my bliss . . . it’s waiting for me in the rabbit cage I’m about to clean.

Driven Nuts by Walnuts

Our property has 150 walnut trees. Before we purchased the property, the previous owner claimed that these trees brought in a substantial amount of money each year. I guess that if he had told us the trees brought in 20 Euros a year that would have technically been a huge amount of money in comparison to the ridiculously huge amounts of money the trees have lost us each year since we acquired them.

They say a boat is a hole into which you throw lots of money into the water. I often think that for all the money we pour into useless things like walnut trees, the tiled roofs of ugly out-buildings, cleaning canals, fighting lawsuits over canals, we could have bought a fancy yacht, based it out of the St. Tropez port, and we’d be living the highlife. However, I don’t tan to I need to spend my summers sitting under expensive trees.

The first year we owned the farm, and at our point of maximum naivety and vulnerability, the ex-owner/now caretaker talked my husband into purchasing an expensive machine to pick up the nuts. He told us that you can’t find workers any more to pick up the nuts, and that it would be impossible for the three of us to pick up the nuts by hand.

The first week of the harvest, we had heavy rains. And lo and behold, this super duper nut machine doesn't function in the mud. So I, went out every morning with a canteen of tea and picked up nuts by hand. My husband and the caretaker would comment on how amusing I looked in my pajamas at six in the morning while they stood around and lamented the fact that they couldn’t use the incredibly expensive nut machine while the nuts rotted on the ground.

The caretaker was kind enough to go over to Roger’s and borrow a contraption that Roger made from a plastic jug, a wooden pole, and some rubber. It was quite ingenious, very much like a manual tennis ball picker-upper. It was slower than picking by hand but it did provide relief for my screaming back. When the caretaker was handing me the device, he explained that Roger harvested sixty trees by himself with this device that didn’t cost him a dime to fabricate. So I’m thinking, why the hell don’t you make two more just like it, one for you and one for my husband? That would give us each fifty trees to pick. Ten less than Roger had to pick up with his bad sciatic leg. Then we can return that useless piece of gasoline-powered machinery that destroys the tranquility when it’s running and farting out pollution, and I can buy some furniture for the house. But my French wasn’t good enough to convey all of my intricate, well-developed thoughts. So I just nodded and continued with my harvesting. (When my French did get good enough to convey my deep thoughts, the caretaker quit. When he left, he advised Craig to get a new wife.)

We returned to San Francisco after that first harvest, and a month later a very tiny check arrived from the sale of the walnuts. I thought that it was missing at least one zero. The caretaker had told us that the nut machine would pay for itself in three years, but if the checks continued to be of this size, I figured that it would take twenty years.

The following year, a frost struck the trees when they were just budding and so the walnut check was even minuter.

Last year, France had the biggest drought/heat wave they’ve had over 500 years and two of our walnut trees died. When it was apparent that the trees were struggling to live, I nagged the caretaker into setting up the irrigation system. But, by the time my nagging was coming to fruitiion, it was too late to save the trees. The trees are located on the road so everyone who drives by can witness the testament to our ineptitude as farmers.Because the trees weren’t watered in time we had very few nuts and they were so small that it is not even pleasurable to sit on the terrace on the evening and crack them. The check for these Lilliputian nuts was even smaller than the previous year’s check for the frost addled nuts.

I ran into the cheese vendor from our town's Friday outdoor market. We were chatting and he told me that he had some walnut trees. I asked him a very rude question. Did you have any nuts last year after that drought and did you make any money? To my consternation he informed me that he didn't have a lot of money, but that he made more money than usual because the nuts were scarce last year. He even rubbed his fingers together in that rural French sign meaning "lots of money."

Last summer, a neighbor suggested that we have the trees trimmed to increase our nut production and make the trees healthier. We received two quotes for the work and hired a man who started while I was here in January. I was very impressed with him because he came to work every morning even though he had to work in a cold wet rain that plagued us the entire month. A few times, when I was returning from a walk with the sheep, I would see him up in a tree, and always, our caretaker was standing on the ground below chatting with him.

My husband had given the caretaker a check to give to the tree trimmer to cover half the work before the cutting began; and he had left the second check and payment to hand over when the work was finished. Sometime in April, my husband started wondering why the second check had not been cashed.

At the beginning of May, we found out the reason. Our friend and her husband arrived for a visit in San Francisco. The day before leaving France, they went to the farm to videotape the sheep for me. The caretaker was at the farm and he told my friend that the tree trimmer left without finishing the job because the tree trimmer "claimed" that the caretaker talked too much and that he couldn’t stand working with the caretaker jabbering at him constantly. I immediately sympathized with the tree trimmer. God knows how many days I have hid from the caretaker in my own house just so I wouldn’t have to endure his endless chatter. It was impossible to get any work done if he discovered your hiding place.

This July my husband has been learning the ins and outs of irrigating the trees. It requires that the pipes be moved every six hours. He learned yesterday that he has to maintain a certain amount of pressure running through the pipes or Roger will have to come over and inform him that the other farmers who are hooked up to the irrigation system are unhappy because we are straining the communal pump.

For the past two days, our area has been getting lashed with the edge of a huge storm that has been attacking Brittany to the north. It was so bad up there that they were advising people not to leave their homes. The winds here blew away our new parasol which I had left open on the terrace as there was no hint of a pending storm. The pedestal must weigh over eighty pounds because Preston and I both needed to lift it when we purchased it. The parasol and the base went flying about twenty feet, crashing into the house and pulling the base off of the parasol and stripping the large screw that held it in place. The wind also blew lots of nuts off of the trees. So the check will be small again this year.

Yesterday, Craig walked in and lamented about how tough the life of a farmer is. One of our GOOD trees, with lots of nuts on it, fell over in the storm. And to top it off, it was near the group of eight trees that had died last month because of flooding caused by the water finally filling our long dry canal (that’s another story). And then Craig speculated that that the tree that fell over was probably one of the few trees that the tree trimmer had trimmed adding more insult to our continuing injury.

When Roger came over last night to gently chastise Craig about his inability to constantly keep up the water pressure in his pipes, Craig told him about the fallen tree. (Most men would be embarassed to talk about their small nuts and inability to maintian the pressure in their pipes, but Craig takes it all in stride, confident in his manhood.) Roger kindly volunteered to come over and right the tree this morning. He said that sometimes, when a tree falls over, several of the roots are still rooted and the tree can be saved. I insisted that Roger join us for some hot apple cake that I had just pulled out of the oven. Roger said that I was going to think that he only came over for food. I joked and said that I wanted to make him fat like us Americans. I worry that he’ll think he only comes over to do work for us. I’m going to have to do a lot more cooking and baking to keep enticing him to help us with our farm follies.

Roger just pulled in the yard with his tractor. God I’ll miss him when he moves into town as he threatened last autumn. I’m afraid he’ll make the decision to move sooner because of all the work we’re requiring of him since the caretaker left. I’m afraid no amount of apple tarts or cakes will overcome the annoyances we generate for him. They don’t make saints like Roger any more.

Take A Hike

Yesterday afternoon, I took Blanche and we walked through the woods and up a large hill to our commune. The village sits high on a ridge overlooking the winding river valley, and the placid farm houses tucked amongst fields of green grape vines. I haven’t been walking or exercising much since I’ve arrived, as I haven’t been able to get on any meaningful schedule. But with the house full of four teenagers who need to be fed three times a day, a husband who to his credit is a joy to be around but still disrupts my scheduling attempts, and being surrounded by twenty cats, I wanted to escape.

During the walk we heard the sounds of wild boar rustling through the woods; a flock of real sheep baa-ed at Blanche but she haughtily ignored them; water babbling from a small stream into an old communal clothes washing basin; lots of different birds; and two Mirage jets flying so low that I swore I could see the pilots faces as they tilted their planes towards the earth. These jets fly over every day, usually at noon, but in the past week, their flights have become more frequent. Blanche is so used to them that she doesn’t flinch. I cringe and wince whenever I hear them screaming through the sky destroying my reverie of pastoral rural France.

Old “roads” so ancient that they can only accommodate foot or cart travel, traverse the wooded hills that surround our house. The Maire sent out this month’s newsletter and highlighted two of these old traces, one of which passes closely by the back of our house. So now we’ll have lots of visitors walking through the property. Yesterday, I noticed that there was more horse poop than normal. When I first arrived here in 2001, giving encouragement to hikers and horsemen to traverse our property would have annoyed me. Being an American, I was wedded to the idea that the ownership of private property precludes strangers from wandering across it at their pleasure without permission. The first week I was here, I was sitting on the terrace one gorgeous morning, listening to the birds, eating a croissant and drinking tea when four Dutch walkers appeared from behind the barns, didn’t say anything, and just stared at me as if I was a figure in a wax museum. (I knew they were Dutch because I could hear them talking as they approached the terrace.) I said bonjour and they just nodded and walked down the driveway.

This summer I have noticed the phenomenon of Dutch tourists sitting on our small bridge which traverses the ruisseau. I hope this spot hasn’t been written up in some Dutch tourist guide. They stay at a camping area down the road, and being on vacation, I guess they feel the need to take a walk. Our bridge is about two kilometers from their camping spot, and either not being used to walking, or noticing a sweet little bridge to sit upon, they decide to rest there. I wave bonjour to them if I see them.

Monsieur Dupuis is helping out a lawyer on behalf of an American couple in the north of the departement who own a mill. Their problem is that one of these old roads leads right past their house, and they don’t like the foot traffic that it attracts. They are going to court to close the footpath. I hope they lose.

I discovered the old roads last year, when I had to take Blanche and Olympia out for daily walks because they didn’t have a pasture and were therefore required to stay in their little house for the majority of the day and night. We would hike for up to four hours a day, and we discovered an endless system of beautiful, stone-walled, or sunken, winding footpaths which led us through tunnels of trees, to high panoramic vistas of the valleys, and we discovered all sorts of ruins of farm houses, chateaux, a castle, sheepherder shelters, and phylloxera-abandoned terraced vineyards.

Rarely did we see other walkers. Unless it was Sunday, and then we would occasionally run into some village’s walking club, whose members were always very friendly and wanted to pet the sheep and ask me lots of questions about them. “Don’t they need leashes?” “Are they mother and daughter?”

More often, we wouldn’t meet another soul on the paths. When I first started walking the paths, I walked with a switchblade that I had purchased in the big town. I practiced flipping it open and felt a little pathetic rush of power when I did so. After a few weeks of walking with the switchblade, I thought I might like to move up to a bigger model and so the next time I went to the big town, I went to the hunting shop. Displayed in the window was a wide array of knives. At the center of the display, there was a huge gutting knife that scared the hell out of me. Seeing that, I decided to forego purchasing a bigger switchblade, for if I met someone in the woods who meant to do me harm, they were going to have a bigger knife than me, and they would know how to use it. I decided to stop my meaningless arms escalation.

One morning, around 8, the sheep and I were startled when a horse and rider came quickly up behind us. I turned, wishing I had my little switchblade, and there was a young girl astride the horse hurrying by us. The jeune fille couldn’t have been more than twelve; she was attired in her riding helmet, jodhpurs, and high boots, accompanied only by her dog. From that point on I didn’t worry about walking in the woods. I realized that even with my knife, I probably wouldn’t hear someone lying in wait for me, because I couldn’t even tell that a horse was galloping up the path behind me until it had arrived. I came to the sad realization that I was a paranoid American who had watched too many episodes of America’s Most Wanted, and from that point forward I would walk in peace in the woods. If it was my destiny to be attacked, then so be it. The reason I love France is because I’ve found peace here and I needed to discard the big-city phobias I brought here with me that prevented me from living here in peace. (And statistically, it’s much safer to walk in France than it is in the U.S.)

About ten years ago, the mayor of our commune wanted to raise some money, for himself or the commune I'm not clear, and so he let property owners buy the right to close off their paths. I only know of one owner who took advantage of his offer. They are French and that regrettably, denies me the opportunity to once again rail about the insensitivities of the Americans, British or Dutch. This French couple owns the castle down the road from us. My friend, Pierre-Yves is an avid runner and he had a run-in with the wife when he was running on her now private path one day. She threatened to sick her dog on him. He picked up a big stone and threatened to hit the dog with it. She let him pass and told him not to come back again.

Last summer, this same woman was driving down the road while I was crossing it with the sheep. Attracted by the sheep, she stopped to talk, and told me that I could use her path whenever I wanted. She also invited me to coffee the next afternoon saying she would like to show me around the castle. When I arrived, she wasn’t there. I waited for half an hour, left my card, and then left. She never called, or contacted me, and I’ve never seen her again. So I was forced to agree with Pierre-Yves, she is very rude and inconsiderate. And, I am now of the opinion that anyone who shuts off the walking path that goes through their property is rude and inconsiderate.

That is why I hope that the Americans from Los Angeles are unsuccessful in petitioning the court to allow them to close their path to the public. If they are allowed to do so, they are destroying the heritage of the countryside. They are destroying the very thing that attracted them to this area. They are destroying the neighborliness and trust that infuses and animates rural France. Perhaps the Americans from Los Angeles haven’t gotten out and walked the paths, and so they don’t understand how precious they are. If you wander the forest paths here, they will lead you to the very center of Nature’s soul, and if you find that, you’ll find your own. Maybe I should get the American’s phone number from Monsieur Dupuis and offer to take them on a hike.

Do You Think I'm An American?

Note: If you recall an earlier post, I told you that our accountant here told us that whenever someone overcharges you the standard reply is, “Do you think I’m an American?”

Yesterday, I dialed the telephone number of a neighbor. A woman answered who I thought was the mother of the woman I was trying to reach. I explained that I was the American who lived down the road, because that’s the easiest way to describe myself. I tell all my visitors that if they get into our area and can’t find the house to ask someone where the Americans live. The other day, a French woman from Bordeaux was trying to find our house, and stopped to ask at the home of a very old neighbor. The old neighbor replied, “Oh the place where the American WOMAN lives.” My husband felt badly that everyone knows me but because he isn’t here as much, the neighbor didn’t know he existed.

It soon became obvious that I had called the wrong number. However, the woman who had answered asked me if I was interested in buying her house. Since this was such an odd reply to give to someone who had dialed your telephone number by mistake, I thought I heard her incorrectly. She had said that she had a chambre d’hotes and so I asked if she wanted to sell or rent her house, and she replied in French, “Whichever you want.”

I’m always interested in viewing houses here so I told her I’d be over at eleven. I thought that perhaps the house might be a good investment for us to purchase together with my brother who has said that he was interested in buying a place here. The woman was selling the property herself, and that would cut out the realtor’s huge fee (they take a much larger percentage than in the U.S.), it was located on the big river, and it was a tourist rental so it could bring in an income.

I rode my bicycle over. There was a man in the walnut grove. I complimented him on how beautiful his walnuts were. They were huge, and plentiful. Our recently relieved caretaker didn’t do anything for our nuts, and so they are small and pathetic again this year, and we’ve lost eight trees in the past two years. I later found out that this man was not the owner’s husband he was her caretaker. When I returned from my trip and described how beautifully kept the property was, my husband said I need to go find him and ask if he'll work for us. This will be a delicate operation for I don’t think it is good etiquette to try and hire someone’s caretaker. However, I am of the impression that he works part-time for this woman.

The man took me to the house, and fetched Madame for me. She was a pretty, well-kept widow, in her seventies, with her thick salt and pepper hair cut into a youthful, and flattering, “flapper” bob. She was excited to show me around her home. I loved the house with its beautiful original walnut doors and woodwork. Her furniture selection showed impeccable taste. The house was old and had been built a few hundred years ago by a wine merchant who needed to be on the river to facilitate transportation to the Bordeaux docks. There were three vaulted stone caves under the house. The woman had a lovely arbor covering a walkway which traversed the width of the house over which she had perfect pears just starting to blush and ripen along with, surprisingly, kiwis. The house was perfect. It hadn’t been ruined with renovations as so many houses here have been, and what renovations had been done, were tasteful. The house even had two built-in stalls for pigs and a larger one for a couple of sheep. The house wasn’t directly on the river, but it was a very short distance away. The only aspect of the house with which I could find fault was the modern house that had been built across the street. And even that fact didn’t bother me so much when she told me that the people who had built it and retired there were French from the north . . . at least they weren't British, Dutch, German, or American.

I was all excited thinking that I could convince my brother and my husband to purchase this darling property. When we were outside looking over her manicured grounds I asked her how much she wanted. She said that she would write the price down on a piece of paper. That’s never a good sign. I’ve had several instances here in France, when asking about the price of antiques, where the person doesn’t verbalize the price, they want to write it down as if the shock won’t be as dramatic if it’s a piece of paper telling you the bad news.

When we went in the house, she had me sit down at the kitchen table, and then handed me a piece of paper on which she had previously written out the price she wanted. I couldn’t believe what she had written. It was twice what I thought it should be, even in this heated-up market, and three times what I thought it should be in comparison to the 2001 market when we purchased our property. Factor in the rise of the Euro over the past two years, and she was asking for big money for a small house.

I told her that the price was too much for us. That her house was beautiful but that there was no way I could make the case to my husband to purchase the house at this price when he would make the unfavorable comparison to what we paid for our farm three years earlier. Her huge “I’ve found an American to buy my property” smile vanished and she now sported a slight scowl. She said that prices had gone up a lot since 2001 and I said I was aware of that, but that the house was just too expensive for us. I told her I’d talk to my husband and perhaps I’d bring him by to look. (I know he won’t buy it, but I want him to see how astronomical the prices are now.) On my way out, she handed me a rate sheet for her chambre d’hotes.

I pedaled my bicycle back home, passing by Grand-mère Foissac, who must be in her nineties, out weeding in her granddaughter’s garden. She was bent over hoeing in the garden by the river, a mother duck and her young paddling by in the background. Attired in a wide-brimmed straw hat, long skirt and apron she provided me with one of those rare glimpses of la vraie France. I silently wished her decades more of good health. After all, she’s what I’m really looking for here.

Save Me From Myself

There’s a small village, part medieval, 17 kilometers from here, with a giant tower, the remnant of a fortress from the Hundred Years War jutting majestically out of its center. The village is perched on top of a high hill, overlooking small, bright yellow wheat fields interspersed with dark green woods. The centre ville is not as bustling as my nearby village, but I make a weekly trip to visit an English-French bookstore run by a very cute and charming British woman. Her appearance reminds me of the French actress who played the lead role in the movie Chocolat. She is a refreshing person to spend time with and so unlike the rest of us foreigners here – she is quiet, she listens to you when you speak, and she remembers what you told her when you last spoke with her. Her bookstore is in an old apothecary shop which she purchased and didn’t remodel. I admire her for leaving the shop as it was.

The little bookstore is a dream destination for me. The woman has impeccable taste in books because they exactly mirror what I would choose if I owned a bookstore. I was happy to hear from her that she sells the same amount of books printed in French as she does in English. Right now I’m reading Diary of a Man in Despair. It is the illegal diary of a German royalist, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen. The time covered in the diary is from May 1936 until he was arrested by the Nazi’s in October 1944. He was shot in the head by the Nazis in Buchenwald in February 1945. The book is fascinating because it chronicles all sorts of gossip about Hitler, Goebbels and other Nazi big-wigs, and it chronicles the rise, and presciently predicts the eventual failure, of Hitler’s schemes. Surprisingly, Reck-Malleczewen predicts in 1939 that Europe must become one country in order to overcome the nationalism that gives birth to the wars which ravage the continent.

I heartily endorse the blurb on the book cover from The Sunday Times’ Frederich Raphael who said of the diary, “I beg you to read this bitterly courageous book.”

What amazes me about the book is that when it comes to political thought, I have much in common with an early twentieth century male German royalist! I marvel and puzzle over this fact even when I don’t have the diary in my hands. If reincarnation is a real phenomenon, then I suspect I must have been Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen.

He contends that the car has done more harm than alcohol. I couldn’t agree more. You’ve read here how I despise what the car has done to Europe. However, I find great comfort in the fact that someone, with a brilliant mind was obsessing about this problem back in the thirties. Reck-Malleczewen’s writing has shown me that my opinions regarding the modernization of Europe are those of an elitist, conservative, German baron. He contends that the women in Germany were getting fat because of processed food. Not a novel concept now, but in his day, when corporate fodder was just hitting the shelves, it was an original idea. He claims, and I agree, that capitalism has created “mass-man” an automaton whose only pursuits are money and sex, and as a result society has no need for the realm of the intellect. He decries the loss of the small farmer to the encroaching plague of modernization. He screams at the top of his lungs about the greed and rapacity of the modern international corporation; placing the blame for World War II squarely on the shoulders of the new breed of German industrialists such as Krupp and Farben whose objective was to put the cheapest product (“radio” to use his example) in the hands of every person on earth and so they were the financing force behind Hitler to open borders and dominate world trade to feed their bottomless digestive systems. Reck-Malleczewen weeps over the industrial destruction of the forests and the rivers in pursuit of the almighty mark.

All that brings him despair brings me despair. Our torment is one and the same. And I must wonder, why am I obsessed with what was destroying Reck-Malleczewen’s way of life? Why, as an American, a capitalist, why cannot I accept the American way of life? Why am I fleeing to southwestern France to grasp at a few years of living in a dying world . . . a rural, corporate-free world that Reck-Malleczewen pronounced dead in 1936? I ask myself these questions, and I have no answers. I just know that with each passing day, I become more anti-technology, sadder that wild Nature is being gobbled up to make particle board and toilet paper, more anti-car. I have no desire to travel to Toulouse or Bordeaux, running the depressing suburban gauntlet of super highways, traffic jams, McDonald’s, Pizza Huts, and track housing in order to spend time in the charming centre ville which is being taken over by Virgin Records, The Body Shop, Starbuck’s, and the French versions of the same.

My husband broke the bad news to me that Walmart will be sponsoring Lance Armstrong in the Tour de France this year, and that this same marketer of corporate excrement has purchased a German chain of stores and is plotting its takeover of Western Europe. My little ville commerçant has two supermarchés whose presence is ameliorated by the fact that we still have a master butcher, four bakeries, a small biologique épicerie, and a small greengrocer. However, if I want bottled water or toilet paper or laundry detergent, I do have to stomach a trip to the supermarket.

Sunday, I made a lunch for twenty-five of the neighbors. On Friday morning, I attempted to purchase the ingredients at the outdoor market in my village, but the place d’Eglise was so packed with English-speaking people, I regretfully gave up the quest and headed the next day for a big supermarket in the big city of our departement. I reasoned that I could load up with ingredients in one trip and I would save myself a lot of time and perhaps money. I always say I’m never again going to the supermarché, but I always override that resolution and I go at the beginning of my stay each summer . . . mainly because I want to make a show of being frugal for my husband. But, after my harrowing and depressing visit this Saturday, I declare NEVER AGAIN. NEVER AGAIN!

The French are very polite people when they are in their small shops. They’ll wait quietly, patiently, and without complaint or the rolling of eyes for the butcher to make his way through the long line of customers until it is their turn to order. However, put a shopping cart in a large supermarket in the hands of a French person, and they forget every rule of etiquette their grand-mère taught them. Perhaps it’s the fact that they must fight with the more aggressive British and Dutch for shelf advantage. Perhaps it’s the fact that they always imagine themselves to be a Le Mans entrant if they are in control of four wheels. I don’t know the psychology behind the behavior, but it must have something to do with the hyper activity engendered by the HYPERMARCHÉ. The giant superstore turns every person who enters its portals into insatiable, aggressive creature lacking what could be called human decency. “This only costs five euros, I must buy it. Get out of my way. I must buy it. It’s such a good deal.” It doesn’t matter that this cute little mass-produced piece of dreck is what is destroying the world I love. I will buy it. I bought it, and wouldn’t you know it, someone who attended my party, was kind enough to bring me a companion piece to what I had purchased! It still had the cute little corporate bellybutton scanner sticker attached to its bottom.

I left the hypermarché feeling as if I must immediately take a shower to wipe off the corporate spittle that spewed forth in the anticipation of profits, showering my head and face as I stuck my carte bleu in its salivating maw. I pushed the trolley to the back of the rented, diesel spewing mini-van, and shoved the bags of garbage into its rear end. Here I sit, three and a half days later, obviously still in deep angst over the experience of paying someone to make me feel like crap. I’m mad at myself for my lack of control in not following my resolution. I was willing to sacrifice an hour of my life to pick through their pathetic vegetables, and to be bamboozled by the old “loss-leader” five-euro water pitcher trick.

When I returned, defeated once again by the maw, I didn’t have much interest in eating lunch. My husband asked accusingly, “Did you go to McDonald’s?” I was proud to answer, “No, absolutely not.” However, I must admit that I had thought about going. I was hot. The thought crossed my mind that, since I had already soiled myself by shopping at the supermarché that a cold, chemical brew of Diet Coke wouldn’t do any additional harm. As I passed the point where the car had to turn towards the sin or towards home the siren song was shrill in my ear. But I didn’t go. I wanted to go, but I didn’t go. I had Preston with me, I didn’t want to set a bad example. The first step is to admit that you’re addicted. Then it is one day at a time. Or should I say, one Diet Coke at a time?