Do Not Purchase a Moulin in France . . . I Repeat . . .

I'm so excited that you get to see what Blanche and Soixante-Douze look like. I hope you enjoy them for it took me two hours to figure out how to post the photos. AAAAGGGGGHHHHHH. The experience was a reminder of why I want to escape civilization and live in the wilds.

Yesterday afternoon, I helped Roger in his vineyard. He's clipping his vines. I follow behind him and pull or clip the cut vines from the wires andpick them off the ground. Then I pile them into neat faggots. Roger will tie them up later and then save some of them for me. The faggots are fantastic for cooking duck on an outdoor grill or for quickly starting fires in the fireplace.

We don't have a "real" grill that we purchased at a store. Instead, my son constructed a barbecue by piling up large boulders . . . it's quite quaint. Everytime I see it I think of him. If we had purchased a barbeque at the hardware store, I wouldn't think of my son. Since living here, I've discovered that if you want to create an ambiance of quaintness, you need to invest more ingenuity and less money in your THINGS. It's a good thing I decided to choose "quaint" as my decor style, because this quaint canal is sucking up money faster than a British sailor on shore leave sucks up cheap gin.

My husband and I spent the bulk of our waking hours yesterday, and there were many waking hours because it was difficult to sleep with the flooding noyer flooding our thoughts, thinking about ways to tackle this problem leaking canal. The easiest solution would be for us to buy the Foissac's noyer. But I don't believe that the Foissac's will go for that. Farmers, who aren't ready to retire, have a religious relationship with their land . . . they just don't sell it. And since the Foissacs are big vintners and farmers, I think they view it as their destiny to be buying land, not to be selling it to annoying Americans.

But naturally, from our point of view, buying it would be the best solution because we don't know what other remedial solutions will work. We aren't even convinced that we are the ones responsible for coming up with a remedial solution.

My husband came up with the BRILLIANT idea of finding another noyer to swap with them.

We are also in the midst of this horrible lawsuit with the Count, and at this point in time, cannot even dream of asking if we can shut off the flow of water to facilitate a solution.

In short, none of the solutions we have been given are guarantted to work, and if we don't own the property, we will be spending thousands of Euros each year trying to correct the problem while the trees die, and we will most likely end up in court over that. And so we lose thousands and thousands of Euros and the Foissacs lose thousands and thousands of Euros.

We're trying to find an attorney, other than the one we currently have, who is admirably handling the Count's case but we feel she would have a vested interest in creating the grounds for another court case, to give us an opinion regarding the degree of our responsibility for the flooding. My husband points out that the canal and basin were in place long before Foissac put in the noyer. And to butress his defense, the Foissac's put in their noyer fifteen years ago in a flood plane that is bordered on two sides by canals and on the third by the river. There is a mysterious drain that leads from their noyer into our park, which leads us to believe that the noyer has always had some drainage issues.

We've asked four different people what we should do to stop the flooding, and we have received four different answers . . . all of them costing lots of money. Roger came up with the plastic lining idea -- which does not please me in the least. He telephoned a "specialist" in artifical farm ponds and that man said that the cost would be 4,000 to 5,000 Euros. (Add 33% more if you want to figure out the dollar amount.) Besides the ridiculous cost, the plastic is not natural and when the basin runs dry, as it has been in recent years, we will have a MONUMENTAL eyesore behind our house. And right now, the back of our house is not anything that would grace even the pages of Town & Hillbilly magazine.

Keep in mind as I'm complaining about costs that my mood is tinged with resentment that we just committed to spending over 9000 Euros to put a new roof on the Moulin . . . a building we do not use. In the meantime, the cottage/hovel (depending on my mood) in which we reside cries out for improvements.

We had aperitifs with Madame and Monsieur Dupuis last night. They used to own the mill and basin that are at the center of our dispute with the Count. Fifteen years later, they still hold great animosity towards the Count for buying and then tearing down their mill. I know this because last night, when talking about the outrage, Madame Dupuis raised her voice level to that of an American tourist complaining about service in a Michelin starred resturant.

Monsieur Dupuis thinks that the leakage was caused by huge river rats, imported into France a long time ago for fur, but which are no longer used for even basse couture and have now overrun the country. He thinks they burrowed holes from the canal into the neighboring noyer. Mr. Dupuis believes that the solution is to simply use a heavy roller to roll over the bottom of the basin. That would be great, if it worked, because it is an aesthetically pleasing and less expensive option than the plastic. The problem is, it's so wet here at this time of year, and the spring should be even wetter, that if we COULD miraculously drain our basin, and the Count's lawsuit absolutely negates that as an option, it would take months of favorable weather to dry out the basin so that a roller could go in there without becoming mired in the mud. We would then run the risk of the canal drying up and breaking up other parts of its course . . . the main source of our angst being the restraining wall on which our house rests.

You already know the solution of the porcelain that the water expert gave us. Foissac and Serge could only think of digging out the canal more and Roger thinks that this plan of attack will only aggravate the problem because it will remove all the silt that has been building up since the canal was last cleaned out four years ago.

This morning, I'm calling the man with all the heavy equipment to come out and give us his opinion . . . he doesn't work on Mondays so he wasn't there to answer my frantic call yesterday. I'm sure he'll have some expensive, unguaranteed idea to add to our list of undesirable options.

And people wonder why I want to hang around sheep. They never serve you with lawsuit papers.