Halloween!

We decided on papier-maché masks for Halloween this year, and spent delightful messy hours in the week beforehand constructing and painting them.  We also discovered that you can bake papier-maché masks at low temperature to speed-dry them.  After Gabriel (an eagle, wearing his mask from Venice because he decided he didn’t like the one he’d made) went trick-or-treating around Feins, we went over to Quebriac for the annual Halloween party with Karin and Jean-Jacques at Malin, Simon, Anton and Klara’s house.  Findus the cat was there too.   We had an exceptional meal (there are never enough of Malin’s potatoes) and some Dragibus too, so it was a lovely night even though we didn’t dance like in Malin’s dream.

Le bar

Happy birthday to Paul and Carolina!

This is a precursor to a larger post, entitled “the 12 labors of Sean and Timothy,” to commemorate Seanie’s visit with us.  One of the things that advanced significantly during his stay is the Bar, or the large piece of wood that now separates the kitchen from the living room, and as of last night, is illuminated from underneath.  It still needs the backing (the horizontal pieces of chestnut flooring on the living-room side), but from the kitchen, it looks about 80 percent finished we can now finally organize the rices and other treats where they have been meaning to go since last January.  Ouf.

Planing and sanding, with Cip's tail.

Château de Combourg

Combourg, we like.  Gabriel is on vacation now, and we get to go to Combourg almost every day because that is where the swimming pool is; in Combourg, is the notary’s office where Jane’s house officially became hers on October 23 wahooo!!! and also, the Château de Combourg.  There’s a legend that there was an underground tunnel between our chapel and the Château, so regardless of the fact that the muddy earth of Le Maffay and the 12 kilometers which separate the playgrounds of the Princes de Combourg and our crib render the reality of a tunnel near null, it seemed like a good time to go and visit the château and see if we saw any tunnel entrances.  Or not.

We did see lots of beautiful leaves, a Countess, and a dessicated cat.  We explored the gardens and the little fronttoothless cowboy found two mushrooms and lots of room to run, and was even knighted by Timothy down by a lake.  I was fascinated with the gutters and practical workings of lightning rods, zinc and waterspouts, and even found a dusty window through which to peer, with an old dusty bottle of some elixir lit by the sun.  We asked two people who work there, the guide and the ticket lady, whether or not they knew of the availability of any historical documents about underground tunnels to consult, but no one knew anything about it.  You’re not allowed to take photographs inside, so you won’t see any of the inside here, you’ll just have to go and visit the inside yourself.  Even if you’re not a fan of Châteaubriand, it is very interesting and the guide is a very kind lady who has visitor’s pamphlets in English.  Here are lots of (way too many, dixit Seanie) pictures, among which is a study for the future stained glass window that we’ve begun collecting bottles for, a possible study for the chapel ogive.  Collecting bottles is hard work; first, you must empty them.  Please come and have a drink with us and help our stained glass project come to life.

ps. one of these images was photoshopped; which one?

Better late…

The computer died and then was resurrected and replicated; then we went to Italy, things have been busy.  But:  we do now have an indoor shower, our very own Timothy, and a working faucet upstairs.  And Mac and Viv finally came to visit us here, bringing genuine goo-goo clusters to Gabriel’s delight, and lots of good music, and we spent a wonderful five days drilling granite, testing lovely wines, and eating roasted chestnuts and foie gras.  And they even did us the honor of helping us pick out our new rooster (Dexter Gordon) and hen, naming her Flora, in honor of Mac’s piano teacher.

See?  (make sure you click on the photo of the granite workers, that is indeed a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape that they’re using to cool the stone.)

Still summer

We’re nigh on a month without significant rain, which is astonishing, and makes July’s porcini, brought by one morning in M. Roullier Père’s tractor,

seem all the more nebulous.  The first walnuts are starting to drop now, school has fallen back into its usual morning and afternoon rythms, and our chickens berate me for not posting their photos on this little site.

Patience, i say, i still haven’t put up the pics of the fête du village in june.  Stella caught a baby couleuvre yesterday, which is a snake, and the two chickens fought over it for a quarter of an hour before it finally played dead convincingly enough so that she dropped it, and it slithered off to repair its wounds in some underground part of Maffay to which we are denied, thankfully, ingress.   It’s the opposite of Africa where the snakes slid off with chicks in their maws.  The chickens understand now that i work in the office with the glass door, so they can come and peck at the window during their explorations of the garden, and peer in to see how we live, retribution for the first weeks where we would come and look in through the chestnut spires of their fence to watch them scratch and cackle.  They follow us around like dogs ever since we began playing the worm game with them, where we would find worms with the shovel and give them to the ladies to eat.  They are the true ladies of Maffay, and Stella and Garfield will have their pictures up here soon, really.  Right now they’re taking a nap on the doorstoop outside my office.

Other belated photos from past months:  the piano tuning, back in July.  We found an old piano (from around 1910) at Emmaüs when Aunty C. was visiting, and bought it and had it delivered on the merit of its tone; it sounds round and golden, especially when played as it was meant to be played.

The tuner came for a visit and adjusted its notes to something closer to real-world harmonies, and i’ve been playing around a bit, G will start lessons in two weeks, and visiting musicians (like Jane) stop by and play feet-tapping tunes that warm up the whole house.

More garden pix

I’m trying to catch up on photos here and am going to toss out a few pictures from the garden over the summer, because it has set rhythm to our days and kept us from getting scurvy, especially now that the tomatoes in Sandra and Jean-Luc’s greenhouse

are doing what they were intended to do.  We’re finally having a few dry sunny days, and i actually have to water the garden, which was the stuff of dreams back in July when the grass had to be mowed more than once a week to avoid jungular heights.  We’ve harvested all the potatoes (i should add a small caveat lector:  when i say harvest, you shouldn’t have images of major quantities of food, because the garden is very small this year and as it’s only the second year we’ve been gardening, all our techniques are still very rudimentary and under constant debate.  Next year, T. promises, we’ll live off the land.  Right, i say.  Go dig, young man.), we’ve snacked on peas, we’ve harvested most of the squashes

but there is hope of a late season harvest there too; some purple snap beans will be ready to eat in about a week, and we’ve had seven (7) chioggia beets,

of whom i can only write glowing homilies and next year am planning to plant much more.  We’ve had cucumbers, a decent amount of zucchini both round and straight, and it seems to be a good year for yellow tomatoes.  The one thing that seems to really thrive here at Maffay, and avoids getting eaten by slugs (and which Gabriel also tries to avoid eating) is swiss chard:  the glorious rainbow brights, that Jenny sent along two years ago.  We’re eating lots of that in tourtes.  Our corn is spindly but we have had at least four good ears.   There were the first pears from our little tree, and M. Honoré brought by peaches from theirs, and M. Roullier brought by the first pears from his and we made a crumble.

My triumph however has yet to turn red, but seems to be headed in that general direction:  before leaving Venice last October we tragettho’d across the canal to a market, and i bought a bag of little round red peppers.  I turned some into hot pepper jam, and saved the rest for seeds.  And even though i also sowed jalapenos and corno di toros, the only seeds that sprouted turned out to be these round red italian peppers from Venice; we have two plants, decked with a respectable number of small peppers that are still green but threaten to redden soon. 

If anyone knows their name, i’d love to hear it.  Our other italian import, from Alberta’s garden at Fattoria Ormanni, are the little succulents called ‘carciofi’ which i looooove, and seem to be happy here at Maffay too, in the big jade pot with the other sedum and the contorted filbert, the picture is still on the mac but i’ll put it up in awhile.

And our attempts at chou romanesco and broccoli have yielded one tiny head of broccoli, but it’s perhaps too soon to tell.  The cabbage patch did yield a scene of garden carnage though, one morning after admiring the lacework that the brassicae had become, i realized it was the work of caterpillars.  So i put on rubber gloves, Gabriel helped by pointing out the caterpillars with a stick, and went out squishing them by hand, which is really disgusting and a very good memory aid for putting row covers on next year.

Jane and Ed’s Home

It’s almost official, the process has now entered into the doldrums of waiting the two months for the final signature at the notary’s, but Jane and Ed will soon be our neighbors in Dingé.  As of next June, they’ll be home.

Home

It takes a heap of living, someone pithily said,

To make a house a home.  I would postulate instead

that you have to live around a bit before you can find your way

home.  Jane started out in a home in Bloomington, a lovely moniker

for a town in a farming state, a very hopeful sort of name.

After that there were many other houses, some with pianos,

some not, some with hedgehogs, most not.  A few had cats,

and one was pink.  She and Ed are now looking for their home.

We did some reconnaissance, trying to imagine Jane and Ed

in houses that we would visit, picture Jane in the garden

drinking a mug of tea, or Ed reading the New York Review

of Books, wondering how the light would fall on the breakfast table

in January on Jane’s yellow provençal tablecloth, in which room

Ed would set up a corner to listen to the BBC and smoke a cigar.

Where the books would go, how it would be to shuck oysters

in the kitchen, what it would be like to open up the mailbox

for news from the other side of the world.  This is meaty work

for the imagination, seeing someone else’s life into a house,

wandering through the furniture and knickknacks that the current owners collect,

the mousetraps, the shocking green paint, wondering how people could live

like that, wondering how Jane and Ed will make it home.

And then they were finally here, and we went out again, looking

at the houses with their eyes.  In Marcillé there was a dead nestling

on the garage floor, and swallows flying in and out of the eaves.  In Meillac

the stairs were medieval or the floors were covered in cardboard,

and three mousetraps guarded the electric blue walls, which were adequate

repulsion on their own right against any living thing, us included.  In Eancé

in the fields to the south, there was the big yard house, with eight apple trees

and gigantic sunflowers, stretching up through the raindrops, taller

than Anne and Anthony, who knows how to put words together.  In Dingé on Monday

we found the arched doorway house, with a wassail cup

carved into the chimney, and two plump cats prowling the courtyard.

On Friday, after making lists and checking and balancing and revisiting and seeing

things in different lights and measuring and plumbing and measuring

themselves up against the walls, Alice Jane made her offer.

The counteroffer came that same night, relayed over mobile phone lines

from Lyon.  Discord over the appliances, capitulation on the price.

(Jane and Ed will live in our self-same harmonic postal code; at 440, Feins and Dingé have perfect pitch.  In Dingé there is garlic from the coast at the little store, a great bakery with perfect éclairs, and a butcher shop whose rillettes have been judged the best in France, David to Le Man’s Goliaths on the subject.)

Jane and Ed will walk under the arched doorway in early July, into the little house with the wassail cup chimney, they’ll turn on the lights, and will be home.

(Le Maffay, on July 25, 2009, during the first of the regrouped poetry afternoons).

Ed wrote a great poem impromptu, in situ, about the chapel during their visit in May, but unfortunately i’ve stored it too efficiently and have to find it again before quoting it to you here.  But we’re very glad to have our Jane and Ed back.

Dog days

We’ve finally had about 2.5 days of canicule, so it feels at last like summertime.  I capitulated and tore out all the mildering tomato plants and made green tomato jam, and it’s rather good and has helped my perspective on tomato blight evolve into delight, deblight, because it’s an easy way to get a good supply of fat green tomatoes right in August when there’s nothing else to jam, in the lull between jars of plums and blackberry preserves. 

Plus the color is green like gooseberries and crunchy and you could think that you’re eating grapes, only they’re tomatoes, so it’s confusing, but in a very delicious way.

Gabriel lost his front tooth.

And we had visitors last week,

our friends Alain and Béa and Clément the aptly-named,

four years to the day from Alain’s visit with Laureen four years ago.

They promise to come back earlier next time, too many changes happen in that much time, but it’s reassuring to discover, in retrospect, that most of the changes are joyful good.  And, i put together the last piece of the kitchen, the counter under the courtyard window, which required 2 trips to Leroy Merlin and Ikea, with a followup to come soon, and we now have more storage but of course it’s already not enough.

Otherwise, we’re working (g in the sand pile, me on the computer in the new Office, which has also officially been inaugurated this week) and dreaming of… chickens.  More to come soon.

Combourg

It’s the cradle of romanticism.  Combourg is 12 kilometers away from us, on the road that goes through Dingé, which we have come to discover means ‘high, mythological land’.  The princes de Combourg had dominion over their vassals at Maffay many years ago from now, when the chapel had stucco on its walls.  We’ve been drawn to Combourg over the past months, visiting in May with Paul and Joyce and Timofee,

then driving through with Marie-Laure and Andrea on the way to the beach (and home again in the taxi when the car had to be towed),

and again in July with Jane and Ed on Jane’s birthday in the rain to look for houses,

then again today for a delightful reason that will soon be announced with a poem on this very site in ten days or so, when it will be official (the category on this post is a clue).

But today in Combourg, a circus was setting up, and so when we drove into the town by the lake, a Bactrian camel was snacking in the meadow under the spires of the château where Châteaubriand once moped.

So uh…

It’s been awhile.  We could blame it on the rain, or on the onslaught of jam season (currants, cherries, apricots, raspberries, and now plums), or inveterate village parties, or lots of great visits (Paul and Joycie, Timothy, Cynthia, Marie Laure and Andrea, Jane and Ed…), meals, or even work.  Or even tomato blight (2 plants have succombed so far and more rain is predicted for this weekend).

But, we’re still here, and still working on the shower.  This has been a project since December 2008; it’s now July 2009, and almost August.  Here in no chronological order at all (because i have pictures from May that need to be posted also), are the updates from today, the latest evolutions of the shower with a detail of the horrible job i’ve done on the grout in the glass bricks that i’ll be fixing as early as the next trip to Leroy Merlin.

More to come soon, as long as we agree on a flexible definition of soon.