Happy Tet, and the X-men

We’ve not been, shall we say, exuberant poster children this month of january of the new year, and now years, with the advent of the Bull. It’s been a busy month of work and travails, and the subtext of the crisis and having to read that word every day makes one feel a little bit like Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight – are the foundations of the world shaking, or is it just me?

Small things have advanced nonetheless here at Maffay. I planted finally all the jonquil bulbs and nectarine tree that Jacqueline and Jean-Pierre brought when they visited after Christmas with Mamie, Rokia, Bruno and Selyan. The tulip bulbs from the school sale in November. The iris from Mme Brugalais at the Poste, and the crocosmia as well. And some bulbs on sale from our faithful Leroy Merlin, because everyone in their right mind knows that it’s now too late to plant bulbs, but i have hope, and a need for color in our messy rainforest of a weed-garden. Cip has now joined Max in the tribe of X-men, and is nutless to begin the new year; the vet found his hidden testicle after opening up his abdomen, tucked up next to the wall of his intestines. Cip is very proud of his soft shaven belly and otherwise shows no signs of trauma at his loss of masculinity.

Politically, recent events in the United States had inspired me to halfway imagine that we would wake up on the morning of January 30 after the strike, to find that Nicolas Sarkozy had left office to be replaced by a coalition of people from Sortir du Nucléaire, proponents of ecological farming methods, bankers with lots of bonus money destined exclusively for investment in eolians, a bevy of chefs de cuisine and sous-chefs to establish a Museum of French Gastronomic History with vast wings devoted to each of the Hexagon’s colonial excursions, Patrick Chamoiseau as Housing Secretary (of my house), Mathieu from the école de Feins as Education minister, with a guidebook written by Anne T., and a Joey Starr in Secretary of the Interior. With the RASED rehabilitated and reinforced, to help everyone in the coalition to get along, and the benefits from converting the Elysee to wind power given to the Education ministry to employ ten new school professors per day. The trees that Klaus knocked down will be used as the beginning of a radical new program to replace cinderblocks, the omnipresent parpaing, with wood-framed, efficient passive low-income housing. Brice Hortefeux shines in his role as chief toilet scrubber at the Elysée, as he has shown particular efficiency at “cleaning” during his time as the Minister of Immigration and National Identity.

But it was just a dream. And here at Maffay this morning we’re listing to Buxtehude at the Folles Journées in Nantes while typing, delaying doing the dishes and grouting the shower, Izzy is waiting for her little Luca Paul to be born in California, Grandpa Paul is in Oaxaca eating seven different types of mole, and we hope that you all are all well and happy and healthy as this second new year begins.

This is what the kitchen looked like before i finished putting down the big black tiles on the countertops (which we loooooove),

and what the shower looked like a few days ago, with the first coat of impermeabilization green stuff on over the Fermacell panels.  The flames at the beginning of the post are what it looks like on the inside of the Fröling when i’ve managed to get the fire lit. All bets are being taken now as to whether or now we’ll have enough wood to last us to the sundrenched (hah) days of April, when the solar panels will take over.

Casablanca

Preliminary note: Happy birthday, yesterday, January 23, to Sara(h) Louise and Thelma Louise.

Of all the mobile homes in all the world, this one could be yours. Electricity updated, new paint and carpet, kitchen with lots of storage space, almost-new electric hot water heater, living room re-insulated with wood panelling. the perfect little house during your home improvement projects. contact piapiapi @ wanadoo.fr

Electricité refaite, salon sur-isolé avec lambris, cuisine avec nombreux rangements, chambre repeinte, moquette neuve. Chauffe-eau eléctrique acheté neuf il y a un an. marque Gruau. peut rouler mais pas trop loin, se trouve dans notre jardin. contact: piapiapi @ wanadoo.fr

Revue de presse internationale

This morning on France Musique, the revue de presse internationale highlighted the editorials of major newspapers around Europe, and everyone seemed to be in accord that last night’s investment speech was the discourse of ‘No We Can’t’ and a complete reversal of the messages emanating from his campaign. And i have the feeling that they must have heard a different speech, or a poorer translation; saying that the first presidential address to the world is a message without hope or ‘negative’ or contrary to Obama’s campaign has profoundly misunderstood the Protestant nature of the American people (i think, but i’m an American a bit removed). In the speech there were references to pulling up shirtsleeves and getting to work, and the fact that there is nothing more satisfactory than the feeling of a job well done. Do not these august editorialists know of the protestant work ethic and our effective guiding phrases like ‘pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps’ and ‘ the early bird gets the worm’ and ‘buy oh buy the bioquant, and get your ass to work?’ and ‘any job worth doing is worth doing well’ and ‘just do it’ and ‘early to bed, early to rise’ and ‘if it doesn’t kill you, it will make you stronger’ and on and on? For an american ear, it was a very motivational speech; hope, at least for this maffaienne, is in the pragmatism of what gets done every day, and if the international press was hoping for arcing discourse about ‘we’re going to solve every problem in the world in the next 10 hours,’ sorry, he’s not going to lie to us just to make us happy and feel uplifted. He’s not going to lie to us. This hegemony of truth and work is very inspirational, and highly puritan, but this is no happy-go-lucky accident of a presidency.

Beau jour

20.01.2009: listening to my chouchou Patrick Chamoiseau on France Inter this morning saying that Barack Obama is the fils du gouffre, which is Glissant’s realm if i recall correctly, and joy lit up his voice and i love the way the word ‘individuation’ sounds in his mouth. Then a day of work, then later, listening to the investiture driving home from Angers, as charcoal rainclouds presented a solid front across the widening sky, i took at photo of the rond-point i traversed while listening to Barack Hussein Obama become the 44th president. Our red car drove solidly north to home, dividing the raindrops as he spoke the words that we’ve all been able to re-read now, on yahoos or other websites. A french translator’s voice was laid over the top of the President’s words like an old holey quilt, and you could tell the man was overcome with the emotion and import of the words that he was given to wring into french, and there were gaps and dropped articles and florid inventions, like when he said something about ‘the electric lines that will power our industry’ when Obama referred to digital lines to link commerce together. The plain architecture of Obama’s speech was napped with the wispy old-world lace, the power of his words contrasted and emphasized by the flounderings and valiant attempts of France Inter’s finest, like looking through cobwebbed windows to see solid beams reaching into the aether. I had to read the speech to understand its elegant simplicity and reach, uncomplicated by the overlay of the other man’s voice. It was a valiant effort, but I wish he had forsaken his task right when Obama mentioned humility.

And then at dinner tonight we had american food (polenta and sausage sauteed with apples and onions) and sang ‘oh say can you see’ and after i finished Gabriel said, oh, can i tell you how i love that? And i thought, oh he must be carried away by patriotic sentiment and my voice, and then he said, the cheese, the mont d’or in the polenta. So we looked at pictures on Yahoo of the investiture, and he wondered at all the people crying, and we talked about how you can cry sometimes for joy, because sometimes things happen in life that are so improbable, and so long-awaited, and so true. I still cannot believe that my parent’s generation has lived through the civil rights movement, to see today. And that older generations still have suffered through invisibility and ignorance older still, to live through today. And i don’t know yet if Gabriel understands when i try to explain it to him, feeling like that noble translator from France Inter, but i hope someday that he will.

For sale

The news of the past week on the left side of Maffay: tiling the kitchen counter, cleaning out the mobile home, getting paint up and carpet down, selling it so that we can look unimpeded out to the farm, and the meadow stretching out between us and the road to Sens.

I’ll put up some pictures of the renovated mobile home soon; either it was the paint fumes or general fatigue, but while working in it yesterday before the first potential acquirers came to visit, i began to have feelings of nostalgia, and thought: perhaps we were actually quite happy in here. And i believe that we actually were, especially in the summertime, or even at winter tucked in at night in our wood-panelled little room. One of the things that we learned from our experience is a very pragmatic tip that we would like to share with you all: if you ever have the chance to live in a mobile home, make sure you don’t store things in cardboard boxes, because they absorb humidity and everything inside, if it is fabric, will smell like Miss Havisham and you will find yourself making many trips to the dump with a carful of moldering, mildering ex-clothing.

The other, better news, is that wine is a surprisingly resilient resident of a mobile home, through the upper ranges of summertime, and the freezing temperatures of winter. Cleaning up, i found a bottle that Jacqueline and Jean-Pierre had given us before we left rue Frédéric Sacher. The bottle had rolled underneath a kitchen cabinet, and survived 13 months in a wooden box (our mobile home), in a French meadow. We drank it last night with Karin, Jean-Jacques, Malin, Simon, and Mathieu and it was actually, not bad. It was actually good. And i remember now, many years ago in Port Townsend, that when the red house burned, the workers who came to reconstruct its innards after the fire found my father’s wine cellar, and tested the bottles in it, and found that the wine was actually very, very good. I’m not saying that i’ll start storing wine bottles out on top of the fröling, but i am saying that if anyone is every about to toss out a bottle of mobile-home dwelling wine, i will gladly help dispose of it.

Also, this is for sale: it is a motor, found in the recesses of our barn. It is a 30watt motor, and used to turn the batteuse, or thresher, at the farm. It probably still works. It is very heavy, and its price is as follows. You must come and pick it up, and then you must see if you can get it to work, and if you can, please invite us over to see what you’ve made it do.

Also, a small remembrance of the history of Maffay: Hélène said that the barbed wire fences came only after the Americans, and the war. As a child, she had to go every weekend and after school, to watch the cows, because there were no fences. Kids had to go out and cowsit in all their spare time, which i actually think would be very appealing to Gabriel. Also, M. Roullier said that at Christmas time, he has the memory of the chocolate that his mother would make only at that time of year: the bar of Christmas chocolate, shaved in razor sharp slices into a warm bowl of milk. That, and an orange, was Christmas. There was also a man who would ride down on his bike from the coast at St Malo with a bag of clams, bringing them to Feins for Christmas. M. Honoré used to ride his bike to get back and forth to Rennes, and Pierrette says that she remembers that people would walk to the market in Combourg from Feins, making the round trip during the morning. This makes me feel very lazy and makes me think about perhaps riding the bikes to school with Gabriel.

Oh, and Cip is probably blind in one eye, because of a scratch or other proclivity to impair himself (this is double entendre in french: you’ll remember that Cip is our cat, who has only one testicle, rather than two). This is what happens when you name a cat after a mythical bandolero; he’s dealing well will his new infirmity and i’m thinking of making him a little eyepatch, for formal occasions, once i get a little more work done in the house, and enough space cleared to make room for the sewing machine.

Mère noël!

or: mother christmas, or ‘more christmas’ if you’re speaking in Expector Clouseau patois, as Gabriel has been for the past two weeks.

Happy New Year, a healthy joyous one, to everyone.

Happy Birthday to: Carol, Renaud, Joycie, Helena.

And a word of thanks to Anne Tanné, who we all wish we could have known better, but who leaves behind her a great burst of light, laughter and color in the world.

Santa Clause came to Maffay and was a woman, my mother, Sally, who arrived on the 21st with smoked salmon, Good Earth tea, chocolate, maple syrup, corn tortillas, tillamook cheddar, socks and warm scarves in her sack. In the past few weeks the weather has been as cold as Siberia (because météo france tells us the winds have been coming to us direct from the Steppes to our temperate meadows). But the greatest thing about the past three weeks has been Grandma Sally’s visit, which, as effectively as the cold from the Siberian steppes, shook us into action as she simultaneously:

1. got us mostly moved out of the mobile home and some cleanup initiated.

2. got lots of laundry done.

3. made lots of great meals.

4. watched lots of expector Clouseau (the pink panther series from Izzy) with Gabriel.

5. held my hand at ikea as i bought the kitchen over several torturous trips (we’ve been back a total of 7 times now and know all the shortcuts in the new Ikea at Pacé).

6. helped infinitely as the kitchen took shape: cleaning up after me, finding lost screws, giving tips on where the best parking spots are at Ikea.

7. and a little bit of gardening too, before everything froze.

Gaël would come over at night after work and do cool things like connect the water line so that we have running water in the kitchen, and connect the electrical lines so that we can plug in computers and the internet in the living room. And then Jean-Luc came over too and played Marcel Marceau, sanding and mudding the final coats on the office ceiling so that i can paint it, and have an office instead of a corner of the living room. One day there was freezing rain, and sheets of razor thin ice slid off the solar panels and floated light as ash down to the ground, where Cip hunted them as they fell. Birds, unsettled by the weather, have been flying into the windows of our house; one, we watched with Gabriel as he came back to consciousness and stumbled off drunkely into the courtyard, and managed to fly away on a different route. One day, sadly, one of them flew too fast for his own good, and fell to the ground, his final landing. And another bird flew down next to him, and waited by him, and pecked at him, trying to get him to move again. We buried him by the chapel.

We love our grandma Sally and are so grateful for her visit, because now instead of a mobile home, we have a real home, and a real kitchen, and so much space that we get lost, wandering from room to room, amazed that we now live in a house where you can jump up and down, and the cds don’t skip, nor do dishes fall from the kitchen shelves. And you can reach out your arms, and not hit something. And you can walk through a doorway straight-on, not having to turn to let your shoulders squeak through. We’ll devote another post to our darling Fröling, who has been keeping us warm over the past month, and whose firelit visits have become an anticipated daily ritual. This post is for Grandma Sally so that you all can see all the cool changes she wrought (what a great word: unsure of how to employ in the present, i’ll use ‘write’ instead, below).

And all the changes we write.

Here are a lot of pictures to make up for the silence on this little blog of the past weeks, as you can see, we’ve been a little busy. There was also of course that strange disconnection from the world that we experienced when France Télécom left us without internet for a long week after the phone line was moved into the house on the 23rd, but otherwise, our hands were full.