A shower! and an upstairs toilet!!!

No pictures yet, because i’m still in shocked overjoyment, but today Gaël came over and hooked up the hot and cold water for the upstairs shower, and also set up the upstairs toilet, so now, but for some joint work, we are a slight few steps away from having an upstairs bathroom (the floor, the counter, the second shower wall, the sink, the faucet, are all to come soon).  Tonight also i took the first outdoor solar shower of the season.  No pictures, we need some private time to process these major events, but of course they’ll come soon.

Lifetime

Steve has shared a link to photos of Darcy…

Darcy pix (click to view)

Moteur de batteuse L. Becquart-Lille

A vendre.  C’est le même qui a fait les batteries ici au Maffay pendant longtemps et selon les dires de nos amis, peut encore faire si besoin.  Voici l’annonce (cliquez s’il vous plaît pour ouvrir).

Case in point

The last of the saints de glace served his revenge cold today.  A hailstorm hit Le Maffay around 5pm, wiping out the spinach crop and disarming a few tomatoes.  The butterfly lavender plumb fell over, and the strawberries were pounded into mush, or worse yet, down into the horse manure that has been their fertilizer these past few months.  Gather ye strawberries while ye may.

Before:

After:

But the green caravan is now gone, trailered out with Emilie and Romain and Pierre-Yves’s help this evening.  Here it was this morning around daybreak.  Now it is no more.

Saints de glace

Journées grises au grand Maffay, un post en français et anglais pour mémorer les saints de glace de l’année 2009.  Il est parfois des périodes dans la vie où des evenements surgissent comme une dernière gélée, coupant court la fructification des journées clémentes de pré-printemps, refroidissant la terre où la germination a pris son cours, incitée par un avril doux.  Aujourd’hui 13 mai est le dernier des saints de glace, Saint Servais; après aujourd’hui, ceux qui travaillent la terre peuvent semer dans l’espoir de recolte, si ce ne sont pas les pluies, ou la secheresse, qui posent problème par la suite.  Le seul métaphore que je peux trouver pour essayer de trouver le logique dans ce qui arrive, ces-jours ci, à tous ceux que j’ai cité autour de Darcy, à la famille de F. et C. à la Bigotais, à nos chers voisins d’en face, à celui d’au milieu, est celui des saints de glace.  Parfois dans la vie il n’y a pas d’abri des forces de la nature, et c’est dans les périodes de gélée tardive, soudaine, inattendue, que nous sommes mis devant le choix de continuer, ou se replier dans la terre.  Je me suis lévée tôt ce matin, le dernier des saints de glace, en pensant à ceux autour de nous qui souffrent et vivent et rient et pleurent, parfois tous à la fois, et suis allée dans le jardin.    Les semences d’avril ont resisté, les fruits sont bien accrochées dans les arbres, les asperges prennent des formes gracieuses et étoffées.  Pour cette année au moins, le jardin a passé les saints de glace.  Et j’y prends espoir pour nous tous qui traversent des épreuves de gel en ce moment aussi.

In France i’ve always been counseled not to plant anything until after the Saints de glace.   These saints mark the end of the waiting period for the last of the late spring freezes, which wreak havoc in gardens and can destroy the stone fruit harvest for an entire season.  The patron saints of may 11, 12 and 13 are Mamert, Pancras and Servais; today, May 13, is the last of the saints de glace, and people who cultivate may now go ahead and plant with the assurance, if not for buckets of rain, or drought, or invasive bugs, that there will be a harvest.  The metaphor of the Saints de glace is the only one that seems to fit right for what so many people around us are living through these days, everyone of whom i wrote in the note about our dear Darcy, the family of F+C, our neighbors at La Bigotais, and all our neighbors here at Maffay, especially the news of our good friends from across the courtyard.  Sometimes in life there is no shelter from an unexpected freeze, and the green tumbling motion of spring suddenly stops, and turns the world into black and white.   You never know ahead of time, and then one morning you wake up and are faced with the choice to find a way to go on, or fold back into the earth.  I woke up early this morning, thoughts filled with those who are suffering, living, laughing and crying and sometimes all at the same time, and went into the garden on this last day of the saints de glace.  The fruits are green but well-attached onto their branches, April’s seedlings have reached the air unimpeded by frost, and the asparagus has taken on a gracile port, branching out from its first tentative spears.  This year, the garden has passed the saints de glace, and this gives me hope for those of us who are living through hard freezes this May.

Saving rainfall

Rain in Bretagne is a prized commodity:  without it we would have nothing to drink but chouchenn, and we would no longer know how to appreciate blue skies.  We love the rain so much that for the past year and half we’ve been collecting it, in a big 6000l box, saving up for a dry day.  And then one day last week, HP Energétik³ came over to plug in pumps and water lines and fix leaks and by the time they’d left, we have the means at our disposal to extract the rain and use it to flush the toilets and wash our clothes and water the garden, in the even that it ever stops raining enough to need a supplement.  During the course of their visit, Simon Olivier and Michel also managed to staunch the bleeding of a small boy who tried to carve a bamboo twig with a shiny new Henckels knife, so we can indeed attest not only to the quality of their plumbing and solar work, but the quality of their first aid kit leaves nothing to be desired.  I don’t have a good picture of the pump yet, but it’s red and shiny and deserves to be photographed so it will be soon.

Darcy O: no, wait, come back…

Darcy died yesterday in Missoula.   She’s the one holding G above, in a photo taken on Patricia’s front steps.  Darcy is someone who you meet once in life, and you want to keep them close, because in one direct sentence she could give you great advice, make you laugh, and make you feel better about being alive.   She was strong and beautiful and became more so even though her body was shutting down from scleraderma over the past four or five years (it seems so long, although, to her, time was measured from one day to the next).  Or maybe, even more so, because she was aware so much more than we all are, that she was dying, because she lived through death every day, until yesterday, when the pain was too great.  Your first reaction, after a sense of relief that she’s no longer in pain, is:  fuck, what are we going to do without her?  Her love, with Steve, was distilled and purified into a cohesive, supportive union that didn’t have to be talked about, you could just sense it at the house, like Gidget the cat, unconditional.  April 9, i went over after work to chat with Darcy, see the work that Steve has been doing on the shower, cutting and tiling the square-cut stones on the downstairs bathroom:  Darcy chose them, a honey and saffron-colored stone skin for the shower, saffron walls, travertine floors.  And Steve cut them, creating a masterpiece of a shower.  When the sun comes in through the window, it will be like bathing in drops of Nepalese rain, and the stone comes to life.  My heart goes out literally, leaking, it feels like, to Steve and her parents and sister Kendra and nephews and friends like our Carolyn and Angela and Lee who watched their Darc die many times over, but in the process got to know her completely in every excruciating, glorious detail, and appreciate every last minute that she was alive with us.  Carolyn says that peonies were definitely Darcy’s favorite, so peonies will bloom for Darcy here.   She was on the first pictures on my little camera, in Missoula on the steps at my sorely-missed Patricia’s house, laughing in July 2002 as the sun went down and we walked down with Carolyn and Diana to meet Greg at DQ.  And then the last photo, taken by a stranger at some noodle restaurant on February 14, 2008.  We love you and miss you Darc.

Florabella

It’s May 6, grandma Mae’s birthday, and we’re adrift in flowers here:  the wisteria, the weeds, the lilacs (the white ones above sadly are not from our garden, happily they are from Yves Roullier’s garden and he’s promised me a start), the colza, the apple blossoms, the lilies of the valley, a profusion of strawberry flowers and the promise of the first roses opening up by this weekend.  Aunty Izzy needs some flowers today, here they are.

Green(house) envy

Gaël et Romain ont fait leur serre le weekend dernier et lundi je suis passée prendre des photos dudit château de la surpousse, maison clôse de tendrilles verdoyantes, moi-même yeux verts d’envie (mais il faut le dire haut et fort qu’on emprunte le serre de Jean-Luc et Sandra, donc on n’est pas à plaindre).  Voici quelques aperçus avant que cette grande cage de lumière ne s’auto-bâtisse de branches grimpantes, et les grappes de tomates ne fassent rougir le soleil de gourmandise.

Peter Simpson

Peter Simpson, friend of many, Pat’s love and eulogist of Port Townsend’s past, a man who opened up the world of art to generations of people on our little end of the world, died two weeks ago.  He was a good friend of my father and mother’s, and he and Paul were on the PT Arts Commission back in 1987…  Paul found these pictures that he took at the time, and now here they are for you, from the past, in fond memory of a great man.

Peter Simpson

PT Arts Commission (dixit Paul: Lainie Johnson, Bertram Levy, Barbara Gemberling, Lucy Vane, Me, Stephanie Lutgring, and Peter in the back.)

Peter in his kitchen

Peter and Pat Simpson

Peter and Pat, cooking

all photos © Paul Boyer

more reading:  Peter’s book with James Hermanson, Port Townsend, years that are gone