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.

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.)

Gone fishing

We’ve been absent from these virtual pages, only because we’ve been busy elsewhere.  First Malin and Simon and Anton and Klara came over and fixed everything that was broken like Gabriel’s bedroom floor and cleaned the house spotlessly and made lunch too, and then Klara walked,

And the next day,

Grandpa and Mimi came to visit and brought boots and music and trumpets and letters and birth certificates and manual labor in the form of yard landscaping and good work advice and great meals.  And then Jane and Ed came

and Ed wrote a poem in the chapel. 

Then on the 26th, Timothy arrived in Paris, and the rest is his-story too now.  After two days of playing in the capital and seeing my dears Marie-l’or and Nicky and meeting Andrea

and velibbing at midnight up to the Arc de triomphe and the Eiffel Tower,

we came home to Maffay and played here with Paul and Joyce and Gabriel, and Malin/Simon/Karin/Jean-Jacques/Sylvain/Jacques/Astrid/Oskar/Anton/Klara for music night.  And we worked in the garden and worked in the house and had more good meals and lots of music and went to the beach too and then more music at a boeuf with Jean-Giacomo and Sylvain and Jacques and two Oliviers,

and fishing and meals with Sandra and Jean-Luc and river expeditions on the Couesnon with Jean-Luc and visits to the dentist and the bank and the local saxophone shop. 

Timothy gets along well with Cip and Max, and Gabriel, and me.  We all agree that he is welcome to live here with us in Maffay, so you’ll see a bit more of him, here.  And we are very happy about that.  More pictures to come, soon.

Joyeux anniversaire Dorine et Noëmie!

Très joyeux septième anniversaire à nos belles jumelles de la Chevrolais!  bisous de vos voisins au nord et à très vite avec des cookies!

Rallye

I was sawing away at something upstairs today when Gabriel ran in and said, “mama, a race car!”.  So we went out into the courtyard, and a Porsche 911 drove by.  Truthfully, our road is tractor-wide and dusted with a covering of cow dung and rocks, and seeing a nice car go by is relativey infrequent.  Also, as Rich can attest, it’s a blind corner to turn down to Maffay, so we could watch the cars up on the road to Sens pass by the turnoff, back up, then take the left down to Maffay/La Chevrolais.  Our other favorite moment was when Pierre-Yves drove by in the opposite direction in his speedy red Italian charger, off to the northern corn field for a spin in the dirt; the shot of the day would have been to see the tractor attempt to share our tiny road with the yellow Ferrari, but they must have met up down by our neighbors to the south, in La Chevrolais.  The Ferrari was Gabriel’s favorite, i think there was a Simca as well, and a Volvo, and four Porsches, three of which passed by the turn and had to reverse.

Also Gaël and Romain started building their greenhouse today, it’s kind of like Versailles only with a see-through roof.  I got the rest of the shower wall up, Gabriel helped plaster it just as night began to fall; earlier, i’d finished the next to last layer on the bathroom floor, and cut and laid the osb spacers between the heating coils in my bedroom.  It was so nice to actually work on the shower instead of whining about it, that i felt a little guilty.  We went over to Jean-Luc’s for what may indeed be our very last shower dehors…

California: happy birthday Isabella!

I’m coming to the realization today that it’s slightly less cool to have spent time recently in California than we had thought, due to swine flu (the name of which makes me laugh, it’s so Clouseau).  We loved every minute of our time with Aunty Izzy, Gramma Sally, Tiny Mo, little Luca Paul, Uncle Mo and his family, Maximus, Maha and Said and their boys, Rowan, Dawn and Garry… especially those moments spent eating Mexican food, and even the moments in the emergency room at 4a.m. dying laughing (pun intended) about MRSA.  Upon arrival we went straight to the Ferry Market to get provisions, because Boyers need to eat, and were overjoyed by the plethora of raisins, cheeses at the Cowgirl Creamery and Acme Bread’s finest… then I went up to Montana to work for a week and hang out with Kaolin and Wich, and Gabriel played cowboy with Gramma Sally, Aunty Izzy and Tiny Mo.  Then there was a great birthday party in the Stockton Children’s Museum where the kids ran around and sat in fire trucks and on police motorcycles and Izzy and i dragged around after them trying to claim the ambulance or the city bus with its wide seats, as a good spot to take a nap.  The trip to Stockton gave us a chance to see our very favorite eolian farm… on Monday, we went into the city, rode on a cable car, ate the best dim sum the iphone could find (at the restaurant with the greatest name:  Good Mong Kok Bakery), crossed over the Golden Gate Bridge and back…and one of the days after that little Luca Paul came down with pneumonia (or was it swine flu?) so we got to visit the Stanford Emergency room too.   We’re just now catching up with Romance Standard Time and as always, are amazed at Aunty Izzy’s generosity, style, organizational ability, and mostly her sense of humor and all this on less than 5 hours per night of sleep.  We love you!  Thank you for letting us come over and play at your house for awhile… and happy birthday!

Seven years

12 kids, 2 hours, and a treasure hunt that took them a scant 15 minutes.  The rest of the time they ran in circles too quickly to be caught on film, and seemed to be attracted like fluttering moths to either the barbed-wire fence, (sorry about that jacket, Madame X), or seeing how many chocolate coins they could fit in their stomachs at once.  Gabriel and his friends had a great time and screaming and balloon popping were favored activities.  After everyone else had either exploded into small pieces from surconsommation of sugar or had just gone home, Mathieu, Gabriel’s teacher, stopped by to say hello and be generally adored by Dorine, Noëmie and Gabriel.

The pre-birthday party

Gabriel has waited patiently for SEVEN YEARS to have a birthday party with friends over, and even though our house is a disaster area and they’re forecasting rain, i broke down, sent out some invitations to 12 of his friends, and we’re having a party tomorrow.  A treasure hunt, with little poem-clues that they have to read, in order to find pieces of the map to the treasure (chocolate golden coins).  With mint brownies and ice cream, and a pound cake for people who don’t like chocolate.   And a box of haribo candies, because apparently you can’t have a birthday party without them.  We’ll see how it goes.

Tiny Modicum gets bigger!

It’s groundhog day, and Tiny Mo’s birthday, and now my little nephew and godson is 4. It’s also chandeleur in France, which means that we made crepes last night to practice, and then crepes again tonight, having perfected the recipe, and ate an undisclosed number between us, and shared some with Sandra and Jean-Luc to make our excesses less American in stature. The crepes represent the sun, and there are few things as positive in life, in early february, as a plate of golden disks with brown lunar seas where the batter came closer to the pan. We ate ours with powdered sugar and lemon, honey and lemon, the first opening of the Maffay plum jam, some chestnut puree… and decided that the unilateral favorite is the Maffay plum jam. Next year we will go to war with the wasps tooth and nail to fight for the plums – they make a perfect, tart jam, with a lovely garnet color that makes me feel very sad and remorseful that we only made three jars.

Also, it snowed today, and the perce-neige actually lived up to their names as you can see in the picture above. They didn’t have to pierce their ways through much snow at all, but it is nice to see them again and celebrate their resistance to the three separate bulldozings that occurred to their previously tranquil home. More pictures are coming soon, this weekend was glow-rious and blue and sunny, teeming with Bach and gardening and stacking wood.

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.