Kidneys and treehomes

Today my father will give his left kidney to a friend of his named Terry; we love my dad, so now we also love Terry by proxy, especially on the left side.  Does this make Terry 1/50th Isabella’s and my father, and 1/200th Julia and Gabriel’s, and Musa and Luca’s grandfather?  Was he aware of this heavy responsibility, before agreeing to accept a gift kidney from his friend Paul?  We’ve been talking about kidneys and operations with Gabriel, and what it must feel like share with a friend like this.  I’ve been thinking about this while working over the long weekend on Maffay’s new treehome, grafting new wood and sawing planks around branches to allow other species to play up among the branches and birds.   Now there is chestnut, and pine up in the walnut tree, now there will be a nine-year old boy, and in a few years, a little girl, up with their friends the birds, riding a wooden saddle in the wind, mounted on this great whale of  a tree.  Now Terry will have unexplainable hankerings to watch Expector Clouseau and will not understand the sudden  fluttering in his kidneys that makes him laugh out loud and ask, Does your deug beuyte?  And Paul will be more concentrated, less filtered, and has promised to come an inaugurate the treehome with a trumpet serenade from the platform that looks out over the field of cows, and the swing where you can kick up higher than the poplar trees into the dusk.

You can follow their story (Paul, Terry, and their shared kidney)  here.

You can come and visit and play in our treehome, here.

Number Nine!

Gabriel is now nine, and it’s every bit as great as 8.  The weather celebrated along with us; we’re having a drought, which is not great if you’re a farmer or a plant, but if you like wearing shorts and skirts in April because it’s 70 degrees out, it’s not bad.  We’ve had solar hot water and haven’t made a fire in weeks.  We’ve been to the beach and dipped our toes.  We’ve had poetry night outside.  So anyway we had a week’s worth of parties with Mr. Gabriel but on the night itself celebrated with pizza and ice cream with his sister Miss Bean.  And shortly after that began the birthday present, which is a treehouse/swing, our latest obsession.  Pix to come.

March…

It’s spring!  And we’re eating… Julia started on real food this weekend with some carrots, which she didn’t like very much.  But the next morning we tried oatmeal mixed with a little breastmilk and she ate two teaspoonsful.  And now she gets cranky in the morning when we sit down at the table for breakfast if her food isn’t ready. (to then be rubbed all over her face and a little bit swallowed and then cleaned up from her stroller – i find little flakes of oatmeal in surprising places.)

We’re going to try carrots again in a bit.  Daffodils are blooming everywhere, and the electricity, with Gael’s and Simon’s help, is finally up to standard.

And we were given a great gift of three new flower planters for the front of the house, in the form of cider barrels which were last used 40 years ago to store Le Maffay’s production.

And Gabriel is on vacation, and painted dragons at school, and is learning how to make pizza from scratch and galettes and runs through the house testing outlets and making maps of electrical circuits for his mama.

Happy holidays

Catching up with weeks past, looking forward to what’s yet to come.  We’ve had our first snow, Julia celebrated her first Thanksgiving with our sisters and J+E, and also  poetry night has begun again, Ed and Jane and Malin and Gabriel, Joycie and Paul and i have restarted a tradition we first began in Rennes when we were younger and had less life experience, 11 years ago.  This does not necessarily mean we have better poems, but it is a delight to sit around a table with our dear ones and talk about words and what hides behind them.  Gabriel made me a snowfriend outside my office window, there are a few requisite chicken pix, and pictures of two maffaien lovebirds, and Julia’s umbilicus tree.  It has been a wonderful year.

Happy holidays!

(more highlight pix of 2010 to come…)

Dexter Gordon

Yeah, it’s been a long time; there are not many valid excuses for not having kept up appearances on the world wide web, we’ve just been a little busy.

Today, for example, was Dexter’s last day.  Dexter was a wonderful rooster, he was kind to children and adults and very protective of his little flock of hens, and was a very good father – that is, he didn’t peck at his offspring like mean Aunty Garfield would.  He was protective of Flora, who was not only his favorite hen, but possibly also his sister or cousin.

He provided us with many photo opportunities and also, opportunities to reflect on miscegeny and whether or not it applied to the kingdom of chickens.

Dexter unfortunately had a small problem:  satyriasis.  (You can see this in action, in the above photo taken at our fourth of July party).  That is, the humans who fed him had not provided him with enough hens, so Dexter wore out the ones he had.  Flora was his first favorite, and she soon lost all the feathers on her back and started brooding as a means of escaping his clawed embrace.  Then one night in early June i went out to tuck in the chickalicks, and found Stella sitting down in the grass looking rather odd.  Her leg was stretched out behind her in a way that a chicken leg should only be stretched out if they have recently been slaughtered.  (This is something i know, after today).  Evidence points to Dexter, because as anyone who’s seen chickens mate can attest, it involves the male jumping on the back of the female and digging in his claws and a bit more.  Dexter was a weighty bird with all his feathers on.  From June on, Stella has been on the injured list, and has supported my wrapping her leg in soft bandages and fretting and cooing and petting and holding her in my lap to wash her wounds… because Dexter also decided, once he saw that she was injured, that she apparently needed him to finish her off, and his mating became much more violent, and Stella’s back no longer had feathers, and was scratched red and bleeding, and her sides had deep cuts from his claws.  Since June, we have been trying to keep them separate, trying to pen Dexter in, or pen Stella in, but on the rare occasions where one of them got out, Dexter hounded (roostered?) the poor thing.  This lead to many charming tableaux around here at Maffay.  The little boy ran after the rooster with a stick and becoming more and more anguished, some nights finishing in tears when he couldn’t stop Dexter from ‘putting his juice into Stella’…or, the neighbors got used to seeing me in the Ste Françoise l’assise pose, sitting out on what counts for our stoop in the hot July evening, with a trembling Stella on my lap while Dexter circled nearby.  She got to the point where she would come over to me, looking for protection, and jumped up on my lap, which has less and less room these days.

Yesterday morning, when i went out to let out the chickens, Stella had two new gashes on her back, and so i made the call.

M. Roullier père has been supplying my addiction to cherries this past month, and has also cut and split a huge pile of wood, and along with Pierre-Yves’s weed-whacking of the entire front of Maffay, and Emilie and Romain’s chats as they walk Olya, has been a constant comforting presence, checking in on us and making sure we’re ok.

He came at five o’clock today to tell me to put the kettle on.  I did, and then called my dad for moral support, and then M. Roullier’s white car pulled up to the door.  He got out, with his folding knife, and a little rope.

We went up to the chicken pen; all the hens had been clustered around for the past half-hour, knowing like dogs know, that something was about to happen.

He hit him on the head with a stick, knocking him out, picked him up by the feet and hung him upside down from the walnut tree.  He then cut his throat.  I was unable to watch, because i was crying, and then he gave me a hug and took me down to look at the plum trees ripening, while Dexter Gordon finished flailing from his last perch.  We agreed that i will never be a good chicken agricultrice.

Then he shook him, to get more blood out, and then took him down to the hot water pot, where he dipped him in, and we both plucked off his feathers.  I saved the tail feathers for Gabriel and Martin, just in case.  Then into the house, where he held him over the gas burner to singe off the hair.  And, the eviscerating, which was gory but less traumautic for me than than the assassination, because it was more anatomic than emotional.  Dexter Gordon had a large heart, and testicles that were the same size as his heart, which i suppose explains his behavior.

He’s in the freezer now, waiting to be turned into coq au vin, which we will eat with M. and Mme Roullier and Gramma Sally, when she gets here to take care of us when the little girl will be born.

And this morning, Flora’s first little baby chick was born.  We found it after running to the library and then Jane and Ed’s today, when i went out to give our best broody hen some water, there was some extra peeping coming from under her feathers.  I yelled for Gabriel, and we petted her first little baby; seven more will follow over the next week or so, if all goes well.  Gabriel said, well that’s good, there’s a new little baby born on the day that we kill Dexter.  We hope that she is a girl.

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.

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.

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.