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.

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 We asked two people who work there, the guide and the ticket lady, whether or not they knew of the availability of any historical documents about underground tunnels to consult, but no one knew anything about it.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.

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.

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.

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.

Lifetime

Steve has shared a link to photos of Darcy…

Darcy pix (click to view)

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.