Yanis!

Aussi sur la liste de beaux évènements de 2010, il y a l’arrivée du grand Yanis à la maison d’en face le 14 octobre.  Nous attendons le plaisir de le voir grandir et s’épanouir dans les années qui vient, Julia est heureuse d’avoir un copain si proche.  Le voici à 10 jours d’age, lors des 2 mois de Julia. (photo par Paul Boyer).

 

November

This month has been metered by great light and poetry.   We’ve been exploring the woods around our home on Sunday-afternoon walks…and Gabriel has been cleaning up around the yard, including his sandpile, and making us hot chocolate in the morning.  Julia turned three months old.  And our great neighbors stopped by and brought us a new chicken, Gabriel has named her Pecorino.

Fall

With Antoine (you can see his arm, at left) and Yves and Hélène Roullier and an enormous cèpe that they found and brought by; we ate it for dinner last night and sauteed and froze the rest for Joyce and Paul’s upcoming visit, October 16, 2010.  (happy birthday Magnus!).

We’ve been a family of three for almost two months now; Julia bulia is clocking 7 weeks, and each minute has been a delight.  The good news of last week is that Yanis was born on October 14, so Julia has a new friend to grow up with here at Maffay, we look forward to Yanis and Emilie and Romain coming home so we can chat over the fence about diapers, spitting up and sleepless nights, in addition to electricity and bricolage.  We have had wonderful visits, lots of help, good meals have been made for us, and Gabriel has become an extraordinary older brother, from babysitting to brushing her hair into the mohawk that we call ‘shark hair’ and learning tricks from Sary Poppins (our great friend Sarah who came to visit last weekend from the states) about soothing a little crankis girlie.  She has visited Rennes, Angers, the health food store , which is for some reason, one of her favorite places to be, Combourg, markets, Jane and Ed’s for pigs in a blanket and hoppin’ john, a transportation department, a cow-farm, basketball games, friends’ houses for meals (we ate the rooster Dexter Gordon in an exquisite coq au vin that Mme Roullier had prepared, and are now even more enthusiastic about our small coterie of chickalicks and their potential for great meals), she knows now how to light a fire in a fröling 3000 and cook pancakes and empty a mousetrap and she loves going for long walks along the canal into the coming autumn and twilight with her mama while her older brother has practice.

Here are some photos to keep you updated on the little girlie and her adventures.

Very first excursion to the Etang de Boulet, the day we came home from the clinique, 28 august. We celebrated the launch of Gabriel’s homemade sailboat.

Malin’s mama Eva came to visit.

Malina, who helped Julia be born!

Klara

Anton

With Cippis.

Small harvest. Gardening was not a high priority this year.

Gabriel’s cherry-tomato harvest.

She woke up from her nap, and i was downstairs, and she stopped crying so i thought she had gone back to sleep. When i went upstairs to check, she was stretched out next to her brother in his bedroom, listening to music and watching him read tintin…

one monthaversary, september 24. she hates this hat; i love it.

Mme Roullier dresses Dexter Gordon for the table.

Our chicken doctor and conselor.

With Mme Roullier

Wall-e our house chicken who now lives outside.

Learning how to do dishes.

Precision helicopter flying lessons with Sarah.

Epilogue

Yesterday, Jane and Ed stopped by to check on us, bringing a lovely bouquet of hydrangeas and red roses, and a huge brioche from Combourg whose topknot we had devoured before their car left the courtyard.

I told them that the story of Dexter Gordon had another suprise happy ending : laying in bed Sunday morning, feeling a little verklempt that we would no longer hear a rooster, there was, suddenly, around 8a.m. a timid little ‘cock a doo’. I thought it might be one of the neighbors playing a trick on me. But it happened again. And again. And when i went out into the garden to see what was happening, one of our babies from Dexter and Flora’s first hatch, two thirds of which have turned out to be male, (that is, two out of three birds), was on a stump in the pen, crowing so that i would come and let them out of their pen.

Gabriel said, Dexter told him before he died what they had to do when he wasn’t there.

And the great treat of this morning was to hear him again, right around the very decent hour of 8a.m., sing a bit, and come down to the computer to find a new poem from Ed about Dexter. We’ll have to start a new category on this little site about poems, the gauntlet has been tossed, on a very high branch.

Here is Ed, with our thanks and praise:

L’ENVOI

The death of a rooster is something
Not often subject to intensive analysis, yet
There are occasions, as with Dexter, who
Used to live at Pia’s place, in which
Wonderment supplants the prospect of a big dinner.
Dexter dead, eviscerated, proved endowed
With testicles to crow about — each larger than
The heart that drove his vanity, his lust, his rise
To corps commander at an early age, to death
Flopping wildly beneath a summer tree, beside
A chapel ancient, near Feins, in Brittany.

There is, of course, a moral here.
Ask any chicken.  Discuss it with the cook.
And choose a very good red wine.

                       -Wallace E. Knight, 7/25/10

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.