This is the end

As Maffay is my witness, i shall never live in a mobile home again, or:  if it’s absolutely necessary, and only in summertime somewhere with mild temperatures and no rain and then, only for less than two (2) nights.

The casablanca served us well, and was a home-in-the-yard-of-our-home for one year, one month, and 4 days.  Jacky tractored it down to Montreuil sur Ille, and i didn’t follow along weeping behind it, nor were dirges hummed.  It’s now in greener pastures, and is no longer taking up space in the middle of ours.  And we can see all the way out to the barn now from the kitchen sink, which is, to some, a  more uplifting view than the side of a white mobile home.

Casablanca

Preliminary note: Happy birthday, yesterday, January 23, to Sara(h) Louise and Thelma Louise.

Of all the mobile homes in all the world, this one could be yours. Electricity updated, new paint and carpet, kitchen with lots of storage space, almost-new electric hot water heater, living room re-insulated with wood panelling. the perfect little house during your home improvement projects. contact piapiapi @ wanadoo.fr

Electricité refaite, salon sur-isolé avec lambris, cuisine avec nombreux rangements, chambre repeinte, moquette neuve. Chauffe-eau eléctrique acheté neuf il y a un an. marque Gruau. peut rouler mais pas trop loin, se trouve dans notre jardin. contact: piapiapi @ wanadoo.fr

For sale

The news of the past week on the left side of Maffay: tiling the kitchen counter, cleaning out the mobile home, getting paint up and carpet down, selling it so that we can look unimpeded out to the farm, and the meadow stretching out between us and the road to Sens.

I’ll put up some pictures of the renovated mobile home soon; either it was the paint fumes or general fatigue, but while working in it yesterday before the first potential acquirers came to visit, i began to have feelings of nostalgia, and thought: perhaps we were actually quite happy in here. And i believe that we actually were, especially in the summertime, or even at winter tucked in at night in our wood-panelled little room. One of the things that we learned from our experience is a very pragmatic tip that we would like to share with you all: if you ever have the chance to live in a mobile home, make sure you don’t store things in cardboard boxes, because they absorb humidity and everything inside, if it is fabric, will smell like Miss Havisham and you will find yourself making many trips to the dump with a carful of moldering, mildering ex-clothing.

The other, better news, is that wine is a surprisingly resilient resident of a mobile home, through the upper ranges of summertime, and the freezing temperatures of winter. Cleaning up, i found a bottle that Jacqueline and Jean-Pierre had given us before we left rue Frédéric Sacher. The bottle had rolled underneath a kitchen cabinet, and survived 13 months in a wooden box (our mobile home), in a French meadow. We drank it last night with Karin, Jean-Jacques, Malin, Simon, and Mathieu and it was actually, not bad. It was actually good. And i remember now, many years ago in Port Townsend, that when the red house burned, the workers who came to reconstruct its innards after the fire found my father’s wine cellar, and tested the bottles in it, and found that the wine was actually very, very good. I’m not saying that i’ll start storing wine bottles out on top of the fröling, but i am saying that if anyone is every about to toss out a bottle of mobile-home dwelling wine, i will gladly help dispose of it.

Also, this is for sale: it is a motor, found in the recesses of our barn. It is a 30watt motor, and used to turn the batteuse, or thresher, at the farm. It probably still works. It is very heavy, and its price is as follows. You must come and pick it up, and then you must see if you can get it to work, and if you can, please invite us over to see what you’ve made it do.

Also, a small remembrance of the history of Maffay: Hélène said that the barbed wire fences came only after the Americans, and the war. As a child, she had to go every weekend and after school, to watch the cows, because there were no fences. Kids had to go out and cowsit in all their spare time, which i actually think would be very appealing to Gabriel. Also, M. Roullier said that at Christmas time, he has the memory of the chocolate that his mother would make only at that time of year: the bar of Christmas chocolate, shaved in razor sharp slices into a warm bowl of milk. That, and an orange, was Christmas. There was also a man who would ride down on his bike from the coast at St Malo with a bag of clams, bringing them to Feins for Christmas. M. Honoré used to ride his bike to get back and forth to Rennes, and Pierrette says that she remembers that people would walk to the market in Combourg from Feins, making the round trip during the morning. This makes me feel very lazy and makes me think about perhaps riding the bikes to school with Gabriel.

Oh, and Cip is probably blind in one eye, because of a scratch or other proclivity to impair himself (this is double entendre in french: you’ll remember that Cip is our cat, who has only one testicle, rather than two). This is what happens when you name a cat after a mythical bandolero; he’s dealing well will his new infirmity and i’m thinking of making him a little eyepatch, for formal occasions, once i get a little more work done in the house, and enough space cleared to make room for the sewing machine.

Cipriano Armenteros

Yes, we have another new cat. This one is Pif’s second son, the strange puzzle-printed animalito who i discovered one morning in early May at Malin/Simon/Anton/Klara’s house. Let me anticipate your questions:

1. You’re not a cat person. You live in a mobile home with a gargantuan six year old with a penchant for mud and general disorder. Your parents are horribly allergic to cats. You’ve said in the past that you think cats are “bitchy” and standoffish.

Yes, all this is true. Did you read the post back in May about finding the mice babies in the compost heap? Also, Sandra said tonight that she found various parts of a rat in the back of the manor. Cats are many things, but my love of cats is inversely proportional to my dislike of rats.

2. What is his name?

Cipriano Armenteros, from the perfect Rubén Blades song of the same name. Buy the album Caminando and listen to it over and over. He’s an honorable bandolero, and little Cip has already distinguished himself for his bravery, hissing blithely in the face of Machin, and bears his white standard nobly on his chest.

3. Are they driving you crazy?

Yes, half of the time, when they’re not asleep, which is kind of the same way i feel about kids. This is karmic retribution for all the sibling rivalries i had with Izzy growing up – i find myself saying, why do you have to be so mean to one another? can’t you just get along? And Cip, who is very verbal, yowls and scratches some more with Max, i consider googling the french translation of ASPA. They’ve started getting along now, which means that one of them will start licking the other one All Over, and i wonder at times if i should tell Gabriel not to watch this until he turns 18 or so, unsure of the age limit for watching homoerotic kitty porn. Then I send them all outside to play in the dirt.

4. Is this one of those strange Freudian scenarios where you’re substituting cats for children/boyfriend?

Yes probably, but they do eat much less, and do not pee on the toilet seats: and, one day, they will eat rats. How many women can say that of their child/lover?

5. Are you going to turn into one of those crazy cat ladies with 600 cats in your house, covered in cat hair and reeking of cat spray?

No. Both boys will become neutered Its at six months old, we are not engaging in any reproductive experiences here at Maffay, and they really will be outside cats, because we have work here on the house for which the collective experience of Grandpas and Grammas is required. However, we might get a goat or two… (to be continued).

April’s fools

Tomato plants in germination about two weeks ago.

I just realized i totally missed out on a cheesy april fool’s joke; I could have posted photos of a finished house, but even Rich’s visit last weekend couldn’t have operated that magic. So G and i are still hanging out in the roulotte, and there are about six million photos of the giant leaps forward in the house over the past week, and this week and the next there’s much more to come. But we’re doing a little catchup on other things before we get photos transfered out onto the vast internets, so here are some leftovers from weeks past.

Moved the rock piles over to the ledge that was going to be a garden and still might be, but after looking at it and looking at the rocks, it seems like a natural spot for a rock garden, which would of course mean that the rocks could stay put, which i’ve decided is really what rocks like to do best. There is a professional, gorgeous technique for this called ‘pierre seche’ or dry stone walls, i call this technique (completely unprofessional) a ‘stone-thrown’ wall.  Check out www.pierreseche.com or http://pierreseche.overblogs.fr to see how it really should look.

This is one of my favorite things about being here in our little roulotte – sending the child outside, or trying to convince the child to come inside after driving his ‘car’ around in the mud (he’s asked for a wheelbarrow with shocks for his birthday), or playing with Machin the cat, or kicking his ball around in the tall grass, or going over to climb on the fence by the cow barn. He sits there and watches the cows and comes back to tell me which ones are not being nice.

Last day of the year

     

We had a lazy breakfast, eating up Christmas cake and pudding imported from London, whose very density earned RyanAir an easy 20 pounds sterling in overweight bags for Rich and Carolyn. Then we went on a small excursion, and came home to take Gramma Sally to the train. But she did not leave before making us more cookies, and cleaning the mud off the floor one last time, and completely remodeling the inside of the little green maison d’amis…

If you will take note of her shoes, you’ll get an idea of what she was dealing with so beautifully and enthusiastically during her two weeks with us, leaving us with a transformed garden, a gear-shifting little boy, yoga tricks for healing Carolyn’s sore shoulder, and among other countless gifts, a lovely Cowichan sweater that I will probably not take off until next August, and only then, so that it may be washed.

If the trailer’s rockin’…

It probably means we’re dancing around inside, which is actually kind of difficult because if you start to dance even a little bit in here, the cd player skips. Here are some pictures of the Gros Travaux in our home on wheels, which we have come to love, especially now that it is better-insulated.

Breton rain sounds very nice on the roof of our little house.

I still have not organized the back bedroom, which is the no-mans-land of boxes of books, our laundry, my office headquarters, shoes that will never come out of their boxes because as we learned from Sylvain the mason, like oak wood when touched by a drop of quicklime, italian kid leather does not respond well to maffaien mud. It has to be organized soon though, because Gramma Sally is coming in soon, and then Carolyn and Rich, (these are our migrant laborers, imported from foreign lands, to come and help build stone walls) and unless they are to sleep in the bathtub (which is pink! and called a ‘sabot’ because it was built for medievally short french serfs, i think…). We have until December 17 at 16h.

this is what it looked like at first. G doesn’t look cold because he’s never cold, but i was.

Getting things ready to take over to Gaël’s to cook for thanksgiving dinner, because our stove hadn’t yet been delivered. That lucky bamboo (dracaena) that you see on the countertop is kind of dead now because it froze on one of the first nights we were there. Does that mean bad things for us, money-wise?

This is what cows look like through the windows of a mobile-home from 1973: kind of like snow. This was on Thanksgiving morning, and at this point we’ve been living in a 4 meter square construction site for about a week, and i’m clearly delirious.

At least now we have insulation. And sawdust. But it’s ok, because neither the bulldozing nor the monsoon that it invoked have begun outside. Ah the heady days of sawing planking outside, instead of on one’s living room table/office desk/bedside table.

Getting better: but still not done yet. This was taken around Dec. 1. I think. More graphically detailed mobile-home renovation photographs to come soon…

First night: 16 novembre 2007

Donc le 16 novembre 2007. Un mot en français, égalité.

Le mobile-home est installé par l’équipe de Gaël/Romain/Emilie/Ollia avec soutien moral par Sandra et Machin, depuis une semaine et demie, depuis la visite de Tiny Mo and Aunty Izzy. Le temps est sec, et très froid; nous partons de Rennes à 7h30 le vendredi matin pour aller chez Malin et Simon chercher le boîtier d’électricité. De la route en arrivant, on voit à travers les fenêtres un beau feu au cheminée, et toute l’herbe et feuillage autour de chez eux est nimbé de givre, avec Gabriel on s’est dit que c’était la neige, et on allait en Suède. Une fois arrivés à Quebriacstad, la suédoise du lieu avait l’air très inquiète et nous a dit : il fait très froid. Dans ses yeux bleus on pouvait voir l’image de nous, aussi très bleus, le soleil lévant du lendemain, samedi matin sur le Maffay illuminant nos corps gélés et inanimés à travers les vitres glacées du caravane. Mais il fallait partir ammener Gabriel pour sa première journée d’école à Ad fines, (Seins, comme avait compris la dame de l’EDF, quand je lui ai dit notre adresse), nous sommes donc repartis dans la voiture rouge vers l’est, où le soleil commençait à goûter le ciel.

Suffit de dire qu’une fois Gabriel déposé à l’école, j’étais rentrée vite fait dans la roulotte pour déposer des affaires, et partie de suite à Leroy Merlin en recherche d’une solution d’isolation. Ainsi s’ensuivait le projet des prochaines semaines: construire un treillage en bois, remplir de la laine de roche, napper avec du lambris. Ce n’est toujours pas fini, mais peut-être qu’avant l’arrivée de Gramma Sally le 17, peut-être que les finitions auront été faites.

Le soir donc à 17h30, nous avions la signature. Gabriel est venu et a joué avec les tracteurs des filles de la notaire pendant qu’on signait les papiers. Après, Elodie nous a invité tous avec Monsieur Lebreton et son genre, le mari de sa fille, dans un petit bar à Sens, un bar parimutuel où les femmes étaient peu nombreuses, leur manque compensée par une lourde rideau de fumée de cigarette, c’était la fête pour la sortie du beaujolais nouveau. Ne dites rien à la DDAS, Gabriel était ravi d’y être. Nous nous sommes installés dans la salle arrière, et avons trinqué avec un verre de beaujolais, qui était étonnamment, pas mauvais, mais c’était peut-être le contexte. Ensuite nous sommes rentrés pour faire la fête avec Malin et Simon et Anton, qui nous ont ammené en plus qu’une soupe chaude (potage de pommes de terre au céléri et basilic à la crème), du chauffage supplémentaire, des tours tournantes très efficaces. Grâce à elles ou peut-être le champagne dont les effets sont visibles dans les images, nous avons pu enlèver enfin nos manteaux et chapeaux pour manger.

Il faisait très froid. Le lendemain, nous sommes lévés pour retourner à Rennes, chercher d’autres affaires et préparer le deuxième déménagement.

Leaving Rennes

Before there was le Maffay, there was rue Frédéric Sacher. We lived there from 15 November 2001- 16 November 2007. Frédéric Sacher, according to the street sign, was a bienfaiteur des humbles, (helper of humble people) but in google i was never able to find out more about him. To leave no trace in google is the sign of a humble modest man, but the street named after him was one of the best in Rennes – Gabriel took his first trip to SuperU in the stroller just after leaving the hospital with aunty sin-day to go get magnum ice cream bars; he was carried down it kicking and screaming countless times by a frustrated mama; he rode his bike down it, after learning how to ride in the Jardin St-Cyr that was our front yard. We walked it or rode it every day to get to school and get home. It’s a short street, peopled mostly by parked cars, and anonymous-looking apartment buildings whose only distinguishing feature is the fact that they look exactly like they were built in the 1970s, which is entirely true. Our building was called ‘Bréhat,’ an island off the coast to the north of Rennes. In front of the door, there was an enormous ash tree; from the third floor, with all the windows, it felt like you were living in the treetop, in a sort of tree-house with a parking garage and a garbage chute and neighbors up and down. You could be at the marché de Lices in five minutes on foot, less time than it takes to wait your turn in line to be served a galette saucisse at the best vendor there. Anne and Elliott lived around the block. Anaïs lived down the street. The nuns were a short bike ride from us across the river. Our beach was 42 minutes away. And SuperU, was our daily delight and source of everything good (consumable goods, of course) in the universe. Gabriel grew up in the dust of construction, the shadows of the light moving through the leaves of the yggdrasil outside our door, and the good smells drifting down from the neighbors kitchen, upstairs.

Leaving there was hard.

It took the combined efforts of: all the friends who came to our going-away party on September 22, and everyone who couldn’t come too but who were there in spirit; our lovely Nicky who had our first picnic at Maffay with us and completely redesigned our house and brought more light into everything and lots of good luck too; Marie-Laure who very patiently put up with all this Maffay nonsense and diligently poked holes and bound calendars while getting emails from me that read ‘promise will check email again soon, am mired down in (insert: work, moving, home improvements, mud); Karin who procured the very best boxes that Fly had to offer, several times over, as it became clear that the books in the shelves had somehow multiplied and borne new generations, like rabbits, in their little warrens; Isabella and Tiny Mo, who came over and visited and kicked things off with the first truckload, a complete redesign of Gabriel’s wardrobe, moral support in the form of margaritas (we know where to find the best one in Rennes, along with a cajeta sundae) and a great Halloween party at Malin and Simon and Anton’s where the two Boyer sisters did the dishes and giggled and snuck glasses of port after all the other revelers went up to bed; of Jacqueline and Jean-Pierre, our upstairs neighbors, who provided babysitting, invaluable packing expertise, many trips up and down stairs and out to maffay with heavy objects, great lunch (homemade choucroute and pâté de grives!), medical advice and plants from their garden in talensac; Connie, who came early, left late, scrubbed, encouraged, consoled, baked quiche, provided a plethora of wool socks and didn’t say anything discouraging or negative even when we came out with the second truckload to maffay in the pouring, freezing rain, and there was no power in the mobile home; Willy and his friend Polo, who carried approximately 2000 kg. of furniture that i didn’t realize we had, down the stairs and then suffered in the freezing rain at maffay unloading it; our new neighbors Sandra and Jean-Luc, and Gaël, Romain and Emilie, and Ollia the dog, who have, in no specific order: sold us a great mobile-home, tractored it onto our property, plugged all the various mysterious parts together (like electricity, water, hot water heaters, gas tubes), let us cook grandma’s rolls for Thanksgiving in their kitchen, and always very nice about coming over to jack up the mobile home when it starts to slip down into the trench behind the house due to the sheer weight of all the books and legos crammed into the back room, who have been very patient with neophyte questions about pouring concrete, who have given us plants and great apple crumble with grapes, who have helped patch holes in the cable that connects us to the ‘fée électricité’, pots and pots of tea, meals and soothing words about everything working out just when i was sure that it wouldn’t; to the three sisters who were the original owners of the property, with a special note of thanks to Marcelle, who we would have liked very much to meet, and Pierrette who with her husband has been so very kind in allowing us to put the three thousand kilos of furniture that i was sure we didn’t have, in temporary storage in the manor house while our farm is torn apart; and to Pierre-Yvès who is the kind of neighbor who will bring over a tractor scoop of fresh horse manure exactly at the moment when you need it for the flower bed, or will drop by one horribly rainy day and leave a pathway of plastic mats so that we can walk through the mud to our mobile home with almost-dry feet (without them and him, the gentle slope leading up to our château on wheels would be rendered inaccessible, and we would be living in our car). He has five tractors. This point has not been lost on Gabriel. Also Malin and Simon and Anton who we love and will do dishes for for the rest of our lives in thanks for the generous sharing of their house, their washing-machine, their bathtub, their wine, their excellent food and elevation of perspective and have patiently given construction advice and wise words on every other various subject on which they’ve been questioned. And who braved the very first cold night to come with heaters, warm soup, great bread and kalles kaviar to celebrate in the mobile home with us (they were the very first ones to see it with us, with Simon’s business partner Olivier, in early July when we came to Maffay with Elodie our wonderful and very very patient real-estate agent). And our parents (financial and emotional support via telephone, email, Tuscan advice sessions over roasted pig and gardening expertise in the muddy months of winter) and our great family and friends in the States and Ireland and Sweden and France and Italy and Switzerland who have been so patient and supportive.

Welcome to Maffay.