Deep Quercy

Deep Quercy has moved

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 20:40:00 +0000

My apologies for peripatetic tendencies of this blog. It has found a new home at http://quercychronicles.wordpress.com, and hopefully will find some new life as well. Please drop by. Thanks,
Gregory

The Aston Martyrs

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 09:39:00 +0000

Summer brings so many good things to the Quercy that, even were I finding time to write regularly, it would be hard to do them all justice. The evening markets, the medieval festivals, the families pouring down from England and Holland to rent our cottages and lie in our pool – it’s all great stuff, and after the long quiet of winter, the summer season often seems like one giant party. A party at which, granted, we in the hospitality industry spend a lot of time making beds, but a party nonetheless.

And with all of these tourists and summer-house-owners come the cars.

This sounds like a negative, and to some degree of course it is. The roads get more crowded, there are lines at the gas stations, and sometimes you actually have to look around for a bit before you find a parking place. Many newcomers here aren’t used to narrow country roads, or are overawed by the scenery, or are just plain lost. Or just plain bad drivers. Or in the general excitement have taken too much or too little of their meds. Hard to say, but between the ones going half the speed limit, the others going twice the speed limit, the lost Dutch motor home drivers who stop in the middle of intersections to consult their maps and the enthusiastic English new arrivals who forget about that little matter of driving on the right, summer in the Quercy becomes largely a question of getting from A to B alive.

That being said, the Quercy and surroundings are ideal motoring country. Not just driving, but motoring around in a car you love because it’s old or collectible or stylish or convertible (and please notice that “fast” was not in that list) just for the sake of watching the scenery go by and knowing that, in your snazzy car, you are an interesting part of it.

This draws a lot of unusual machines down here in summer to stir up the everyday selection of 1950’s tractors and tattered 1990’s Renault 5’s. As with dogs, the interesting thing about cars is often their juxtaposition with their owners. There are a few patterns. There are the gay couples celebrating their youth in their well-tended little convertibles. There are the retired English couples celebrating their second youth similarly well-tended and slightly larger convertibles. There’s the occasional elderly couple in something outrageously classic like an old Bentley, or sleazy middle-aged guy with salt-and-pepper hair and dark sunglasses in his Ferrari, or smug overgrown boys in dune buggies. Recently one sees more oddly-matched couples in motorcycles with sidecars, the ultimate way to travel with someone without actually having to speak to them.

I think my favorites though are Aston Martyrs. They all tell the same story. He is an old car buff. He wasn’t when he was younger, but at some point he became obsessed by classic cars and acquired a vintage Aston Martin. He learned everything about it. He knows all the trivia, much of the mechanics, and has poured his soul into restoring the old beast to pristine condition. She at first found this charming. Oh, Richard and his old cars, she’d say to friends, but it was more boasting than complaining. She found his enthusiasm charming, and was relieved that it was directed at something attractive and stylish.

But as the years went on, she realized that the Aston Martin had become part of their marriage. It was his mistress, they had become a ménage a trios. And now their trips to the Continent are all the same – instead of flying down to the Mediterranean coast, instead of a city break somewhere in Italy, every year the Aston Martyrs have to drive all the way south through France. They always break down somewhere, and always have to attend another interminable classic car rally somewhere else. She smiles, makes the best of it, and of course looks utterly charming in that classic English way sitting in the passenger seat of a vintage roadster driving through the French countryside. But it is a grim, enduring sort of smile.

I can’t help but smile back at her. Every year the Quercy offers its visitors a very full schedule of markets, festivals and concerts to liven up their holidays, but she is part of the unscheduled summer entertainment that visitors bring here with them. Even though we’ve tucked ourselves away among farms and villages of France profonde, we are given a regular glimpse of the outside world as the tragicomic parade of humanity marches by for a few months every year. I would feel bereft without it.

And next week, if all goes well, I’ll write about my own classic car.

Koffie

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:43:00 +0000

Okay, it was inevitable. You start a blog. You try to keep it highbrow, literary, interesting for a wide audience. But sooner or later, you post pictures of your dog. Here's Koffie, doing his best impression of a charming stray.

An unexpected visit... and one pissed off cat.

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:59:00 +0000

After many weeks of silence, I’m back. And I am not alone.

A small black dog watches me as I type this. It’s early morning, the weather’s good, and I’m out on the terrace overlooking the vegetable patch – the tomatoes are huge and just starting to ripen, long green cayennes twist and dangle from the slender branches of the pepper plant, courgette flowers raise their crinkled yellow faces to the warm summer sun and the rather terrifying pumpkin vines grow several inches a day as they quietly plan world domination. The tiniest of caterpillars is working its way, millimeter by millimeter, up the edge of my screen.

On the other side of the field, the cottages are full of newly-arrived guests, tired from their long trips from England, Belgium and the Netherlands. All our frantic work of this spring is now being paid off by happy holiday-makers enjoying the beginning of the summer season in the Quercy. I’ll be running to the village baker in a few minutes to buy bread – still hot from the oven this time of morning - and croissants to deliver to the guests. It’s our busy season, and it’s not all bad.

But suddenly this dog has been added to the equation. He is now officially named Koffie. He is officially ours. And, given his taste for 6:00am walks, I am officially ambivalent about it.

Koffie showed up last week. Strays aren’t uncommon here: we often get visits from the dog of the previous caretakers of our house, who now live in a hamlet a few miles away. The occasional disoriented and famished hunting dog wanders onto our land in winter. But this was different: this friendly little terrier/dachshund/n’importe-quoi mix we’d never seen before, with no collar, suddenly taking up residence in the playroom of our cottages was a visitation of a different order. We called all our neighbors, took him to the vet to scan him for a chip, asked the mayor and the baker’s wife. No luck. Or rather, luck. Sebastian has dreamed of having a dog for years now. We’d already fallen in love with the little creature, much to the chagrin of our cat (also a foundling). No tag, no collar, no one to claim him – make yourself at home, Koffie. And stop chewing on my shoes.

We’ve spent some time puzzling over just how he got here, but the locals all have the same reaction. Someone didn’t want him anymore, so they drove at least 20 km from home, found a lonely little country road and dumped him out of the car. Apparently it happens all the time. The vet didn’t even blink. It is, I suppose, a reminder that until very recently this was a region of subsistence farmers where animals served two purposes: food and labor. Dogs were for hunting, for herding sheep, for killing rats. And when they no longer served a practical purpose, they were discarded. That attitude lingers today, not just in the despicable way in which some hunters here treat their hunting dogs, but even among townspeople with regard to pets.

But it’s not all so dire, as I was reminded yesterday evening when the three of us took Koffie for a walk. We walked up towards the neighboring farm keeping Koffie on a leash to prevent him from chasing Madame’s sheep, who are deeply ambivalent about his arrival. Madame came out of her house to say hello and to meet the new member of our family. It’s always a bit of a linguistic adventure, these chats with Madame. She dishes out her generous portions of local lore in a thick Quercy accent, heavily seasoned with Occitan words like “nosotre” instead of the French “nous.” And then, of course, we get onto the subject of animals.

Madame has her own fair share of animals. Her own little foundling dog Chocolat vanished last year, but was quickly replaced by a beautiful white foundling cat. And while she isn’t a self-sufficient farmer as she was when her husband was still alive, Madame still manages, with some help from her children, to care for a small flock of sheep and an enclosure full of smaller animals. While I held Koffie, she took Sebastian around to show him the rabbits, chickens, ducks and geese. I could hear Sebastian telling her about the rabbit we used to have, rescued from Cazals market where she was being sold as an ingredient for a stew. Sebastian came back with a handful of feathers and a beaming face, and then Madame took us over to the cage where she keeps her doves.

“This one is also a foundling, a wild turtle-dove” she explains, pointing to a small dark bird among the dingy white doves fluttering around the cage. “You know the Souveton family, who sell their wine at the evening market in summer? Last year, la fille was there, selling wine, when this dove fell out of the big mulberry tree right in front of her. She cared for it a while, then gave it to me to keep.”

Stray dogs, lost cats, wild birds falling from trees. Everyone around here has similar stories behind their own accumulation of foundling animals. If there is much cruelty here, there is equally an impressive amount of kindness towards lost animals that find their way onto farms and into village houses.

“I like to hear the doves sing in the mornings,” Madame tells us just before we go. And then she gives us one of her wry smiles.

“They’re not for eating,” she adds.

The potager, encore

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:19:00 +0000

Okay, apologies for producing absolutely nothing for weeks now. By way of apology, pictures of the potager. I'm toying with the idea of treating this blog as, well, as a blog, ie posting little blurbs and photos more often. Thoughts? At least then there would be something to fill space between the rambling essays. Let me know. In the meantime, our first tomato, about the size of a marble as of today.

Gardening, the hard way

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Sat, 09 May 2009 20:52:00 +0000

I spent the better part of this afternoon upside down with my head in our rainwater cistern battling the all predatory forces of heaven and earth. I think I’m winning.

Spring is the time for grand designs, and having both finished half of my gate and said goodbye to our first large group of guests, I figured it was time for something more ambitious. For years now, we have aspired but failed to keep up with the Jones’s, or more precisely, the Bousquets. But this year will be different.

Whenever I am in the village and have a spare moment, I peek into the Bousquets’ vegetable garden. It is immaculate, every year. There is never a weed in sight. Their perfectly staked tomato plants always produce beautiful red fruit by the hundreds. Their lettuces march in perfect rows and seem blessed with some sort of natural slug-repellant. Their spring onions stand up straight like little soldiers. They even have a row of grape vines, tendrils neatly tied up comme il faut. And they manage all of this in a modest village garden. If they weren’t so nice, I’d hate them.

Here in the French countryside the potager, or kitchen garden, has long been an art form and, I suspect, a badge of rural civilization. Our various neighbors seem to produce huge quantities of beautiful fruit and vegetables with almost no effort, possessed as they are of the local lore passed down from generation to generation of farmers and country gardeners. Their generosity is equally as effortless, bringing both the lore and the results of it regularly to our door: eggs and figs from Richard and Barbara, tomatoes from Madame up the road, mushrooms from Monsieur Dubois over the hill, and a dire warning from our roofer about the upcoming Saints de Glace (the “ice saints,” the last days to expect a late frost, specifically the 11^th-13^th of May). From bottles of homemade walnut liqueur to bags of meat, we have received, through the kindness of others, the fruits of this overabundant earth.

I can’t help but suspect that this generosity is not unmixed with pity. The results in our own potager over the years have not been stellar. We did well with tomatoes one year, but the next year they all rotted after a very wet June. The raspberry bushes Claire gave us are still alive and produce a handful of berries every year, but they seem resentful about it. There was one courgette plant that seemed unstoppable, but we had to search for the courgettes among a forest of weeds that relentlessly invaded the garden. And our attempt at growing lettuce led to nothing more than a few very happy slugs. Only the young fig trees and one ferocious cayenne pepper plant could be called an unmitigated success. Even the basil seeds Sophia sowed carefully in pots in our guest bathroom to protect them from frost have not deigned to grow more than a few millimeters above the soil before mysteriously beheading themselves like self-hating Bourbons.

But this time we’re getting serious. There’s no point living out here, we decided, if we don’t start to produce our own food from the land, to take another step in our efforts to be more self-sufficient and rely less on the big bad corporate controlled world beyond our horizon. So first things first, we plotted out a new potager on a very fertile sunny patch of grass behind the house, in plain view, and as close as possible to the kitchen. Once Serge had come with his rotavator and done the heavy work of removing the grass layer and plowing up the rich red earth, we could get started.

As rational, educated people, Sophia and I did our research, and in the process were reminded that vegetable gardening is more than a hobby – it is an epic struggle against the forces of nature. The potager is not a playground, it is a battlefield, and reading about all that could go wrong I became determined to march into it well-armed. I would start by working high quality fertilizer into the soil, a sort of compost available here called Or Brun, or brown gold, which would improve the chemical composition as well as the structure of the soil. I would get an electric wire as they use to fence in livestock in order to keep away the deer. Good quality seedlings, some sturdy stakes for the tomato plants, and a carefully chosen variety of crops to deter pests. A few essential extras – slug pellets, various organic-farming-approved potions to deter this and encourage that. A back of the envelope calculation suggested that we would be paying about two euros a piece for our home grown tomatoes. This was a sort of self-sufficiency a credit card company could get very excited about, but it wasn’t quite what I had in mind. Clearly nature is not my only enemy – the false comforts of the capitalist machine were also hell-bent on luring me to my ruin.

So this is where lore comes to the rescue. I was sad about losing the electric fencing, but the lore is particularly rich when it comes to keeping the deer away. A length of twine soaked in gasoline is said by some to keep the lovely little beasts at bay, but a garden reeking like a mechanic’s workshop falls just a little short of my idea of bucolic. Scattering human hair is said to help, and human urine is also supposed to be effective. Great. I think I’ll start with the suggestion on one website of hanging bars of perfumed soap at intervals. I’m all for following expert advice, but finding the right expert isn’t always easy.

Keeping the cats from turning the garden into a litter box requires garlic, but slugs are more exigent. They like beer well enough to drown in it, so apparently I’m meant to place little bowls of Kronenbourg here and there to lure them to an inebriated end. These things I can deal with. On balance, I’d say better the radishes smell like an Italian restaurant or a pub than a garage or public toilet.

The other basic needs we need to fill, preferably without doling out too much cash to chemical-producing corporations or the water company, are food and water. We collect rainwater in our cistern (hence my subterranean adventures this afternoon recoupling some pipes that had come loose over winter), but fertilizer is a challenge. The answer is obvious, of course, but it brings us back to the smell question, and the scent of horse’s backside might, I’m afraid, put the slugs off their beer.

The lore provides the ideal answer – you put nettles in an old pillowcase and soak them for a couple of days until they form a dark, hopefully only moderately smelly, tea. Our pampered vegetables will be drinking nettle tea and inhaling the scent of lavender soap, doing their dignified best to ignore the slugs as they sing off key and pick fights with each other.

Well, I’ve already made a concession or two. I did buy a bit of chemical fertilizer to get us started, and I found some inexpensive garlic pellets designed to last outside specifically in order to scare away cats. This evening our cat curled up amongst the scattered pellets and licked himself in flamboyant contempt.

These tomatoes had better be damned good.

Update: the gate

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Sat, 02 May 2009 19:35:00 +0000

For those of you who read last week's post, this is just an update to say that the gate is finished! Well, half of it it finished. A smaller gate for foot traffic will go into the gap. Check back with me in a few years...

The Virtue of Almost

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 11:13:00 +0000

This week marks an important milestone on our little estate. After many months of debate, planning, getting quotes, and of course actual labor, the refurbishment of our swimming pool is nearly complete.

That word “nearly” might trouble some people. I can sympathize. Milestones should be about actually finishing something, about achieving a sense of closure. I mean, how inspiring is it to hear “Just do it, eventually?” Who brags about giving a job their 85%?

Ah, but this is France.

To say that things here move at a slower pace would, I think, be missing the point. Yes, it’s southern Europe as opposed to northern Europe, and it’s countryside rather than city, and each of the respective stereotypes of general slowness have some ring of truth to them. But it’s not so much the slowness of pace here as the intermittency of work that leaves us in so constant a state of almost-arrival. Anyone we hire to do anything seems to be perpetually coming and going, starting and stopping. There are always extra parts on order, or extra machinery needed, or additional experts to be consulted. Any process here seems to acquire extra steps, like the random baritone vowel sounds that characteristically insert themselves into the sentences of the southern French. Behn, euh, c’est preque euh, finit euh.

I’d love to say that after living here for four years I’d figured out a reason for all this. I’ve trotted out a few theories, and I think I might well be onto something with the idea that it all relates to the French capacity for appreciating nuance. In this slow quiet corner of an already introspective, abstract nation, people accomplish things in fits and starts because at every step they perceive issues that might simply be ignored in a more straightforward culture. Our nearly finished pool, like our half-repaired boiler or the perpetually about-to-be-overhauled transmission on my Renault 4, is in fact a Gallic form of celebrating the bedazzling multifariousness of life. Maybe.

The problem is, I’m finding myself doing the same damn thing. Our house and land is generously peppered with nearly-completed projects, half-hearted attempts and partly-realized ambitions. The most colorful of these can be traced back to that most dangerous of books, the great lexicon of country-living ambitions, John Seymour’s Compete Guide to Self-Sufficiency. The wreckage of Mr. Seymour’s well-intentioned encouragement is all around me.

Fortunately for everyone concerned, including and especially my back, the drystone wall I dreamed of building has yet to evolve beyond the accumulation of a large pile of rocks at the edge of the upper field. Our yearly stab at a vegetable patch has seen more success. We have managed to acquire a collection of tomato, courgette and pumpkin seedlings, and have staked off a new patch of earth for this year’s potager. It is promising, at least, and the years have proved it more realistic than my early-aborted plans of bee-keeping.

But my favorite project, and the one that best illustrates just how these things get slowed down, is my farm gate. The field that separates our house from our rental cottages borders on a small road. This isn’t such a problem – it’s a narrow country lane that ends at the next farm, the sort of road where two cars couldn’t pass without one pulling off the side, the sort of road where two cars rarely pass anyway. But that field bordering on that road spoke to me. A vision rose in my head, a Seymouresque vision of that field separated from that road by an old fashioned hedgerow, á l’Anglaise. I’d seen many of them during our years in England, read about them in Winnie the Pooh and the Wind in the Willows. I wanted one, and the good Mr. Seymour was telling me that with a little work it could be mine. A hedgerow, with an old-timey farm gate (important to allow access for my beloved jaunty blue tractor) was within my reach.

That was three years ago, and I’ve been reaching for that gate ever since. I started with the hedge itself, each winter setting aside a bit of time among other projects to carefully gather saplings in the surrounding forest – hawthorn, hornbeam, maple and broom – and slowly planted two staggered rows of rustic bushes that will one day, I’m certain of it, grow large enough for me to interweave them as befits a proper hedgerow. In the meantime, I put in two sturdy fenceposts – thick chestnut, also from our woods – and set about planning the gate.

Enough care and planning went into this gate to make it worthy of St. Peter himself. Two years ago I settled upon a design, measured, cut good long chestnut poles for the top and bottom and shorter ones for the sides and crossbeams, and bought all the metal parts (hinges, bolts, screws). It would be a double gate, one half large enough to allow access for the beloved JBT, the other small and easier to open for foot traffic. It had taken a while, my priorities were always elsewhere, but I had just about everything gathered together and ready to go.

And then, that spring, one of the guests in our cottages had the idea of building a little hut for the kids. He asked if that would be alright and if he could use some wood from the pile at the edge of the field. It seemed like a fun project, something our various guests could enjoy all summer, so I said okay and went about my business. He was a builder by trade, and he put together a wonderful little pyramid. The kids loved it. And I did too, until I noticed that its frame was composed of all the posts I had so carefully cut to size for my gate.

So my gate spent the next two years entombed in the traditional Egyptian manner, as honored and useless as any dead pharaoh. Other priorities reasserted themselves. Life went on and my hedge slowly grew. My fenceposts stood silently, watching that pyramid like two great sphinxes, waiting, waiting.

But this spring, the mummy awakes. The pyramid was becoming unstable, so I took it down, excavating the lost pieces of my gate and with them a renewed determination to complete this long dreamed-of project. I have replaced the pieces that could not be salvaged, gathered my tools, found the hinges that had been gathering dust in a corner of my shed, and started building.

And it’s nearly finished.

Les Sacres du Printemps

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:05:00 +0000

Spring is a magical time – the maples and hornbeams are budding, dusting with pale green the grim lattice of dark bare branches that enclosed us all winter. With the birds back in force, the wisteria flowering and Wordsworth’s hosts of golden daffodils just finishing their annual march through the Quercy, the warm poetry of nature renewed can at last return to our frozen souls. I suppose my soul’s up for it, but quite frankly the rest of me is just too tired.

Every year it’s the same. When we close up the cottages for the winter, Sophia and I tell each other that this year, this year we will get most of the fixing up work done early, so that spring will not be stressful. And we always make a good start of it. But then winter makes its own demands and imposes its own limits. The cottages – not built with winter in mind – grow too cold to heat efficiently. So rather than struggle to get paint onto the walls before it freezes onto the brush, we shift our energies to the house, the land, other obligations. And next thing we know, there we are in March, every single March, making a mad dash to get the place in order before our first guests arrive for the Easter holidays.

It’s not just us – the entire countryside is on the move, getting ready for summer. Caves and castles are opening for business. Even the farmers seem intent on beautifying the place, carving the earth into immaculately ploughed fields, row after row of red-brown clouts of soil snaking deftly in synch with the surrounding landscape. When the tourists arrive, they will see the Quercy in its rightful state of pristine beauty, a land of sunshine and vineyards and clean tidy medieval villages.

Unfortunately the mass of work that goes into making everything picturesque seems to come all at once, and it’s not always so charming. Amid all the efforts to restore our surroundings to their perfect state of pretty, amid the cleaning and digging, the frantic painting and one particularly astounding feat of amateur electrician work that I honestly think could be compared to brain surgery, I found myself faced last Monday with yet another inconveniently-timed reminder of life’s less-picturesque side. I had to attend a school Parents Association (the “APE”) meeting.

I’m not going to prevaricate - these meetings are like dental surgery. I like the people, at least. Catherine the baker’s wife is the APE secretary, and she’s a good guarantee that the meeting will stay lively. Claire, Sylvie, Jean – I suppose I should be grateful for the social aspect of it. But after a few minutes of friendly chit chat, the fun and games stops, and the dark side of this otherwise idyllic world raises its venomous head. You see, apart from always cropping up when everyone is at their busiest, these meetings are entirely in French.

I don’t mean the language. That’s hard enough, granted, but the real issue is the French approach to doing business. There is a persistent Anglophone stereotype of the French as obsessed with talking in circles and hanging themselves up over bureaucratic nonsense. I get very defensive when confronted with stereotypes about the French, but this one’s true. Monday proved it. I spent three hours of my life listening to my dear friends talk about sausages.

The purpose of the meeting was to discuss arrangements for the Marché des Ecoles, the second annual plants and pastries sale we hold to raise money for everything from books to school outings. It was just growing dark but there was still a faint red glow on the honey-colored stones as I drove up the winding narrow road to the tiny hilltop village of Cassagnes for the meeting. This is good, I thought, this is real. We live here not to be permanent tourists gawking at pretty villages, but to integrate, to do my part. But the rosy glow vanished as soon as I entered that village hall. There were twelve people at that meeting, and at no point were less than four of them speaking. While the G20 tackled the global economic crisis in London, the Quercy G12 negotiated the details of sourcing and preparing the sausages and frites that are to be sold as lunch at the plant sale. The frites are sold in little open carton boxes. So do we need plates for the sausages? No, people put their sausages on top of their carton of french fries. But what about those people who want sausages but no fries? And what about bread? Is it included in the price of the sausage or do people need to pay extra. Should those who eat their sausages without bread be penalized by having to pay for bread they don’t want? We wouldn't want to show prejudice against all the Atkins diet aficionados in the Quercy, now would we? In English, viewed from a distance, it would have been worthy of Monty Python. Up close and in French, an hour of this becomes a human rights issue.

And then, as if the various sausage and fries controversies weren’t enervating enough, things got political. I think there is some kind of strange rule that the smaller the community, the more complicated the politics. The three villages of Montcabrier, Cassagnes and St. Martin-le-Redon share a nursery and elementary school. The nursery school is at St. Martin and the elementary is in Montcabrier. Each of these schools has a separate Parents Association board, each with its own President, secretary and treasurer, as well as a second for each position. That makes a total of 12 Parents Association board members for a total of 48 kids.

Even in France this bureaucracy/constituency ratio of 1 to 4 seems kind of extreme, and yet, the simple suggestion of merging the boards has become a battle that makes the run-up to the invasion of Iraq look congenial. We Cabrimontains, as the largest village of our three-village regroupement scolaire, tend to let our power – we are nearly 400-strong, after all, compared to just under 200 souls in Cassagnes and in St. Martin - give us imperial pretensions. Or so you might think listening to the debate. The fact is that the “debate” seemed to center more around how to organize a vote on the issue. Is it appropriate just to let people tick a box, or must we hold a meeting? The conclusion was that if we hold a meeting, only the people against the merger would bother to show up. But the by-laws seem to require a meeting, and a group of die-hards from St. Martin would insist on their God-given rights. We discussed the various options, and heard several impassioned pleas for a democratic resolution (including assured anonymity in the balloting procedures) until midnight rolled around. Had we stayed any longer, I have no doubt we would have discussed dimpled chads.

As it was, we finally all agreed not to vote on whether or not to have a vote, and then opened a bottle of cider and a packet of cookies to celebrate. Democracy was tested and endured, and the treasured independence of the good people of St. Martin was preserved.

We all stacked the chairs and tables back against the wall of the village hall, turned out the lights and locked the doors before heading home. It was a clear night, the roads silent and empty as I wound my way down the Theze Valley toward home. The moon hung as a yellow crescent low on the horizon, a Cheshire Cat grin suspended in the darkness. Not a single reason to object to the merger had been produced in that entire three-hour meeting. The moon kept smiling, and I couldn’t help but smile back. Sometimes I have no idea why we’re here. I’m still glad we are.

That other tradition

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 08:08:00 +0000

Tradition is important. It binds a family, a village, a people by reinforcing its links to a common past. The village news years drinks, carnival, the upcoming easter egg hunt at the Marqueyssac gardens, these are all traditions here that we've come to look forward to year after year.

This week we're celebrating another tradition. Every year, we reinforce our link to a common past by putting off repairs in the cottages until some point just after it becomes impossible to get them all done before our first guests of the new season arrive. It's a beautiful custom, a celebration of spring's renewal and an anticipation of the warm joy of summer, when the cottages will be filled with people who will expect such niceties as clean kitchens, functioning bathrooms and woodwork that does not flake large quantities of dried paint into their tea.

All this is to say, this week's post is going to be a little late...

The Perfect Calm

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:18:00 +0000

We all have different ways of dealing with stress. When I was a lawyer, we all had one of those cushy little stress-balls in our desks – generally a freebie from one of the big financial printing companies – and we’d sit around squeezing the things and drinking coffee. Some people run. Some knit, play Sudoko, go on long walks. These days, when I’m stressed, I call Fabrice.

Fabrice is our odd-jobs guy. I’d say he looks the part, but he doesn’t really. Imagine a young guy from a tiny French village doing occasional jobs as a woodworker, builder or gardener, and I’m not really sure what you think of, but it’s not Fabrice. At first sight, he looks more the part of an urban junkie, someone who in a city you might expect to hit you up for some change. He’s rake thin, slight of frame, and about half his body mass is accounted for by the huge bundle of dreadlocks perched uncertainly above his kind, fine-featured face. If Tolkein’s elves listened to Bob Marley, the result would more than likely resemble Fabrice.

The youth of Montcabrier have a tendency, like the youth of most small rural communities, to leave home and seek their fortunes elsewhere. Some come and go. But Fabrice has stayed, and has no interest in leaving. The outside world is quite simply too crowded and fast-paced for his liking. So he lives here in a sort of parallel universe, staying alternately with friends, with his parents, or alone in his van. As far as I can tell, he is happy.

We had Fabrice around this week helping to clear up after another round of tree-cutting. He pulls up in his old car, dark gray but for one white fender, and climbs out. He opens the trunk, pulls out his chainsaw, a gas can, an old machete with a taped-up handle. He says a quiet bonjour, we discuss the weather, and then he gets to work.

I watch him for a few minutes cutting branches, methodically stacking logs, one by one, and it reminds of Buddhist monks going about their daily monastic chores. Is he contemplating God as he drags branches and packs them into the trailer? Is he practicing awareness meditation? Pondering Rousseau’s writings on the Noble Savage? I don’t know, but he gives off a sense of calm that is almost soporific. When he’s around, I find myself moving more slowly, speaking more softly. I feel reassured. I used to assume, based largely on his appearance, that he spent his free time smoking weed, but I’ve come to doubt that. Fabrice is a mind-altering substance in his own right.

He pauses, looks around, gathers strength and then swings his machete, separating another branch from a fallen tree. To talk to him you would hardly imagine that the world is in the grips of financial meltdown. He scrapes a living from odd-jobs like this, a bit of construction work, occasionally helping a friend who sells bric-a-brac at local markets in summer. It’s not that he’s lazy – he will carry heavy logs, dig, plant, chop down trees, haul branches all day long without ever appearing tired or uttering a word of complaint. And it’s certainly not that he’s unskilled. Over the years I’ve come to learn that he is an accomplished carpenter – he’s done some amazingly meticulous jobs for us, from building a bookcase to repairing a couple of antique chairs. He even makes traditional wooden rowing boats – I suppose that’s as close as he’s got to a hobby, although it’s hard to imagine him having much need to blow off steam. I once asked him if he sold any. Yes, he makes them to order, in theory at least. But given that his only attempt at marketing is a small wooden sign that reads “bateaux” nailed to a tree along a dead-end country lane, I’m not holding my breath. But then again, neither is he. All he’s after, as far as I can tell, is to live in peace in this quiet corner of France. One could do worse.

But these days I’m starting to see an ambitious twinkle in his eye. A new law in France has made it much easier for people to start their own small businesses and not have to pay enormous social charges, so Fabrice is thinking of setting himself up in a business building wooden houses. He has managed to buy a small plot of land of his own in the forest, reached by a dirt path. Not the choicest real estate, perhaps, but it’s perfect for him. He’s looking for good straight pine trees to cut down to use for building a little chalet. It won’t have electricity, and he’ll heat it with a wood-burning stove, but it will be his, and I would imagine it will suit him just fine.

Of course, my secret fear is that we'll lose our friendly, dependable and curiously enlightened odd-jobs man. He's settling down, building a house, thinking of starting a career. Joining the rat race. But I don't think that will change him. Fabrice will bring that sense of calm to whatever he does. In the meantime, he's very welcome to bring it here.

Keeping it Simple

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:48:00 +0000

We came to France for a simpler life. It sounds easy, a goal that should require nothing more than a shedding of things, perhaps a reorientation of priorities. But living a simpler life has proven challenging in some unexpected ways. It takes more patience than I had imagined. It requires physical fitness and mental discipline. And, as it turns out, a simpler life requires a lot of complicated equipment.

When I was first browsing dreamily through John Seymour’s Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency I had different ideas. It all seemed so natural – the book is filled with lovely illustrations of hoes, spades, axes and scythes. A scythe, that’s what I wanted. To spend hours and hours on the land, scything and reaping and threshing and shunting, I wanted nothing more than to live in a world of obscure, hearty Anglo-Saxon verbs. And I was itching to go out and buy all the obscure Anglo-Saxon nouns to do it with.

And it’s amazing just how many of those nouns, Anglo-Saxon and otherwise, I need for even the most basic of tasks. Take firewood. Yes, our ancestors managed to keep the home fires burning using wood processed with axes and saws, but having tried it, I understand why they tended to die young. Today, if you’re cutting your own wood you need a chainsaw. And then of course you want a spare chain, files and perhaps a grinder for sharpening the chain, and a trestle or sawhorse for cutting the meter-long stacked logs into smaller sections for burning. Bigger logs need to be split, so you get an axe, but for even bigger ones, it’s best to get a sledgehammer and a wedge – preferably a neatly twisted one like I’ve got so it splits the wood more easily. It’s all satisfyingly heavy and conveniently cool-looking.

For maintaining the grounds the chainsaw is useful, but it doesn’t stop there. You’ve got brush to cut, grass to mow, branches to trim. You’ve got a garden that needs digging, weeding, planting. Fences, gates, patios need fixing. All this requires massive amounts of gear, much of which involves at least an electric motor if not a combustion engine. There’s the hedge trimmer, the brush cutter, the various power hand tools, a compressor. After the chainsaw, my favorite bit of equipment has always been my jaunty blue tractor-mower. I ride around on it all summer mowing grass and all winter hauling logs. It is my mid-life crisis red convertible, and it makes me happy.

But even the tractor’s place in my heart has been usurped by something new.

We came here with ideas of living in harmony with nature, of reducing our footprint. But it’s not always easy, and ever since we moved in we’ve been plagued by the question of what to do about the terraces. You see, the terraces around our house and holiday cottages are packed earth covered by locally-quarried gravel, an inexpensive, low-impact and very French alternative to paving. But weeds spring up, and the surface area being too big to simply pick them all by hand (believe me, we tried), we have in the past had to resort to chemical weedkillers. But finally I have discovered an environmentally friendlier solution, and yet another piece of equipment.

Some clever person has come up with the idea of destroying weeds by inducing thermal shock. Simplicity itself: a metal tube with a handle attaches to a long flexible hose, which in turn attaches to an ordinary gas bottle of the sort used for gas stoves. A six-inch flame bows out the end of the tube, and you simply hold that flame over the weed for a second or two, until it starts to wither. The shock kills the weed, but does not pollute the environment. In other words, I’ve bought myself a blowtorch.

I spent a very happy and only moderately dangerous afternoon scorching weeds the other day, and I’m totally hooked. This thing is great. Not only does it eliminate unwanted plants, but it’s capable of obliterating pretty much anything in its path – dead leaves, twigs, pets, inquisitive children, all bow before the power of my butane-fed jet of fire. I’m busy dreaming up all sorts of new uses for this new toy. Bonfires will be a piece of cake from now on. Previously I have struggled to perform what should be a simple task of igniting a large pile of dead branches. No problem now, with my portable arson kit I’ll be incinerating garden waste as fast as I produce it. It’s not quite subtle, but after a few humiliating experiences of watching my fires dwindle before accomplishing the job, I’m done with subtle.

I’m not the only one who gets worked up about this kind of thing. I’ve noticed this tendency among both the local farmers and the expats who move here, this obsession with equipment. It’s normal enough – you’ve got a job to do, you need the right tools, but clearly there’s more to it. Farmers here go into massive debt just to own a lot of farm equipment that they could much more efficiently rent as needed. I scoffed at first, but once you’ve seen one of these modern grape harvesters at work - huge sci-fi contraptions that straddle the rows of vines and pick the delicate grape clusters as they roll along – it’s hard not to get drawn in. In cities, people have fancy cars and granite countertops. Here, we’ve got machinery.

But I’m content with what I have. My blowtorch is a small and relatively simple device, but it does the job. And best of all, as I torch plant after plant, weed after insidious weed, into ashes, I can do so with a sense of satisfaction in my heart, knowing that the path of devastation I leave behind me is non-toxic and totally environmentally friendly. I can feel like I’m doing my part.

But the gratification of my pyromania is a definite bonus.

Rabbits, dinosaurs and a damn good coffee

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:29:00 +0000

We have a Saturday morning ritual. It started last year. Sophia decided one morning to try out the farmer’s market in the nearby village of Villefranche-du-Perigord and came back raving about it. So now, every Saturday, we talk about going.

“Do we need anything there?”

“We could maybe use a few more tomatoes.”

Inevitably one of us has recently been to the big, efficient and aggressively un-picturesque supermarket in Montayral. So we shrug, look outside. It’s raining, or it’s already late morning, or we’re feeling lazy.

“Next week, definitely.”

But occasionally one of us bucks tradition and actually goes. As I did this past Saturday.

Villefranche is one of the old “bastide” towns, “new” towns built around the time of the Hundred Years War (14^th and 15^th centuries) as centers of trade that would be loyal – ie pay taxes - to the king rather than to local feudal lords. As picturesque medieval villages go, Villefranche is a pretty ratty one. Lost deep in the forest, far from just about everything, its claim to fame is that the surrounding woodlands are teeming with chestnuts, cep (porcini) mushrooms and deer. Villefranche has a real backwoods feel to it, like the Ozarks only with better food.

The market itself it tiny, especially off-season. There are three or four fruit-and-vegetable stands, our local Montcabrier vintner selling his wine, and usually the mobile pizza van. That’s about it, which is what I love about it. I suppose it appeals to my sense of solidarity with the underdog. I’m a lot like Charlie Brown, who goes to buy a Christmas tree and chooses the smallest, saddest one because it needs him. Surely Villefranche needs me.

And surely no one in Villefranche needs me more than the guy running the smallest of the fruit-and-veg stands. He’s always there, at least he has been every time I’ve shown up, with just a small table of vegetables set up in front of his little van. I don’t know his name – I probably wouldn’t be able to understand it if he tried to tell me. He’s one of these gruff old farmers who speak in a garbled patois that most Parisians wouldn’t understand either, which gives me some comfort as I smile and nod idiotically at the various sounds he produces during our brief interaction.

He’s having a conversation with a few older old men in Occitan, the ancestral language of southern France, which sounds like a mishmash of strangely-pronounced French, Spanish, and Harry Potter spells. He sees me waiting, continues his conversation for a few more minutes as I examine his caged rabbits (they too need me, but they’re better off in a stew than in the clutches of our cat Oliver, who tried to breed with the last rabbit we “rescued”), and then looks up at me as if seeing me for the first time. His friends continue on among themselves, and he comes over to see what I need. I make a polite remark about the weather. He responds “eh behn, za fay du byeng, ung peh d’zolay.” I don’t always know exactly what he’s staying, but I recognize friendliness when I see it. So I smile and reply with something noncommittal as I pick over the half dozen little heads of lettuce on his table to find the one with the least mud plastered to it. I get a few onions. Sometimes he has butternut squash, but not today. What he pulls out of that little van is whatever he pulled out of the ground that morning, no more, no less. Two euros exactly, he informs me. The prices, I’ve noticed, he pronounces with startling clarity.

Feeling smug at having had a genuine olde worlde moment, I move on the other fruit-and-veg guy who has a larger repertoire than my friendly veg-and-rabbit man, and then I’m off to the bakery. I always feel a little guilty there, as if I’m betraying Catherine and Gerard at the Montcabrier bakery, but they make great croissants, and I kind of enjoy smiling at the haunted-looking girl behind the counter, presumably the baker’s daughter, and having her respond with a dark, complex Fellini film sort of expression.

From there I go to the rock shop, and here’s where Villefranche becomes just a little strange. It’s not just a rock shop. It’s a jewelry shop, but much of it is taken up by fossils and minerals. It wouldn’t be at all out of place in a big city – it seems aimed at catering to everyone, from polished tiger’s eye pebbles to custom made necklaces to enormous fossils that any museum would be proud to display.

Fossils are my thing, so I love the place, but I have to ask myself: how many people around here are really looking to fork over several thousand euros for the lower mandible of an Allosaurus? Even the prospect of selling the €500 dinosaur egg seems a little dicey to me. What must friendly veg-and-rabbit man think of this place – is he saving up his euros to acquire a glittering watermelon-sized cluster of amethyst to put on his mantelpiece? “Zay byeng, za.”

I suppose it’s just something that happens in underdeveloped areas beautiful enough to become holiday destinations. This is one of the poorest parts of France, a region of small family farms, where even the better-off locals can remember childhoods hoeing fields or force-feeding ducks. But they now live side by side with retired English and Dutch and urban French couples, with bankers and lawyers who buy second homes here, with foreign families starting holiday cottage businesses and enrolling their children in village schools. Different economies, different priorities, are forced to live side by side.

And the results are mixed. It means that young people have a hard time affording housing here. It means their local cafes and bars, their markets, their churches are invaded by outsiders many of whom hardly speak French much less Occitan. Perhaps it means the loss of a certain sense of authenticity. And yet, it’s not the rock shop or the upmarket café that threatens the local way of life here. They tend not to displace previously existing businesses, and they are locally-owned. It’s the supermarkets in Montayral, so quick and easy and available to everyone, that risk slowly putting an end to the livelihoods of people like friendly veg-and-rabbit man. The outsiders, seeking local color, often are the ones most inclined to shop at the farmers’ markets. The foreign influx, despite its downsides, means income. It means jobs, it means enough people buying produce to keep the markets viable, it means more variety of goods and services.

And it means I can listen to a little Occitan, endure the brooding gaze of the baker’s daughter, examine the lower mandible of an Allosaurus and then go have an Ethiopian Moka Sidamo coffee in the quirky little café up the road, all on a Saturday morning 15 minutes from home. Zay byeng, za.

Becoming a Small

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:42:00 +0000

We’ve just come back from spending two weeks in California, and I’ve discovered something unsettling. I’ve shrunk.

If you’ve been following this blog you’ll have guessed by now I intend this in a vague quasi-philosophical sense that will give rise to various reflections on life in rural France about half way through this post. I’m hoping to get there, but first things first. I’m talking clothing.

One of the things we invariably do in America is buy clothing, which is both less expensive and less, er, polyester than much of what we can find within an hour’s radius of our house. But this time around I suddenly found myself buying a shirt in a size “small.” How’d I become a small? I have my suspicions. It’s the same reason that even if I buy a shirt that’s ostensibly my size it fits me like a garbage bag. I’m not shrinking in an absolute physical sense. I have become small now, in a relative sense, because people in general are getting, well, wider.

But - here it comes - this sartorial downsizing has broader implications, a symbolic resonance if you like. Living someplace so small-town and remote has changed me, changed all three of us, more than we might have expected. We have come to feel smaller in what has started to seem like a very big world. Even though I was born in Los Angeles, I felt dwarfed and disoriented on this latest trip back home. Montcabrier to Los Angeles is perhaps an extreme transition - plenty of thoroughly urban people feel dwarfed and disoriented in LA. Plenty of Los Angelinos feel dwarfed and disoriented in LA, which may just explain that impression of pampered goofiness which haunts the world’s entertainment capital. But the fact remains, our tolerance for big has shrunk.

One particular shopping trip really said it all. We went to the Topanga Plaza, a local shopping mall, ostensibly the same mall I visited regularly as a child, with the simple idea of picking up some inexpensive clothing and letting Sebastian ride the double-decker carousel. No big deal, but every step of the way I was reminded of the pervasive smallness of our new home. Having gotten used to narrow country roads, often only a little more than one car wide, just pulling out of my mother’s driveway was confusing. Her suburban street, a cul-de-sac with minimal traffic, is already wider than the main road to Cahors and even a short section of it would qualify in most villages as an ample parking lot. Each lane on a California freeway could nearly serve as two on a French motorway (and Los Angelinos, I noticed this time, are no better at staying within these wide lanes than the French are at staying in their narrow ones). But then they need to be: one in three cars is an SUV or Hummer large enough to transport livestock.

So we arrive at the mall, and in the course of five minutes pass more shops than we could find within a 45-minute drive of Montcabrier. The food court alone offered a dozen varieties of ethnic food – having to choose between Korean BBQ, sushi and Mexican when you have gotten used to the idea of pizza as being ethnic is daunting, but a wonderful problem to have. And then it hit me: our entire village, the whole thing, from the ruined medieval gate at the west end to Jojo’s house at the east, from the village’s resident donkey in his field at the north to the old priory with its Renaissance chimney to the south, would fit within this one enclosed climate-controlled retail space. Even the ceiling with its plentiful roof-windows could easily accommodate the three-tiered triangular bell tower of St. Louis, Montcabrier’s church.

I have to admit, it gave me a vaguely uncomfortable feeling, wandering around so banal a place and yet reacting with a mix of scorn and awe more appropriate to visiting Dubai than to shopping at the local Target. Lost among clothes racks big enough to require planning permission in Europe searching for something wearable among shirts that that look like they should come with poles, stakes and mosquito netting, I felt nostalgic for our little world. And yet this too is home for me. This is what was meant to be my world. Not just the corndog stands and the tacky environmentally nightmarish suburban trucks people drive in, but the vibrancy, the diversity, the sheer energy that comes with packing millions of people into a relatively small area. It is all mine to embrace or to reject, but what did not sit well with me, what really got me thinking, was the fact of being at once so drawn to it and yet so uncomfortable in it. I find myself between worlds, which on some level means being nowhere at all. I am homesick, but I’m no longer sure where home is.

Sebastian has no such sense of angst, as far as I can tell. While Sophia and I waffle about questions of culture and lifestyle and identity and belonging, he just gets on with it. Montcabrier is his world, and LA is a magical far-off land where every couple of years he gets spoiled by his grandmother, plays with his cousin and solemnly shakes hands with Mickey Mouse. Sophia and I may inwardly giggle when he asks if the canary yellow Ferrari that has just blown past us is the mailman, because of course back home that yellow is the signature color of the French mail service, but Sebastian just takes it in stride. Like having to learn French by osmosis when he entered nursery school, this cultural acclimatization is just a normal part of his multicultural world. Papa’s home town is huge and American. Mama’s is a bit smaller and Dutch. Sebastian’s is tiny and French. It’s all fine with him. He is able to appreciate it all for what it is, which in itself is a gift.

Arriving back at my mother’s house, I open the remote-controlled garage door and we drive in to park. Sebastian seems far away and thoughtful as I unbuckle him from the car seat.

“You know,” he says at last, looking around, impressed, “this is a good barn. It’s so big, you can just drive right inside it and not get wet in the rain. I like this barn.” He’s got a point.

The Guns of Winter

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 11:32:00 +0000

February. The sounds of winter hush and crackle along the frozen landscape like frost patterns on windows. The cold whisperings of nature drift through the air like a mournful, cryptic sentence already hinting of spring: the ticking of woodpeckers, the dripping of dew as it thaws from the bare branches, the leaf-rustling of the blue tits and red squirrels searching for food. The crunch of frost beneath hesitant feet. And of course, the occasional staccato burst of gunfire. Winter in the Quercy means hunting season.

When we first moved here I was all about quaint rural traditions. I’d bought John Seymour’s classic guide to self-sufficiency and – okay, let’s get confessional – I had fantasies about growing our own vegetables, keeping chickens for eggs and bees for honey and home-brewing wine, beer and mead on the side. And part of those fantasies involved joining the hunt and bagging the occasional wild boar. To be fair, we have managed to tease a few tomatoes and raspberries from the soil, and I haven’t given up on producing my own bottle of wine some time before I die. But my visions of early-morning deer stalking with my farmer friends have run up against one stubborn problem. La chasse, as the hunt is called, is a little spooky.

I’m not sure what exactly I was expecting – manly adventures in the woods, I suppose, confronting and defeating a charging wild boar, perhaps roasting the thing over an open fire in the woods while the farmers taught me ancient secrets of animal tracking or local medicinal plants. Okay, maybe not, but realistically, although the only things I’ve ever hunted in my adult life were clay pigeons, I had witnessed both American and English hunting and had assumed that the French version would be some combination of the two.

American hunting, like much of American society, plays out a mythos of rugged individualism and unbounded opportunity. Rich or poor, any man can head into the woods and face his prey, engage in the eons-old quasi-spiritual dance of souls between man and beast, a ritual homage and putting off of man’s own sense of mortality. The idealized American hunter is rugged, solitary, free and sanctioned by God to kill things and talk nonsense about it afterwards. Fox hunting in England is pretty much the opposite. Ostensibly the goal is to cull foxes, but that’s merely an excuse to gather hounds, horses and upper class English people in snazzy jackets and jodhpurs for a morning of riding, eating and drinking. It’s essentially an elite social bonding ritual, and the only struggle is to look good while staying on a horse as it jumps over hedges and ditches in pursuit of a pack of dogs. The only thing he has in common with the American hunter is that he too is sanctioned by God to kill things and talk nonsense about it afterwards.

Now the French version is in a league all its own. In one sense, it’s hunting at its most pure. By and large, the hunters here are local farmers, and their goal is to cull crop-destroying wildlife – deer and wild boar – and to put a little extra meat on the table. There’s no half-baked philosophy or elitist tradition here, nor any divine sanction or silly talk. It’s a job that needs doing, so the men get together a few times a week over winter and do it.

On the other hand – Well, it’s always that pesky other hand that keeps things interesting. Unlike so much in French culture, hunting here is anything but subtle. I’ve tried to find some romance in it. Perhaps there is something beautifully primeval about hunting in packs – a long stroll down genetic memory lane inevitably takes us back to tribes with spears ganging up on mammoths – but it’s not easy to idealize dozens of men fanning out through the countryside in beat-up white hatchbacks and 4x4s hoping to gang up on Bambi with enough firepower to invade a small country. Although la chasse probably does recapture the chaotic frenzy of a mammoth hunt more closely than its Anglophone counterparts, it’s a pretty ugly affair. While one group races up and down country lanes to no clear purpose, another gang has spread out along strategically chosen roads, guns in hand, to await their prey. The third group, a pack of very hungry dogs, usually followed by a puffing paunchy Frenchman blowing a hunting horn, is busy trying to flush the deer and boar out of the woods and into the line of fire of the hunters. And when that happens, the real fun begins.

Paint the scene in your head. A line of woods, an open field, a road and a handful of armed men standing about 50 yards apart from each other. It’s a cold winter morning, the landscape dusted with the vagueness of frost and mist, the chill displaced from the hunters’ blood by a good shot or two of pastis shared that morning before they set out. The barking of dogs grows closer, the blast of a hunting horn rips the air, and suddenly a frightened, hapless deer bounds out of the trees into the open field. Does a single, well-aimed shot crack through the bitter morning air offering instant resolution of the timeless confrontation between man and beast? No, you guessed it, that quiet field ignites in a deafening unsteady barrage of gunfire. As we listen to shot after futile shot echoing through the woods, I feel grateful for France’s strict gun control laws. If these guys had access to more firepower I wouldn’t be surprised to hear machine guns and heavy mortars ripping through the forest.

It is a testament to the poor aim of these hunters that there is ever anything left of the animal once they’ve brought it down. Yet I know from experience that large chunks of deer often remain in edible condition. They show up often as Loto prizes, or sometimes as gifts to local landowners. There is something grotesquely charming about having a smiling, scruffy-looking man drive up to your house in a battered old car and offer you a clear plastic bag of unidentified bloody meat. Thank you for understanding our time-honored traditions, those bags of meat say. Don’t ever go walking through the woods in a brown sweater or coonskin cap, they silently add.

It’s easy to make fun of the hunt – stories about drunk hunters shooting each other are particular favorites of walkers and disgruntled landowners – but I have kind of a soft spot in my heart for these guys. They’re rough, they’re reckless, and they seem like exactly the sort of people who should not be running around armed. But they work hard, they believe in what they do, and they’ve done their best to be nice to us. They slow down as they pass by our house, conscious that we have a small child and that we rent cottages to families. They wave politely when they see us, and every year we get an invitation to the hunters’ association ball. But they have never asked me to join the hunt, and I’ve never asked to come along. Better for everyone, I suspect.

On the other hand, brewing mead is sounding a lot more plausible to me these days. It keeps you indoors.

The wrong sort of silence

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 11:23:00 +0000

Silence comes in many colors. We get a lot of the good kind of silence, the one that comes from being in the countryside, away from crowds and cars and major airline routes. But there’s another kind, that peculiar silence that falls over a conversation when someone has said or done something inappropriate. The silence of the faux pas. At Sebastian’s soccer practice last week, the silence was deafening.

It all started when I made the mistake of saying hello.

You would think, in the interest of social harmony, that saying hello should be encouraged by being made easy. It is where I come from. American greetings come only in a few varieties. Hello, hi, yo, hey, what’s up – even the intensely annoying “hey there” will rarely cause much consternation. But for the French, who for centuries were the uncontested leaders of European civilization simply by being really really complicated, life is not so easy. Here, saying hello is a series of signs and countersigns, like in spy films, during which you are given the opportunity to establish whether or not you are civilized, i.e. French.

My hello to Jean-Pierre, one of the soccer coaches, was just plain wrong. It may seem easy in French class. Bonjour. Good day. Ça va. How are you, or literally, how goes it. But dear old Mr. Welch, my high school French teacher, never mentioned the unwritten rule. Maybe it’s a leftover from the hard times during the war, but the use of bonjour is strictly rationed to one per person per day. If you’ve said it to someone, you are expected to remember that fact and not say it to the same person again. To forget is presumably inattentive and therefore rude.

Jean-Pierre’s a real stickler for not double-bonjouring. I secretly suspect he takes a playful pleasure in catching me out. His eyes twinkle as he flashes that puzzled, almost professorial smile and reminds me that we have already said bonjour. And then he leaves that silence, the one I tend nervously to fill with some particularly flagrant piece of bad grammar. Jean-Pierre is a kind and honest man – his silence is never scathing, and at least he never looks at me, like some others have, as if I were a patient in a psych ward - but he sure doesn’t make it easy.

Moving on from Jean-Pierre, I almost immediately stumbled into the next trap. The kids were all doing their practice drills, kicking the ball around cones with varying degrees of success, and on the sidelines stood two of the mothers. One of them I’ve gotten to know by now, but the other I’d never seen before. And as I walked up to say hello – an easy bonjour, I thought, having not seen them yet today - I suddenly found myself faced with the big question. Do I or don’t I? I’m talking about the bisou.

Bisous are those little kisses the French give each other when they meet, and they can be a real pain. Technique is easy enough once you know it. They are air kisses, not big wet smackers, and typically you lightly touch cheeks while doing it. Here in the Quercy one gives two of them, one per cheek. In Paris, I’m told that some people give up to four. In the city of love, even a single hello seems to border on making out.

But the hard part is knowing whom to kiss. Even the French don’t run around smooching just anyone. The gender rules are easy and obvious: women give bisous to both women and men, whereas men give them only to women. Children are treated as unisex but otherwise are not exempted. It takes a little time getting used to letting near-strangers giving your kid a kiss on the check, I can tell you.

The hard part is deciding if you know someone well enough to have been accepted into their bisou circle. My understanding is that you only bisous friends and some acquaintances, so it involves some judgment calls. That’s where it got tricky at football. Having previously crossed the bisou threshold with Soccer Mom #1, we said bonjour and air kissed. So far so good, but that left Soccer Mom #2. Bonjour, we say, then panic sets in. I feel rude if I don’t kiss, but kind of lecherous, or at the minimum presumptuous, about cuddling up to this total stranger. She too seems uncertain and fearful. We look nervously at each other and them it comes. Silence. This kids play on. We watch. The conversation is over before it has even begun.

I guess these things take time to unravel. David explained to me the proper behavior if you have already said bonjour to someone and then see them again later in the day: you either ignore them, jump into conversation without any greeting as if they’ve been standing next to you the whole time, or you say “re-bonjour.” The bisous thing just takes practice, as does the similarly vexing question of when to use “tu” or “vous,” the informal and formal forms for “you.” Other mysteries have proven harder to solve. Saying ça va, for example, is usually treated as perfectly normal and polite, but every once in a while someone responds to this casual “how are you” as if you just asked them about their favorite sexual positions. It’s stuff like this that can make you want your kids to take up chess.

It’s all turned out alright so far. Jean-Pierre is as friendly as ever, and I don’t think Soccer Mom #2 was actually offended. Although I have no genuine excuse for not remembering when I have said bonjour on a given day, the people here seem pretty forgiving when I get it wrong. Nobody in the village has turned hostile after I inadvertently said tu instead of vous, and I have yet to be slapped for an inappropriate bisou. We are foreigners, after all, and the good people of Montcabrier have cut us a good deal of slack.

And the silence never lasts too long. If you want real silence, real awkwardness, try spilling an entire cup of hot coffee in the lap of a fellow passenger on a transatlantic flight, as I just did.

Sometimes, pleading cultural differences only gets you so far.

A Moment of Epiphany

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 15:29:00 +0000

Our son came home from school with the fève yesterday. He always does.

Every year when we are packing away the Christmas decorations and Epiphany rolls around, Sebastian starts talking about the Galette des Rois and the fève, or bean, he is certain he will find inside. It’s a wonderful tradition. The galette, a pastry usually filled with frangipane, is supposed to contain one bean. Whoever gets the bean is “king” for the day. Sebastian, a six-year-old born to the purple if ever there was one, comes home with the bean and a little paper crown every year.

Of course the bean stopped being a bean more than a century ago, and was replaced by tiny ceramic figurines. In the old days they were little nativity figures, so whoever got to be king would come home with a miniature angel or Baby Jesus to put among other childhood keepsakes. Modernity being what it is, these days your child is far more likely to turn up a character from the latest Pixar film than a Biblical figure. I have to admit, that sharp little piece of ceramic lurking in my son’s dessert seems alarmingly easier to swallow than the corporate crassness of replacing Mary and Joseph with Asterix and Obelix. But the look on Sebastian’s face when he puts on his paper crown makes the risk seem worth it. He hasn’t broken a tooth yet.

Now, I’m not one to doubt my little boy’s suitability to be king every year, but I couldn’t help becoming a bit suspicious. At school they go through several of those pies every January, and Sebastian’s figurine collection is starting to pose storage problems. “I think there was more than one fève in that galette.” he ventured cautiously, interspersing his accented English with perfectly pronounced French words. “Actually, lots of kids got one.” This didn’t seem to diminish the excitement in the slightest.

When Sophia commented that the ones we buy at the supermarket have only one figurine, his highness shot us an exasperated look. “No, but Danielle’s dad made the galette for our school lunch. He must have put in lots of fèves.” He looks at his figurine proudly - this one is a somewhat sleazy-looking man in a yellow suit, with bits of almond filling still lodged under the ridge of his jacket. “Can I watch some television?”

I’ve never met Danielle’s father – unfortunately chance has dictated that I will always imagine him as a sleazy-looking man in a yellow suit – but he has made my day. Beyond the fact that our son survived yet another encounter with a school-sponsored choking hazard, I love knowing who baked Sebastian’s Galette des Rois. When I try to imagine a similar thing happening back in the US or in England, I keep running up against images of concerned parents objecting on the basis of hygiene laws, legal responsibility, child safety… Offering homemade pies from relatives of school employees – Danielle cooks the school lunches, among other things – seems to my American legal mind like a potential liability issue. Back home, perhaps it would be.

But the French, bless them, just don’t see it that way. It’s not that there is any lack of regulations. On the contrary, the French love them, and French bureaucrats are famous for wielding them with astonishing inflexibility and even a certain sinister pleasure. But, especially out here in the countryside, the law is made to be ignored if it gets in the way of more important values, like food.

This relaxed Gallic approach to rules has its downsides, as anyone who has managed to survive driving in France will appreciate. But in a tiny community like this, it’s priceless. Rules exist to guide behavior because, particularly in a large community, social norms are incapable of doing so. In a community of a few hundred people, however, where everyone knows everyone else (and, let’s be honest, is almost certainly everyone else’s cousin), the rules can be tucked in a drawer, to be pulled out only in time of need. As long as no one complains, there is no problem. No harm, no foul.

This doesn’t work in a community of strangers. Parents, as a general rule, don’t want random strangers feeding pies to their kids. But in a small community, there are no random individuals. Strange ones, perhaps, even a few scary ones. But in a village everyone is accountable to everyone. The cook in the school cantine is also your neighbor. Her husband works at your bank. Her brother-in-law is the cantonnier, the man in charge of local roadworks and other odd jobs around the village. And her father, turns out, is the guy who manages to pack all those figurines into the school’s Galettes des Rois. It’s all entre nous.

If it all sounds a little inbred and stifling, well, it can be. That guy who nearly got you killed by trying to pass you on a blind curve… before you start exploring fascinating subject of English versus French hand gestures, you may want to think twice about who he might be. Next week he could resurface as the grandson of the charming widow who lives in the farm up the road. He could be the mayor’s younger brother. Whoever he is, he is closer to you than you want him to be, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

But this small town interconnectedness is also liberating. Danielle’s father is free to make his galettes for the schoolchildren. It allows Laurent the bus driver to give all the kids on his bus a piece of candy every day in symbolic defiance of his own diabetes (even in defiance of parents’ valiant but futile attempts to control how much candy their kids eat). In an age when, at least in the US, teachers cannot touch their pupils for fear of child abuse allegations, it allows Danielle to give the children hugs when they are down. In short, it paves the way for random acts of kindness.

And it means that Sebastian always gets to be king. This could be a problem…

Apologies

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 16:01:00 +0000

Greg suffering from a very quaint, traditional rural southwestern French flu. A bientôt.

In Search of the Perfect Christmas

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 21:54:00 +0000

Ever since I was little I’ve been in search of the perfect fairytale Christmas.

Maybe it’s just a product of having grown up in LA. Southern California is kind of seasonally challenged when it comes to the whole Christmas thing. There’s no snow, no frost on the window panes. There are no chestnut trees, and the only open fires are produced by either sterile gas burners or toxic Duraflame logs, neither of which are fit for roasting anything. So out of a kind of yuletide Napoleon complex, we overcompensate. You will never find so many people in Santa suits, holly wreaths, blinking lights or plastic reindeer than in LA. From late October to New Years Eve LA becomes one enormous celebration of climatically-confused winter-wonderland kitsch.

So ever since I left I have continued to act out this symbolic, neurotic quest for the perfect Christmas. Christmas in London ticked most of the boxes. Working on Fleet Street and living in a Victorian terrace house gave the season an undeniably Dickensian flavor, and the thought of mince pies and dark ales and the lights strung up over Regent Street still takes close to center stage in my imaginary idyllic holiday season. Even despite London’s particular winter horrors - the drunken office Christmas parties, the London Underground with its winter smell of chilled petroleum-based sludge, the disturbing English tradition of the Christmas pantomime – despite those downsides, we had good times in London over the holidays.

So now it’s our fourth year of Christmastime in the Quercy, and the fairytale jury is still out. I don’t quite know what I imagined – horse drawn sleighs maybe? Carolers wandering door to door, crossing the good mile or two between farms to sing a song and be rewarded with hot chocolate? At least a bit of snow, surely. The reality here, on the other hand, is resolutely more mundane.

The French don’t traditionally make much of Christmas. New Year’s Eve is their big excuse for winter celebration, and much of the Christmas festivity one sees nowadays is imported from the German or English traditions. That makes for an easy transition. The leap from Father Christmas to Père Noël wasn’t any harder than that from Santa Claus to Father Christmas. The mulled wine and Christmas lights remain a constant, and if mince pies have fallen off the radar screen, they’ve been replaced by crepes, walnut cakes and aligot, a specialty of the nearby Auvergne which seems to be a potato-and-white-cheese-based form of wallpaper paste. The French may lack the peculiar enthusiasm that the English bring to Christmas, they make up for it with a slow, quiet, family-focused holiday that has its own charms.

In fact, the quiet here can be a little overabundant. During summer, when our holiday cottages are full and our time and attention are in constant demand, we yearn for some solitude, but as winter sets in it sometimes brings a little cabin fever with it. Our old friends and extended family are all abroad, and most of our new friends here, whether French or foreign, have fled to spend the holidays with family elsewhere. Amid the hush of the winter countryside, house after house silent, shutters closed and chimneys cold, it’s hard not to wonder whether perhaps they all know something we don’t. And with the climate just mild enough to preclude the consolation of snow in most years, it’s no surprise that Claire and David rush off to family on the Mediterranean coast, or that Miranda takes the kids back to England during the school holidays. They know better than to hang around for cold rain and deep silence.

This year the village of Duravel hosted its second annual Christmas festival, and we were determined to take advantage of whatever holiday cheer we could lay our hands on. A Christmas of Legend, it was called. I suppose the idea was to bring to life various fairy tales, and to the extent that that was the goal, they did it well. And yet, as we bought our ticket and entered the enclosed public park where the event was being staged, I couldn’t help wondering what on earth all this had to do with Christmas.

For a start, there were the witches. I’m not just talking about one or two to evoke the story of Hansel and Gretel, which at least has a Christmas connection, however tenuous, via the gingerbread house. No, there were dozens of them. Five or six at least were clustered at the entrance, leering at the children as they entered and taunting them with threats to boil them in a cauldron. Another group had set up camp around the cauldron itself, just up the path, waiting for their hapless victims with a punitive glee which reminded me ever so slightly of Sebastian’s old kindergarten teacher. It was as if the French witches’ union had chosen Duravel for their annual convention. Their noses and green skin were most impressive, but there was a certain lack of, well, of ho ho ho about them.

The other fairy tales worked a bit better. There was a short Snow Queen play which, although inaudible, at least looked enchanting. The kids seemed to enjoy the maze of white pebbles which lead to hidden treasure (in practical gift certificate form), and only perhaps one in three burst into tears when adults in wolf costumes jumped out from behind trees to startle them. There were lambs, and a baby donkey, and in one corner an opportunity to have a photo taken with a scruffy-looking Père Noël. For braving the wolves, Sebastian was given a small Furby – its unreplaceable battery already dead - with McDonalds printed on the label. He was as happy as a clam.

This gentle, well-intentioned chaos was as far from a star-studded neon-lit Los Angeles Christmas as it could get. With the possible exception of those witches’ noses – detailed enough to have come straight off the set of the Wizard of Oz – everything about the evening was defiantly imperfect. The lighting was blinding in some places, nonexistent in others, and taken together would have met the test for gross negligence in any American court of law. The theatrics were resolutely amateur and the hygiene standards at the grilled sausage stand troubling. But for all that, it was wonderful. Scores of people had volunteered their time to make the evening a success, and for the hundreds of people who came, all the effort and good intentions seemed to be what mattered most. What it lacked in polish, it more than made up for in its generosity and simplicity. It was local. It was ours. It was a chance to get out and see other people. That’s all that mattered.

So I guess that’s where things stand with my fairy tale Christmas. No place is perfect, nothing can quite live up to the ideals we form in our heads while growing up. But a little imperfection focuses your attention on what matters. When the big day came, we gave Sebastian a new racetrack and I dutifully spend hours putting it together. The cars jump off the track all too easily, as they did with mine when I was little. There were tears. They dried again. It was as flawed and wonderful and happy a Christmas as anyone could want.

And this morning we had snow. Plenty of it.

Merry Christmas.

The Not-so-Fine Art of Woodcutting

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 16:25:00 +0000

Winter is in full swing, and a tenacious fog has wrapped itself around the Quercy. Colored lights have been strung in all the surrounding villages, and a large Christmas tree festooned with odd bits of multi-colored tinsel has taken up residence in front of the village hall. And from every chimney, down every country road, a cheerful plume of smoke rises to merge with the low leaden sky.

It’s woodcutting season, and I’m in my element.

Honestly, there’s nothing like starting up a chainsaw to boost a man’s sense of machismo. The weight of the machine, the little jolt of torque as the chain starts to spin, the seemingly gratuitous but necessary gunning of the motor to disengage the choke – it’s all calculated to bring on a testosterone high like nothing else. For me, it’s a high that lasts right until I start cutting.

I love cutting wood, but somehow, even in my fourth winter here, I’m not very good at it. Oh, I’ve improved, no question. I’ve got a better sense of how often to pause, pull out my file and sharpen the chain’s teeth. I know just what length to cut so that it’ll fit in the wood-burner, and which logs are too knotted to bother trying to split once I’ve cut them to size. I’ve got my rhythm, and I’ve still got all my fingers, so I can’t complain.

And yet it’s always humbling. Some days the logs seem to fight back. I’ll nestle one into the V of the sawhorse, and just as I reach down to pick up the chainsaw the log will inexplicably shift its weight and hit the ground with a mocking thud. So I reposition it for better balance, but now not enough of it is protruding for me to cut the right length for our insidiously small wood-burner. So I try sliding it with one hand, I try kicking it a bit with my foot, I try invoking the spirit of the tree it once was. And all the while I’m grateful to be alone as my mojo is ground into so much sawdust.

Splitting the thicker pieces usually involves the same sort of Marx Brothers routine. No matter how carefully I set the short section of log on its end, it rarely stays there long enough for me to hammer a wedge into it and split it in half. I won’t go into the silent humiliation, rarely witnessed by others but just as poignant nonetheless, of hefting my sledgehammer and swinging at the perfectly balanced log and wedge only to miss.

All this is just shooting fish in a barrel compared to cutting down a tree. Live trees have much more creative ways of fighting back than logs. They position themselves on awkward slopes near your house. They drop dead branches on your head while you’re cutting. Even in the throes of death they will twist as they fall - see you in hell, you can almost hear the branches curse as they plummet towards you. Taking down these wily bastards is an art in itself, and although I’ve mastered it enough to tackle the smaller ones on my own, I don’t mess with any tree that’s too big for me to hug. We have a few of those that need to go this winter, and that’s where Francois comes in.

I keep putting off calling Francois. He’s a pleasant and kind man, and is one of the best tree cutters around. He doesn’t grossly overcharge me, and he is always ready with a smile, friendly conversation and expert advice. At least, I think so. I can’t understand a word Francois says.

Having trouble following all of a conversation is a pretty common problem when you live abroad and speak the language imperfectly. There are always moments when you have to ask people to repeat themselves, and the French, at least around here, are usually pretty obliging. But you can only ask for so many repetitions before people start speaking to you very loudly, which for the record really doesn’t help at all. So then you’re left with piecing together the words you do you know and filling in the gaps with your best guesses based on context.

After a while you start to watch out for the telltale puzzled looks, awkward silences and nervous laughter that warn you when you’ve guessed wrong. These looks, like the toes bruised from logs falling on them or the singed hairs on my hand after an awkward encounter with the wood-burner, are the daily reminders of how much we still have to learn here. At one time Sophia and I spent our days bringing our expensive educations to bear on the arcane complexities of corporate law. Now we find ourselves struggling for mere competence in the daily necessities of living in so raw and unmediated a place.

I’ll get around to calling Francois. I’ll ask him when he can drop by, and he’ll say something like behn, damang, fang de matinay in his gruff, rapid-fire Cassagnes farmer’s twang of which, on a good day, I can make out one word in four. And I’ll say sure, great, see you then, and be forced by my own cowardice to hang around the house for days hoping that he hadn’t actually suggested an afternoon in February.

And when he does arrive, and is in the process of pointing at various trees and emitting strings of sound that I’m sure could be resolved, with enough time, into something resembling the French language, I’ll start to feel tempted. Perhaps cutting down big trees is actually less challenging than deciphering the local dialect. Next year, maybe I can start taking a shot at the trickier ones myself.

The temptation won’t last though. A day or two later I’ll be cutting firewood again. Between bursts of sawing, the familiar sound of English expletives will drift across the fields and woodlands around our house. Francois’s work will be safe for another year.

A Visit with Badger

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 11:38:00 +0000

I walked this morning.

I do it less often than I care to admit. On the occasional winter morning, however, when feeling distracted or restless, I put on the silly hat that I can only wear because wild boar can’t laugh, grab my favorite walking stick à la Bilbo Baggins, and head into the woods.

The sheep were quiet this morning and the frost was just leaving the fields as I passed the neighboring farm. The mist seemed to block out almost all sound other than my own footsteps and the occasional rooster, and by the time I had wound down the little dirt path and reached the valley floor I felt myself in another world. The path then joins a larger track – this one just wide enough for Gerard the baker to ride his quad bike on the disturbingly rare days he leaves the bakery – and I turned left. The woods here are young, mostly hornbeam with a scattering of obligingly gnarled oaks, and visible among the now leafless trees wind rows and rows of crumbling stone. This is all that’s left of the retaining walls that would a century ago have supported the terraced plots of a thriving vineyard.

Especially in winter it’s hard not to detour now and then to explore among the old walls looking for abandoned farm equipment or hidden cave entrances. Today I found a badger set. No sign of the badger of course – he was I’m sure staunchly holed up deep in his cave, protected on all sides by cold gray stone and packed earth, wondering what strange smelling creature was lurking at the gates of his little underground kingdom. So I left him in peace and continued on my way, past the overgrown ruins of an old stone barn, skirting the edge of a young walnut grove, until the path forks. Here I examined for perhaps the tenth time a large battered stone which I am convinced is a flint core from which prehistoric men chipped the raw material for their arrow heads and scrapers (bear with me, it’s just plausible enough…).

The flint core tells me it’s time to stop. I’ve gone farther, many times, through the little hamlet I know lies ahead and beyond. I am probably no more than a mile from home as the crow flies. But here my comfort zone ends, and today I’m not up for an adventure among foreigners. They are border people – not far beyond them lies the frontier with the Dordogne. I just can’t face it.

The funny thing is that I’m only half-joking. One of the corollaries to living in such a slow and remote place is that your sense of local begins to contract. It’s not really so much a question of physical distance – in the countryside you inevitably are obliged to drive farther afield for shops and services than you would living in a city or suburb. But the psychological and cultural territory seems still to correspond to the old feudal boundaries. Like the skeletons of the old vineyards and the leftover stone-age tools, the ghosts of small scale feudalism still leave their mark on the human landscape.

Our part of the Quercy occupies the northwestern corner of the Lot, and borders on two other provinces, the Lot-et-Garonne and the Dordogne. These new administrative borders, arbitrary though they may look on a map, have huge local significance. Our tourist information office, for example, carries almost no information about sites a mere 20 minute drive away, simply because they are on the wrong side of the border. Collecting information for our holiday cottages we must go to three different offices to get pamphlets on all the nearby happenings during the summer tourist season.

But it’s more than bureaucracy. The local economies are different. People smile less over there. And then there’s the driving - people from the Lot-et-Garonne are terrible, aggressive drivers, at least by our standards over here in the Lot. The last two numbers on French licence plates reveal which district the car is registered in, and we have learned from experience that when you see car with that tell-tale 47 plate, you’d better give them a wide berth.

Even the smaller scale feudal territories present some startling contrasts. Take language. They all speak French, right? Behn oui, any of the old timers here will tell you, but they don’t speak the same French in Cassagnes as they do in Montcabrier. Cassagnes is a small village of about 200 souls, a little over an hour’s walk away. Each of these tiny villages have their own dialect, their own character. And don’t talk to a hunter from Montcabrier about the Cassagnes hunting association. Savages, every last man of them.

It’s a contagious frame of mind, and even foreigners (I mean real foreigners, not just the ones from other villages) who have moved here find themselves acquiring both the folk-wisdom and folk-folly of their adoptive village. It is at times surreal to listen to English and Dutch people talking about the micro-climate in Frayssinet-le-Gelat just up the road (it’s too cold for wisteria to grow there, our English neighbor assured us) or the big-village airs put on by the shop girls in Prayssac. I get it most when I’m walking. On foot, every familiar tree stump or pile of rocks is a reaffirmation of belonging, and every unexplored path both an opportunity for adventure and a potential for hidden menace. As much as I enjoy exploring an unfamiliar patch of woods, I find more and more in myself a sense of fellow-feeling with that badger, snugly tucked away in his hole and reluctant to stray very far.

But times change, and younger generation, with their mobile phones and Internet access, are starting to leave some of this feudal attitude behind. Now that several villages must combine to share a school in order to have enough pupils, village cultures are beginning to blend in a sort of micro-globalization. Our own son’s two best friends are from Cassagnes. One of them is the girl he says he want to marry some day.

We’re trying to keep an open mind.

Loto Night

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:19:00 +0000

Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared with what lies within us.” The quote appeals to me, perhaps because living abroad involves a lot of looking within. Inevitable daily reminders of your own otherness necessitate an almost constant process of self-reevaluation. This week I looked within, and found something unexpected and disturbing. There, among the hopes and fears, the secrets and shadows, lurks a love of bingo.

I was not brought up to love bingo. Bingo is what elderly aunts play on cruise ships and in retirement homes. I’m 38 years old, male, Harvard educated, city-born, and I’m sure for all sorts of other reasons totally outside the bingo paradigm as I have always understood it.

So the sheer delight I felt the other night at our school Loto as I, the operator of the boulier no less, turned the handle, withdrew the numbered plastic balls and handed them to the nursery school teacher to be read out, gave me cause for concern. Sure, it was all dressed up as a quaint rural French tradition called “le Loto,” pronounced “low tow.” I could easily try to intellectualize it as a cultural experience, or write it off as an amusing Peter-Mayle-esque adventure in mingling with the locals, or use it as a pretext to feel smug about having “integrated.” In fact, I’ve done all those things. But even sitting here in my study, surrounded by books, striving to live the part of the intellectual country gentleman, I can’t shake the feeling that the game itself if fun.

The preparations were not. It takes some organizing and some manpower to run a village bingo night. The evening before about a dozen of us, parents and members of the village council, gathered in front of the “Salle de Fetes,” or village hall, and spent the next few hours carrying trestle tables and chairs and even pew benches out of the church and setting them up in the three adjoining rooms of the village hall, the mayor’s office and the larger of the two classrooms of Sebastian’s school. Saturday afternoon was spent organizing all the donated or purchased items into boxes to form prizes for each round of “quine” (one row on your bingo card), “double quine” (you can guess…), or “carton plein” (a full card). Lucky players might go home with just about anything - a DVD player, a coffee maker, vases, corkscrews, a large carved wooden Porcini mushroom, lighting fixtures, homemade pâté. Some of the prizes couldn’t go into boxes, so we wrote out little I.O.U.s for the wild boar haunch courtesy of the Montcabrier Hunters' Association or for the several live chickens, ducks and rabbits donated by farmers.

But once it was all in place, things ran like clockwork. It was a cold night, and the afternoon’s rain was now freezing on the roads, but still they came. An hour before we were scheduled to start, even as we were still divvying up the cash boxes between the desk where the bingo cards were sold and the “café,” the serious players began to arrive. Older women mostly, in comfortable baggy clothing and sporting their own plastified metal chips and magnetized batons with which they could effortlessly gather up the chips at the end of each round. The amateurs arrived a bit later, families with kids in tow, some with their own chips, some scooping up a cupful of dried corn kernels from a sack at the entrance.

My boulier and I were lodged in a corner up on stage, and at the table next to me were several of these hard-core enthusiasts. One deftly managed to spread her chips among 18 bingo cards, despite the surprisingly fast pace at which I drew and the teacher called out the numbers. Another kept turning around to stare at the boulier, and as if to ensure against foul play. Under the pressure of her gaze, each time I pulled out a number I felt inexplicably guilty.

And so for a solid three hours, with one break for coffee and homemade crèpes wrapped in tinfoil, I turned that tumbler and the numbers were called. An occasional wave of excitement or laughter rippled through the crowd as someone called out “quine” or, more often, let out an anguished cry when they missed out on winning by just one number. It was intense and exhausting. When the prizes were all given out, a couple dozen people stayed behind, not just the organizers, but random others as well, to put everything back in place. Trestle tables were disassembled. Church pews returned to their rightful home. The mayor’s desk moved back into place ready for Monday morning. And then, the work done, the crowd dispersed again. I couldn’t help feeling a little sad as we locked the door. On that bleak cold night, far from anything that could be called a city, surrounded by the frosty hush of a country winter, that bright noisy village hall had seemed like the warm center of the universe. The Loto is so popular, I realized, because out here, with so little else going on, it is the ultimate cure for rural loneliness.

The Loto was a big success – we raised a good 3000 euros for the school – and it has a new fan. Despite my lingering suspicion that I had been so readily offered the job of operating the boulier because in it lurked some hidden horror, the only downside had been a painful arm from turning that damned tumbler. And that I had been unable to play. The wild boar haunch, alas, will grace someone else’s table this Christmas.

But in a few weeks the Football Association is hosting its own Loto...

Thanksgiving, chez nous

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 18:46:00 +0000

Thanksgiving, I am convinced, is best celebrated abroad.

Okay, there are a few disadvantages, even beyond the obvious absence of family and friends. Canned pumpkin, for example, is almost impossible to find beyond our borders except in world capitals boasting a large American expat community, and even then it’s a brutish Hobbesian struggle to get your hands on any before limited supplies vanish. Ditto cranberry sauce. And then there’s the stubborn refusal of foreign governments to recognize our four-day weekend – unless you’re self-employed, you have to take a vacation day in order to wallow in the overstuffed hung-over bliss of the Friday after.

But the advantages far outweigh the shortcomings. For a start, living abroad means there are no expectations, apart from calling your mother. Don’t like those candied yams? Does anyone? No matter. Don’t like Aunt Margery? She’s thousands of miles away. Daunted by spending a week picking over leftover dried out turkey meat and battling the supposedly mythological but all-too-real L-tryptophan induced stupor? No worries. As long as you don’t invite any other Americans, you can just roast a chicken. No one will know the difference. Celebrating Thanksgiving abroad means you can honor the traditions as selectively as you like. You can even make up a few, although from personal experience I would advise against trying to convince your six-year-old that Santa Claus has a less-talented brother known as Turkey Claus. Being ridiculed by a six-year-old is not pretty.

So, unshackled from the burden of tradition and constrained by Sebastian’s school schedule, we had our Thanksgiving Thursday dinner last Sunday at lunchtime. Since one of the other pleasures of celebrating the holiday abroad is initiating foreign friends into the tradition (or such bits of it that you choose to observe), we invited David and Claire over with their children, Chloe and Theo.

Having French people over for a meal is not always easy. Most of our neighbors are old-fashioned rural French, and are uncomfortable with being invited over for a meal with someone they aren’t related to and haven’t known for at least 30 years. For an aperitif, maybe after a few years of saying “bonjour” at the bakery, but even that is a stretch.

And then there is the food issue. The French, for all their love of great cuisine, are not terribly open-minded when it comes to foreign food. To vary the ingredients of a traditional dish is heresy, and to serve something outside the accepted French canon is for many, well, beyond the pale. Start waving marshmallow-covered sweet potatoes at them and they are likely to run away screaming. As, quite frankly, they should.

But Davie and Claire are both grew up in more cosmopolitan parts of France and are mercifully flexible. While the kids played and the chickens roasted, we sat down for a drink and I explained to them exactly what Thanksgiving is about. I ran through the history, aided in large part by having watched the Peanuts TV special so many times, and proudly described how it is perhaps the one holiday almost totally unspoiled by commercialism. And if I am guilty of having sidelining some of the darker details – the subsequent war and genocide against the Native Americans, the grotesque spectacle of shoppers throttling each other in the Friday sales – let’s just say that this holiday is about being thankful for the good, not dwelling on the evil. It’s already enough that they braved the succotash.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Where there's smoke...

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:55:00 +0000

Having grown up in LA, I have very fond memories of childhood winters. After summer’s unbearable heat and autumn’s furious winds and wildfires, I found myself yearning for cool cloudy days, for nights that closed in well before dinnertime, for the occasional rainy afternoon by the fire. I remember making popcorn to snack on while I watched the rain fall, wrapped in a warm sweatshirt and listening to the occasional sizzle of the reliable three-hour-burn Duraflame log. Mom would bake cookies while I, always the romantic, imagined our late-60’s Spanish-style house to be an ancient thatched cottage tucked away in the English countryside. In a land of endless freeways and almost no rainfall, I appreciated all things cozy.

These days I’m up to mes oreilles in cozy, and it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Cozy, in the context of a picturesque medieval farmhouse nestled among the hills and dales of the Quercy countryside, turns out to be hard work. We all picture the obvious: outside are crumbling stone walls and magnificent old trees dripping with November rain, inside it’s all hand-knit sweaters, warm cups of tea and a roaring fire comfortable filling the enormous open hearth. All great stuff, for which we are grateful every single day. But that fire…

For a start, let’s get it out in the open, fireplaces do not heat your house. Eighty percent of all the heat that’s produced goes right up the chimney, bounces off the stratosphere, and returns to Earth somewhere in the Arctic where it feebly conspires with the oil industry to discomfort polar bears. Our enormous medieval cantou, the local rendition of the Inglenook hearth, is big enough to climb into because that’s precisely what they used to do before central heating. The cantou traditionally would have had a cooking pot suspended in the middle and a chair to either side in which the grandparents could sit to keep warm. The rest of the family kept warm by working hard in the fields until they reached old age, probably at forty, and earned their turn by the fire.

Given that its nominal heat production renders it essentially ornamental, the fireplace is awfully high maintenance. We don’t need to sit by it; we can keep perfectly warm all day by ferrying in the enormous logs that it consumes like potato chips. It makes me wistful for those Duraflames.

Better, on that score, is the lovely old Godin wood-burning stove in the dining room. This quaint green-enameled piece of 19th century technology gives off much more heat with much less wood. But that wood must be cut into 45 cm sections and not be too thick; the hours I spend with a chainsaw every week sculpting little logs to fit into the Godin’s narrow jaws are gratifying to my sense of machismo and affinity for country life, but quite frankly I could do without them. At least the Godin is happy when I feed it; it thanks me by belching large quantities of smoke into the dining room.

Nonetheless here I sit, my laptop warming my legs, my clothing reeking of smoke, happily entering what will be our fourth French winter by the fire. Like every year, Sophia and I are discussing the option of using our magnificent medieval fireplace to frame a modern wood-burner that would actually keep us warm. But despite the absurdity of all this chopping, carrying and choking in homage of a romantic ideal, we won’t do it. Sitting here by the fire, sooty and reeking of smoke, watching the logs disappear as fast as the raindrops hit the drafty single-glazed window, it’s just too damned cozy.

Armistice Day

noreply@blogger.com (Gregory Mose) — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:07:00 +0000

Yesterday Montcabrier, along with the rest of France, paused to commemorate Armistice Day.

I have to confess, we don’t always make it to village events. I suppose the curse of running your own business is the ever-present feeling that there is something you should be doing, something more important than whatever is going on out there in the big wide world. But today we were determined, so a little before 11:00 we hopped in the car and wound our way up to the square.

There, gathered in front of the church, were between 50-75 of our fellow “Cabrimontains,” as inhabitants of Montcabrier are called. The mayor, the two schoolteachers, and the baker’s wife were all there, as were assorted parents of Sebastian’s classmates and a handful of other villagers, both friends and strangers. After a few minutes of saying bonjour, of handshakes and bisous, Jean-Pierre the mayor corralled everyone over to the Monument des Morts.

Montcabrier’s war memorial is a stone obelisk bearing eighteen names of men from this tiny village who gave their lives for France during the First and Second World Wars. It is smaller than many a tombstone, so we all gathered closely around under the large mulberry tree to hear Jean-Pierre give the customary speech. To one side remained a cluster of seven children, some with flowers. As Jean-Pierre spoke, the children looked on, quiet and solemn, trying with their little brains to follow the mayor’s words on war and sacrifice, on honor and tragedy. It was a scene out of a sentimental French film.

Except that among those little standard-bearers of tomorrow’s France was my son.

It seemed strange to me at first. Setting aside for a moment the color of his passport, what is Sebastian? Half American, half Dutch, he is growing up French. I’m feeling more patriotic than usual these days in the wake of the election, and I could not help, for a moment, feeling uneasy at the thought of my son becoming a little Frenchman. But then Jean-Pierre spoke. The mayor’s speech could have dwelt only on the victories and defeats of his fellow villagers. It could have been a pompous invocation of the greatness of France. Instead he spoke of the sacrifice that so many made to keep France free; not just the Cabrimontains, not just the French, but also of the English and Americans and others who came to France and died by the thousands. He spoke of the African brigades who fought here, far from home. And he even spoke of the newfound hope, felt by so many all over the world, inspired by the election of Barack Obama. As if to underline the point, the commemorative wreath was laid by our village’s eldest veteran, not a Frenchman, but an Englishman who landed in Normandy on D-Day.

Jean-Pierre then read out the list of the men of Montcabrier who had died in the wars, each bearing the familiar-sounding family names of our friends and neighbors. And after each name, “mort pour la France” spoken softly by everyone in the crowd. Dead for France. It was touching, and honest, and humble, and as I watched Sebastian speak the words along with his classmates, his fellow villagers, my angst over his identity faded. If Obama is a post-racial American, then Sebastian is a post-national one. He is Cabrimontain. As the ceremony concluded with its minute of silence and Sebastian ran off to play tag with his classmates in the village square I couldn’t help but think that Cabrimontain is a pretty good thing to be.